• by Joe Mandese , March 10, 2022

A week after one of the world's biggest marketers called for an end to the traditional upfront advertising marketplace, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has just unveiled the schedule for the media companies participating in the newest iteration of it, the so-called "PlayFronts."

The PlayFronts are an evolution of the digital NewFronts that were originally spawned by Publicis' Digitas unit, but ultimately assigned to the IAB as a way to draw attention to digital media's supply chain at a time when big advertisers and agencies are making decisions, placing bets and committing billions of dollars to conventional media buys in the network TV upfront.

Not surprisingly, some participating in the digital gaming industry's PlayFront are some of the same companies represented in the NewFronts -- Meta and Microsoft (Activision Blizzard) -- but others are pure-play game developers, as well as spectator variants like Amazon's Twitch.

Like the NewFronts, the GameFronts pitches taking place in New York City on April 5th will focus mainly on advertising and marketing partnership opportunities in gaming.

“Gaming is an untapped ‘attention oasis’ that embodies many of the characteristics of the next wave of the internet,” IAB Vice President-Experience Center Zoe Soon said in a statement unveiling the event's lineup this morning. “As an industry, we can’t afford to keep neglecting the massive source of consumer attention that gaming provides."