With people around the world looking for indoor activities to help keep themselves occupied, it should come as no surprise that the gaming industry would want to capitalize on that. In addition to simply needing more things to do, many consumers are also watching much more television than they normally would, so it makes sense for companies to invest in television commercials while more potential customers are able to view them.
VentureBeat’s GamesBeat division, along with iSpot.tv, has presented data that shows that it is exactly what much of the industry has done in the past months. In the month of March specifically, the estimated spending on U.S. television video game commercials was $17.3 million, which was $5.3 million more than the month prior. For the month of March, Nintendo, who often sits atop the ad spending charts, accounted for 84.5% of total spending on ads in the U.S. with a whopping $14.6 million spent. Nintendo was actually the only company that spent more than $1 million for the month. The second-place company was Bethesda Softworks with 5%, and that was entirely for their new release, Doom Eternal, which had the largest budget for a single TV spot at just shy of a half a million dollars.
Their data also suggests that TV ad impressions in the U.S. practically doubled over the previous 30 days. Nintendo regularly sits atop this chart as well, but unlike the spending data, where Nintendo was essentially the only contender in March, the 30 days from March 16 to April 15 were not quite as lopsided. Nintendo still has a clear and commanding lead in ads meeting consumer eyeballs, but it only held 55.4% of the total impressions compared to its 84.5% in spending. To be clear though, the 15 days of April are not reflected in the spending data just yet, so we do not know how much of that pie would have gone to these up-and-coming companies compared to Nintendo.
Nintendo aired 20 different unique spots a combined 3,400 times and 713 million impressions. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the big push with 120 million impressions for their “Animal Crossing: New Horizons – Your Personal Island Paradise” spot alone. These ads aired primarily on family-friendly networks such as Disney Channel.
Runner-up in impressions was Sony/Square Enix with their ads for FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE, with two unique spots that aired 906 times for a total of 171.2 million views. Its top spot, “A Touching Reunion,” generated over half of those views with 101.1 million alone. These ads typically did not heavily compete in similar markets to Nintendo and instead aired on cable networks like Comedy Central and MTV.
Rounding out the top three positions is Animal Crossing: New Horizon‘s sister game, Doom Eternal. It received 147.5 million views in total and the official launch trailer was the heavy hitter for Bethesda with 132.7 million views. It competed with Sony/Square Enix on networks like Comedy Central but also branched out and heavily focused on sports networks like ESPN as well. Doom Eternal also contributed to Microsoft’s Xbox rising to fourth place as it ran its own ad for the game on Xbox One, which contributed over half its views for the period.
