Gamers will not skip your ad. They will roast it.

Most audiences ignore a bad ad. Gamers do something worse: they screenshot it, quote-tweet it, and turn it into a meme by lunch.

Zach Oscar is a Senior Account Director at Viral Nation, one of the biggest creator and social-first agencies in the world, where his client is Meta. He has spent his whole career at the intersection of gaming, creators, and brands, and he came on the show to explain why so much marketing money still lands wrong.

The big idea: an audience raised on real gameplay can smell a repurposed ad instantly, and authenticity is not a nice-to-have, it is the entire game.

Nobody pre-orders off a trailer anymore

This was the line that reframed the whole conversation for me. Gamers wait for real gameplay, real creators, real reactions before they spend a dollar. A polished trailer is not proof. The community has been burned too many times.

That single behavior shift breaks the traditional launch playbook, where the trailer was the campaign.

The $50K post versus the relationship

Brands love a clean, one-off deal: one TikTok, one Reel, a link in bio for 24 hours, fifty grand, done. Zach’s point is that the splashy one-off is usually the weaker buy. The win is the always-on relationship where a product genuinely lives inside a creator’s life over time. Reach is cheap. Fit is everything.

He also walked through the work most people never see: vetting more than a thousand creators for brand safety, now AI-assisted, so a video game weapon does not get flagged as real-world violence.

“We are not looking to replace people, we are looking to amplify people.”

Faking it until Twitch noticed

Zach’s own start is a story in itself. He got laid off during Covid, started writing gaming columns he had no business writing, until a senior person at Twitch shared one and told their network to read it. He built credibility in public before anyone gave him permission to.

What you can steal

• Stop repurposing. Build for the specific room you are walking into.
• Authentic fit beats raw reach. Pick partners by genuine overlap, not follower count.
• You can build authority in public before you are “qualified.” Zach did.