Influencer marketing for gaming brands: what actually earns attention

Most audiences ignore a bad ad. Gaming audiences do something worse: they screenshot it, quote it, and turn it into a meme before lunch. That difference is the whole discipline of influencer marketing for gaming brands, and it is why campaigns that perform everywhere else can die on Twitch and YouTube.

We spent an hour on this with Zach Oscar, Senior Account Director at Viral Nation, one of the largest creator and social-first agencies in the world, on his episode of The Connector’s Table. What follows is the practical version of what he laid out.

Why do gaming audiences reject normal advertising?

Because they were raised on proof. Gamers watch real gameplay, real creators, and real reactions before they spend anything. As Zach put it, nobody pre-orders a game off a trailer anymore, because the community has been burned too many times by polish that did not match the product. A cinematic spot that works on television reads as evidence of nothing on a gaming platform.

The practical rule that follows: creative should never just be repurposed for gaming audiences. Work built for TV and dropped onto Twitch signals that the brand does not know the room, and the room notices immediately.

Gaming and esports are not the same audience

Zach’s cleanest framing was a pickup-basketball analogy. Nearly everyone games in some form, the way nearly everyone has shot a basketball. Esports athletes are the trained minority who compete. Brands routinely budget for “gaming” and then buy media as if the entire audience were esports fans, which targets a stadium by advertising only to the players on the court.

The gaming audience is enormous, mainstream, and diverse. Treating it as one niche subculture is the most common and most expensive segmentation mistake in the category.

One-off posts or always-on partnerships?

The splashy one-off, one video, one link in bio, one invoice, is usually the weaker buy. Zach’s strongest campaigns are always-on retainers where a product genuinely lives inside a creator’s life over months. Audiences instantly sense when a creator is promoting something for the paycheck, and they equally sense genuine fit. Reach is cheap. Fit is everything.

Streaming platforms sharpen this further: creators can show products and services working in real time, which is exactly the proof a review-driven audience is waiting for.

What do gaming communities expect from brands?

Something back. The campaigns that land give the community discounts, codes, gifted subscriptions, or unique in-game rewards rather than only asking for a purchase. And behind the scenes, the unglamorous work matters at scale: Viral Nation vets enormous creator rosters for brand safety with tooling plus human review, so context is understood and a video game weapon is not flagged as real-world violence. The line Zach used for the whole philosophy: they are not looking to replace people, they are looking to amplify people.

What can B2B founders steal from this?

More than you would expect, which is why we had this conversation on a B2B show in the first place.

Build for the specific room you are walking into instead of repurposing what worked elsewhere. Choose partners on genuine fit rather than raw reach. Favour long relationships over transactional one-offs. And note Zach’s own origin story: laid off during Covid, he wrote gaming columns he had no obvious credentials for until a Twitch executive shared one, building authority in public before anyone gave him permission. That is the same logic as founder-led marketing, just in a different arena.

The full conversation, including the AT&T roadshow story and how campaigns run with over a thousand creators, is on the episode page, and the essay version lives in our reading library.

And if the idea of hosting the people you want to learn from, and sell to, sounds like a channel you should own, book a call and we will show you how the show behind this article works.