AppLovin wants brands. The Kantar study is a pitch deck, and here is what is in it for games

Reading the Kantar study for what it is

AppLovin's Axon unit and Kantar published "Mobile Gaming: The New Mainstream Consumer Channel" on 10 March, off a survey of 2,500 US mobile gamers, and the topline numbers are generous to the sponsor: 70% of respondents say they play daily, 71% say they view in-game ads favourably, 38% report making a purchase within three months of seeing an in-game ad, and 92% describe themselves as satisfied buyers after doing so. Affluent households, the study says, are especially receptive.

None of that is implausible.

The problem sits upstream of the findings. An ad platform commissioned the work to argue that its inventory deserves brand budget, and the survey asks people what they think rather than measuring what they went on to do, so every favourable number in it carries that authorship. A respondent who says they view in-game ads favourably and a media buyer who can prove those ads drove incremental sales are answering two entirely different questions.

What it is actually for

Performance UA buyers are not the audience here. They have their own CPI and ROAS numbers already, and they don't need Kantar to tell them whether in-game ads work. The target is the brand marketer who has never bought mobile game inventory and who justifies spend with exactly this kind of consumer research: reach, favourability, purchase intent, satisfaction. AppLovin built Axon Ads Manager primarily around performance advertisers buying app installs, so a study telling a CPG or retail brand buyer that mobile gamers have money and attention, and no particular hostility to advertising, is the argument a platform makes when it wants the same inventory to carry a second kind of budget alongside the first.

That matters to a games UA team even though the study isn't built for one. More demand competing for the same impressions historically pushes CPMs up for everyone buying that inventory, performance buyers included. It also shifts what a platform means by quality inventory, since a network chasing brand dollars has a reason to protect user experience and viewability, which can help a performance playable or hurt it depending on where the format requirements land.

Watch the auction too. Brand advertisers buy on reach and frequency rather than performance, and a platform serving both types of buyer eventually has to make trade-offs in auction dynamics and inventory allocation between them; a buyer who has spent years optimising bids against a purely performance-driven auction should not assume that auction behaves the same way once a meaningful share of demand comes from advertisers chasing a different outcome entirely.

What a games buyer should take from it

Two things are worth doing, and one reflex is worth resisting. Watch your own CPM trends on Axon inventory for the arrival of non-endemic brand demand, which will turn up there long before it turns up in any public announcement. Read the study properly as well, because it is the document a non-endemic advertiser sees when someone asks them to buy alongside game inventory, and knowing its numbers beforehand beats hearing a partner quote them at you. The reflex to resist is dismissing the affluent-household finding because of who paid for it. Even a vendor-funded study samples real people. A receptive, higher-spending segment justifies a modest test budget, verified on your own attribution, before anyone turns it into conventional wisdom.

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