Slap a banner ad on Pikachu and Mrs. Pac-Man because programmatic advertising is taking gaming seriously.

Last week, Anzu, a platform that helps brands run display, video, and interactive ads within games, announced it has raised an additional $20 million on top of the $17 million it’s received since its founding in 2017. Investors are a marketing who’s-who, including WPP, NBCUniversal, Sony, HTC, and *checks notes* the Chicago Cubs. Okay, sure.

Why this matters: In-game advertising is growing faster than expected thanks to the pandemic, and those in the industry are on the hunt for partners that can help them infiltrate integrate into a medium not yet totally soiled by advertising.

“Why gaming? Today, most marketers get why gaming. That wasn’t the case two years ago,” said Itamar Benedy, the CEO and co-founder of Anzu, which is a Japanese first name meaning “apricot” and a fire-breathing bird-god in some Mesopotamian religions, if you were curious. “There’s a poster on a building, there’s a logo on the shirts. It’s in real-time, placing branded content inside the game’s world.”

Details: So far, Anzu is integrated into iOS, Android, Sony’s PlayStation, Microsoft’s Xbox, and most recently, Roblox. Games with inventory include Trackmania and Dakar Desert Rally.

• On the advertising side, it’s worked with more than 100 brands, including PepsiCo, Huawei, American Eagle, Vodafone, and Samsung on in-game advertisements that average out to about $6 per CPM.
• Like most digital advertising, ads can be tailored to the user or contextualized for the game, meaning they’re more relevant. Benedy declined to share any of Anzu’s revenue figures.
• Anzu’s latest round of funding added NBCUniversal and the consumer-electronics company HTC, which manufactures virtual- and augmented-reality headsets, as investors. These were strategic partnerships, Benedy told Marketing Brew, as NBCUniversal would be able to sell Anzu’s inventory and HTC would help the company enter the metaverse.

The $20 million investment will also be used to boost the company’s headcount, which aims to grow from 80 employees to 150 by the end of the year, with the goal of reaching more gaming platforms and strengthening what can be done there.

For gaming companies, the hurdle is convincing brands and media buyers that there’s an audience there. Read more here.—RB

Before the McPlant, there was the PLT.

McDonald’s started testing the McPlant, its plant-based burger created with Beyond Meat, in eight US locations last November. However, the burger had already made its debut up north, namely, in Canada, where it’d been called the PLT (plant-based meat, lettuce, and tomato) during an initial test run in Canada that began in 2019.

Big picture: Turns out, Canada “regularly gets the first look at—and bite of—products before they are introduced in the US,” writes Retail Brew’s Andrew Adam Newman.

“Nearly 70% of Canadians live within 100 kilometers of the US border,” Jeff Greenspoon, CEO of Dentsu Canada, who’s worked on test-pilot retail programs in his homeland throughout his career, told Newman. “So the culture and the consumption habits really closely mirror the markets that they border on.”

$$$: London, Ontario has become a popular testing city for brands, in part because of its diverse population and relatively small size. “Of course, retailers could gauge responses from a diverse population in a city like New York, but part of a pilot program involves placing and testing advertising, which is a lot more affordable in a market like London,” Newman explains.

Read his full story here.

Experiential marketing was all but put on pause in 2020. But last spring, once Covid vaccines started rolling out more widely, marketers started cautiously revisiting IRL events in hopes of meeting people where they (literally) are.

We spent some time last month checking in with brands that are back in the experiential game. Read our stories below, or check them out here.

• Instead of another billboard, HBO Max refurbished a basketball court
• As in-person gatherings return, DDB North America triples down on an “experience” team
• Two DTCs that hosted IRL events last summer look back
• Oreo’s one-day Blockbuster takeover allowed people to experience 2007 all over again

+1: Our latest Mood Board features Coors Light’s plastic-free pop-up in Brooklyn.

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Employee of the month: Click here for a guide to employee advocacy on social media.

Face it: March, like basically every month before it, was full of Facebook updates—here’s what you might have missed.

The ’gram: Do Instagram profile pictures matter for brands? If so, what makes a good one? Find out here.

Power up your partnerships: With impact.com’s ultra-handy partnership success tool kit, you’ll be equipped with ebooks, case studies, best practices, and plenty more resources for jump-starting or scaling your partnership programs. Get it free here.*

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“Shake your astral body and get down to the store” is quite the call to action—touché, 1993.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Why this sports podcast network is looking to TikTok to find talent
• Small advertisers win class-action status in lawsuit against Facebook
• California AG says “inferences” are personal information. Here’s why that matters