The short version: in-game advertising leads all three channels on viewability and sustained attention, connected TV holds a strong but slipping second position, and social wins decisively on reach while scoring lowest on attention. Which is why the sensible plan buys all three for different jobs.
That summary is the answer most people arrive looking for, but it conceals a set of definitional and measurement details that determine whether it holds for any particular campaign. What follows is the full breakdown: what the category actually covers, what the independent attention research measures and reports, how the three channels compare when scored on the same instrument, and how the main gaming platforms differ from one another once a buyer decides to allocate budget.
What Counts as In-Game Advertising, and What Doesn’t
The single largest source of confusion in this comparison is that “in-game advertising” is used to describe at least four different products, which have little in common beyond the word game.
The definition that supports the attention claims is the narrow one: advertising that reaches a player during or immediately around an active gaming session. In practice that covers two delivery methods – standard display and video units served through desktop overlay applications, and branded moments triggered by an event occurring inside the game itself.
What falls outside that definition matters just as much:
- Livestream sponsorships and creator integrations reach a viewer watching someone else play.
- Gaming websites, wikis, and news coverage reach a reader between or after sessions.
- Chat platforms and community servers reach someone discussing games rather than playing them.
None of those are bad buys, and several are efficient. They are simply spectator inventory, and spectator inventory behaves like conventional media because the audience posture is passive. Any attention benchmark quoted for gaming assumes the player is inside the session, so a proposal that blends the two categories under one CPM should be unpacked before it is compared to anything.
How the Three Channels Score on Attention
Attention is now measured independently by several research firms, typically through eye-tracking panels scaled to modelled predictions across inventory. It has become the most useful comparison axis available, because it separates channels that cost-per-thousand renders artificially similar.
| Channel | Attention benchmark | Trend | Primary strength |
| In-game (active session) | ~6,736 attentive seconds per 1,000 impressions at ~$3.38 attentive cost; close to 100% fully viewed | Ahead of cross-channel norms | Sustained attention during concentrated play |
| Connected TV | ~67 attention units, roughly 23% above the linear TV benchmark | Declined between 2024 and 2025 | Scaled long-form video reach |
| Social | YouTube leads at 64.8 AU; X at 29.4; Meta platforms lower still; ~77% fully viewed | Broadly declining | Reach and frequency at the lowest cost |
Read across the rows rather than down the columns and the picture is straightforward. Gaming leads on both the volume and the completeness of attention delivered. Connected TV holds a genuine premium over linear television and remains the default premium video buy, though its scores moved in the wrong direction as inventory expanded and ad loads grew. Social sits lowest on attention across the board, with meaningful spread inside the category – the gap between YouTube and X is wider than the gap between YouTube and connected TV.
The trend column deserves as much weight as the benchmark column. Two of the three channels are drifting downward on attention while gaming’s position has held, which changes how a multi-year plan should be weighted.
Why Gameplay Holds Attention Longer
Three separate mechanisms produce gaming’s numbers, and they are worth understanding individually because each one applies to a different part of the buy.
Undivided posture. A player working through a match is operating the content rather than consuming it in the background, which is a materially different relationship to the screen than a connected TV viewer with a phone in hand or a browser moving through a feed. The Dentsu and Lumen attention research quantified this at roughly 6,736 attentive seconds per thousand impressions, ahead of Dentsu’s cross-channel norms, at approximately $3.38 in attentive cost. The efficiency figure is the one to check in any vendor conversation, since attention purchased at a heavy premium is not a planning advantage.
Consent mechanics. Rewarded formats reached a full on-screen impression rate against an 87% norm in the same research for the unremarkable reason that the player agreed in advance to watch in exchange for something they valued inside the game. Agreement produces on-screen presence far more reliably than placement tactics do, which is why rewarded inventory generally prices above standard units.
Slow decay. The Activision Blizzard immersion study conducted with Alter Agents measured how quickly engagement falls away over an exposure and found immersion in a mobile game dropped roughly 15% after three minutes, against roughly 38% on social. Almost every channel performs acceptably in its opening seconds; very few still hold at minute three. Because recall and consideration accumulate in those later minutes, durability is where the practical advantage sits rather than in the headline viewability number.
Platform Comparison: Overwolf Ads vs Anzu vs Frameplay
Choosing to buy gaming settles less than buyers expect, because the platforms make structurally different bets and are not interchangeable on a media plan. The table below compares the three most commonly shortlisted options across the dimensions that actually drive the decision.
| Dimension | Overwolf Ads | Anzu | Frameplay |
| Core approach | Desktop overlay apps during and between sessions, plus a gaming web network | Intrinsic placements | Intrinsic in-world objects |
| Platform coverage | 1,500+ titles | Mobile, PC, console, metaverse | Titles with large 3D environments |
| Scale claim | 113M+ monthly players | Programmatic reach across formats | Focused on world-heavy titles |
| Signature format | Rewarded Achievements | Environmental signage | Rendered in-world objects |
| Measurement emphasis | Video completion and viewability near 90%; included in Adelaide’s AU ecosystem | Third-party-audited viewability | Proprietary time-in-view measurement |
| Best suited to | Breadth across titles, standard IAB units, defensible reach | Immersive placement | Long sessions |
Overlay and rewarded inventory scales across a far wider set of titles and delivers familiar IAB formats that slot into existing buying workflows.
The Bottom Line
Gaming has earned a permanent tier on the media plan alongside connected TV and social rather than a rotating test-and-learn slot, and the case now rests on independent measurement from Dentsu, Lumen, Adelaide, and Comscore, which is what changed over the past two years.
Practically: weight gaming toward messages that must land during peak engagement with an 18–45 audience, keep connected TV for long-form storytelling and broad video reach, and keep social for frequency and scale rather than for work the attention data says it cannot do. The useful diagnostic before any of that is to label every line on the current plan as either an attention buy or a reach buy, because most misallocation becomes obvious the moment those two jobs are separated.
FAQ
Q: What is the difference between viewability and attention, and why do both appear in these comparisons?
A: Viewability is a technical measure of whether an ad was rendered on screen under agreed conditions, while attention research measures whether a person actually looked at it and for how long. The two can diverge sharply, since an ad may be fully viewable and still attract almost no gaze, which is why channels with respectable viewability numbers sometimes post weak attention scores.
Q: Should the gaming budget be reallocated from CTV or from social?
A: It depends on what the budget was doing rather than which channel it sat in. Money buying reach and frequency will lose scale if it moves to gaming, while money buying attention for a message that needs to be absorbed rather than glimpsed is better placed in gaming. Funding a gaming line from the attention portion of the plan rather than the reach portion is the cleanest approach.
Q: What does Overwolf Ads sell?
A: Standard IAB display and video delivered through desktop overlay applications and a network of partner gaming websites, together with Rewarded Achievements – a format tying a branded moment to a gameplay milestone the player has just reached, paired with a digital reward. The difference from conventional rewarded video is the trigger, which is the player’s own accomplishment.