There is an assumption about gamers that marketers need to retire: gamers hate advertising. They don’t.
Gamers buy sneakers, burgers, phones, clothes, collectibles, and luxury goods just like everyone else. What gaming audiences tend to dislike is something more specific: brands interrupting something they care about without understanding why they care about it.
Gaming fandom is not simply another audience segment waiting for a media plan. These are communities with their own language, rituals, jokes, heroes, and histories (read: lore). Entering one is less like buying TV airtime and more like walking into somebody else’s group chat. You are allowed to be there, but read the room first.
Instead of asking How can we advertise to gamers? Marketers should ask: How can our brand become useful, entertaining, or interesting enough that gamers actually want us around?
Three ways brands can earn their place in gaming communities—and three ways to get rejected
DO #1: Learn the game before joining the conversation
In 2018, Fortnite introduced Food Fight, a limited-time mode pitting two fictional restaurants against each other: Durr Burger and Pizza Pit. Someone at Wendy’s noticed that Durr Burger had freezers.
That created a perfect intersection between Fortnite and Wendy’s “fresh, never frozen” positioning. Instead of simply advertising inside Fortnite, Wendy’s created a character, entered matches and started destroying the freezers.
The brand streamed the stunt on Twitch, players noticed and eventually joined in. Wendy’s went from zero Twitch followers to more than 7,400 during the activation, generated more than 1.5 million minutes watched, and eventually won the Social & Influencer Grand Prix at Cannes Lions.
Keeping Fortnite Fresh worked because the joke required understanding both Wendy’s and Fortnite. A less thoughtful brand might have simply placed a giant logo inside the game. Wendy’s found something already happening and became part of the joke.
For marketers, the lesson is simple: somebody working on the campaign needs to actually know the game. Watch the streams. Understand the memes. Learn what players complain about and celebrate. You don’t need an entire marketing department of gamers, but you need someone who understands the community.
DO #2: Add something to the fandom instead of borrowing from it
Gaming fandom already creates enormous amounts of culture: tournaments, memes, fan art, cosplay, lore videos, Discord communities, streams and endless debates. Brands don’t need to add another advertising message. They need to find a way to make the ecosystem better.
For marketers, the lesson is simple: somebody working on the campaign needs to actually know the game. Watch the streams. Understand the memes. Learn what players complain about and celebrate.
Spotify’s partnership with Riot Games around League of Legends is a good example. Instead of simply attaching its logo to esports, Spotify built around something League fans already cared about deeply: music.
The partnership created an official League of Legends esports hub, playlists, original podcasts and behind-the-scenes content around the annual Worlds Anthem. Spotify wasn’t asking League fans to suddenly care about Spotify. It identified something they already cared about and asked what the brand could uniquely contribute.
That is a useful question for any non-endemic brand. A food brand can feed players during long gaming sessions. A bank could help creators manage irregular income or prize money. An airline could help fans attend international tournaments. A fashion brand can help fans express their gaming identities offline.
The best brand role in gaming often isn’t invented. It is discovered.
DO #3: Give gamers something to do, not just something to watch
Gaming is fundamentally participatory, yet brands often enter it using a passive advertising model: here’s our commercial, our logo and our celebrity. Please watch.
Jollibee took a different route with its 2026 Mobile Legends: Bang Bang GameJoy campaign, developed with gaming and brand experience agency Octopus&Whale, where I lead Growth & Partnerships. Instead of simply putting Jollibee inside the game, the campaign gave players the WOW BIDA Battle Emote, which more than 10 million players eventually used.
The campaign extended participation beyond the game through collectible MLBB hero cards, in-game rewards and Jollibee stores transformed into “Houses of Heroes.” The brand became something players could use, collect and experience, rather than simply an advertisement to watch.
That is the opportunity for marketers. Gamers are accustomed to agency: they choose, customize, collect and compete. The strongest campaigns design around those behaviors instead of interrupting them.
Don’t just ask what should gamers see? Ask what can gamers do?
DON’T #1: Speak fluent “marketing gamer”
“GG gamers! Ready to LEVEL UP your snack game?”
Please stop.
Brands don’t need to insert “GG,” “XP,” “OP,” “level up” and “achievement unlocked” into every sentence to prove they understand gaming. The problem isn’t merely cringe. It signals that the brand learned the vocabulary without learning the culture.
Wendy’s didn’t succeed in Fortnite because it started talking like a streamer. Its behavior worked because the irreverence already matched the Wendy’s personality people knew elsewhere.
Your brand shouldn’t pretend to become a gamer. It should remain your brand inside gaming.
DON’T #2: Treat “gamers” as one giant fandom
A Valorant esports fan, a father playing Diablo after his children go to bed, a teenager building houses in The Sims, a Pokémon collector and a Mobile Legends player in Manila may all technically qualify as gamers.
That doesn’t make them the same audience.
Even individual games contain multiple communities: competitive players, lore fans, collectors, creators, esports viewers and casual players.
Move from targeting a gaming audience to understanding a gaming community.
This is why “we want to reach gamers” usually produces generic work. Instead of asking which games are biggest, ask which communities naturally intersect with your customers, brand and product.
DON’T #3: Run the campaign, then disappear
Perhaps the easiest way to reveal that your interest in gaming was transactional is to disappear the moment the campaign report has been submitted.
Games and their communities can live for decades. League of Legends launched in 2009. Counter-Strike’s roots stretch back to 1999. Pokémon began as a Game Boy title in 1996. Fandom accumulates history, relationships, and expectations.
Brands therefore need continuity, not necessarily enormous year-round budgets. Support the same community again. Bring creators back. Turn successful activations into recurring traditions. Build on what players responded to last time.
Think less like an advertiser buying temporary access and more like a community member building reputation.
Earn the Right to Be There
There is an irony at the heart of gaming marketing: the harder a brand tries to convince gamers that it belongs, the more obvious it often becomes that it doesn’t.
The brands that work tend to learn before advertising, contribute before extracting attention, and give communities something to participate in rather than simply something to consume.
Gaming fandom is valuable precisely because people care enough to participate in it. That passion can make these communities difficult for marketers to enter, but extraordinarily valuable once a brand earns a place inside them.
So perhaps brands shouldn’t ask how they can target gaming fandoms. Nobody particularly enjoys being targeted.
Ask instead: What could we contribute that would make this fandom slightly better because our brand showed up?
A lifelong gamer, Gretchen Que is Head of Growth at Octopus & Whale.
Featured image by Alena Darmel.
