The Attention Gap: Why Australian Video Ad Budgets Belong in Gaming

Australia's video advertising market just surpassed $5.4bn. And according to IAB Australia's Internet Advertising Revenue Report, it now represents 29% of all digital ad spend, and is the fastest-growing segment in the country, up nearly 20% year on year. By any measure, the industry is booming.

And yet, for all that investment, the sector is still wrestling with the question: is anyone actually watching?

IAB Australia's Video Measurement Framework, released in December 2025, was a direct response to that anxiety. Developed by the Video Council, it maps the full measurement ecosystem across delivery, brand building, and sales outcomes, and explicitly identifies attention as a core metric for marketers to start tracking. 

The message is uncomfortable but honest: completion rates are no longer enough. The industry needs a better proxy for whether advertising is generating real human focus, or simply running unnoticed in the background of someone's life.

But there’s one channel that already holds that answer. And it's been sitting under-utilised in most media plans for years: gaming.

‍

The attention gap nobody's talking about

McKinsey's report, Gaming's Next Growth Era: Unlocking the Value of Attention, offers one of the most compelling validations of gaming environments I've seen from a mainstream strategy firm: roughly 75% of PC and console players maintain high focus while playing, and 55% of mobile players do the same, comparable only to live events, and comfortably ahead of social media, podcasts, and broadcast television.

What’s more, a 10% increase in consumer focus correlates with a 17% increase in spend. And because gaming demands active participation - i.e. your brain is constantly making decisions and evaluating outcomes - it creates genuine cognitive presence. You can’t simply scroll past a game.

Compare that to the environments absorbing the majority of Australian video budgets. Social feeds have become, as McKinsey puts it, "background companions to second-screen scrolling." Brands are buying impressions that represent, at best, a split second of passive glance. We have been treating attention as binary - either the ad played or it didn't - when really, the quality of that attention varies enormously, and that variance has direct consequences for whether advertising actually works.

‍

Premium social: rethinking what gaming actually is

Part of the challenge is how gaming has been perceived by media planners, filed under niche, youth, or experimental. That framing doesn't hold up. Gaming spans generations in a way few media channels can. Roblox captures younger audiences. Wordle and Words with Friends regularly draw players into their seventies and eighties. Rather than a demographic category, gaming is a behavioural state that cuts across age, income, and platform.

A better frame is ‘premium social’. When players are engaged in a game - competitive, collaborative, or casual - they are in a state of motivated, self-directed focus. They're connected to other people through shared experience. McKinsey identifies "love and connection" as among the most valuable motivations for media consumption, and gaming fulfils both with a depth that passive formats cannot match. 

Advertising that integrates with that experience, rather than interrupting it, lands differently. It's encountered by someone whose mind is fully present.

‍

The commercial gap - and what it means for media planners

McKinsey's analysis surfaces something telling: despite gaming's exceptional attention quality, there is a significant gap between its attention performance and its commercial monetisation. The advertising industry needs to catch up. On mobile, advertising's share of gaming revenue has risen from 35% to 48% over the past decade. On PC and console, it still sits at around 4%. That's not a reflection of gaming's value to advertisers, but of how slowly media planning is catching up.

At the same time, iion’s recent Attention Advantage report states that gaming advertising delivers 20 times more engagement for just 5% of typical media budgets, with in-game ads generating 10 to 22 seconds of attention compared to 1 to 5 seconds for traditional digital display and video. As IAB Australia CEO Gai Le Roy puts it, “high attention, when achieved, offers marketers the potential to drive disproportionate impact from their investment”, which is what this data starts to quantify in gaming.

What’s more, from our own data, we know that plugging into a premium gaming advertising platform can generate 10 to 35% incremental reach beyond social and video platforms, and up to 30 to 50% beyond VOD. This is genuinely additive reach, accessing people in a mindset that other formats don't touch.

‍

If you look closely, the measurement already exists

While the broader video industry is building standards for attention measurement, gaming already has them. From attention per impression and video completion to verified brand lift and campaign recall, the metrics and benchmarks exist today to justify investment with the same rigour used in premium video. The metrics exist. The benchmarks exist. The incrementality data exists.

The Australian video market is investing record sums in pursuit of high-quality attention. The IAB has told the industry that completion rates aren't sufficient and that attention must be measured. When you overlay the IAB’s guidance with iion’s Attention Advantage data, gaming emerges as the obvious underpriced source of high-quality attention that most video plans overlook.

‍So now the question isn't whether gaming deserves a place in the plan. It’s how long a media strategy that ignores all of this can continue to be called best practice.

‍