Getting attention in the crowded back-to-school market

Every back-to-school season, brands don’t just compete for attention: they compete for preference.

And for large eCommerce retailers, it’s no secret that in-game advertising is a prized environment for reaching the school and college-age demographics that are key to driving seasonal sales.

But when they need to create campaigns with real ROI, they need messaging that feels natural, contextual, useful – and not interruptive.

Here’s how this global eCommerce retailer used AudioStack to achieve it.

Contextual in-game audio, built for speed and scale

The retailer aimed to bring its back-to-school campaign into mobile gaming environments with short-form (15-second) audio ads, advertising products like storage, water bottles and desk organizers, among others.

Ads in these contexts could certainly reach the right audiences – school children and college-age young adults – and in-game audio ads typically enjoy particularly high attention. 

But there are challenges to making the approach work:

• Even in free-to-play games, where ads are expected, gamers have low tolerance for interruptions to gameplay.

• However, interstitial (loading screen) ads that don’t stop gameplay can be a ‘switch-off’ moment for engagement.

So, the retailer chose a programmatic ad delivery partner that could serve ads during gameplay to minimize interruption and maximize attention.

However, for the ads to be recalled (and the campaign to deliver ROI) they needed a high degree of personalization based on the profile of the gamer that was playing.

Enter AudioStack.

The solution: intelligent audio, built for scale.

A traditional audio production process – scripting, voicing, producing and versioning ads for all the retailer’s different offers – is usually too slow and too expensive to make personalized audio at scale a viable addition to the media plan.

But with AudioStack’s end-to-end AI-powered workflow, the retailer can produce creative versions mixing and matching products tailored to specific personas ultra-rapidly: a matter of seconds per new ad, rather than days.

What this resulted in was a 70% faster turnaround in ad production timelines (with the savings that entails) and highly-personalized, targeted audio ads produced at scale.

The campaign represented a new possible for eCommerce retailers – but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Where next for in-game audio ads with AI?

For brands chasing Gen Z attention, audio isn’t just a format—it’s a strategic lever. Especially when you can produce and adapt it in real time.

With AudioStack, brands and their agencies can automate the production of credible, broadcast-quality audio – but the real added value is what this unlocks in terms of personalization at scale.

Using AudioStack’s platform, brands have the potential to:

• Produce thousands of creative variants using different voices, messages, and offers—all without studio time.

• Maximize attention with audio - even in skippable and short (e.g. 6s formats) where instantly delivering audio can grab the attention of a gamer.

• Customize audio dynamically to fit the game environment, player profile, time of day and other personalization factors.

• React to performance data: testing audio ads, and re-creating those with the greatest impact – all whilst a campaign is live.

By streamlining workflows and integrating real-time feedback loops, AudioStack gives brands the most agile and effective audio production pipeline for in-game advertising.

Why not see how it could work for you?

➡️ Create an AI audio ad for your company here.

AudioStack can give your next seasonal campaign unprecedented reach. Book a 30-minute demo and we'll show you how.