Matt Edelman: Gamification in Marketing - How Should Brands Adapt?

Marketing still talks constantly about capturing attention. But that framing may already be outdated.

People no longer simply watch, read, listen, and scroll. Across social platforms, fitness apps, shopping experiences, loyalty programs, prediction markets, dating apps, and games, they are increasingly invited to progress, earn, collect, maintain streaks, achieve status, and receive rewards.

That changes what people expect from brands.

Matt Edelman, Chairman, CEO and President of Super League, describes this audience as the gamified consumer. His argument is more consequential than saying that brands should advertise to gamers. It is that game-like systems have influenced how consumers interact with much of the digital world.

As Edelman puts it, “the modern marketing formula is dominated by appealing to and engaging with a gamified consumer.”

For marketers, that creates a different question: What happens when people stop expecting merely to receive content and start expecting to participate in it?

The Player Mindset Has Escaped the Video Game

Gamification in marketing is often reduced to tactics: add points, introduce badges, create a leaderboard, offer a prize.

Edelman starts one level deeper.

“A player’s mindset is about progress … status … rewards,” he explains.

Consider how familiar those mechanics have become outside traditional gaming. Fitness apps reward streaks. Social platforms signal status. Commerce apps introduce loyalty levels and incentives. Algorithms continuously provide feedback designed to encourage another interaction.

The result is not necessarily that every consumer thinks of themselves as a gamer. It is that many have become accustomed to systems that respond to their actions.

That distinction matters.

A passive advertisement asks someone to notice.

A gamified experience asks someone to do something—and gives that action meaning inside a larger progression.

Research increasingly supports the broader principle. A 2026 systematic review of 172 empirical studies found that gamification can improve marketing outcomes including purchase intention and loyalty, though its effectiveness varies considerably by design, context and user experience. The researchers specifically caution against treating gamification as a universal collection of tricks.

In other words: points themselves are not the strategy. The value exchange is.

Why Participation Can Be More Valuable Than Another Impression

Marketers are competing inside a fixed attention economy.

Deloitte's Digital Media Trends research estimates that U.S. consumers spend an average of roughly six hours per day on media and entertainment, distributed across streaming, social media, gaming, music, podcasts and other formats. That pool does not appear to be expanding significantly.

So the marketing challenge is not simply finding another place to insert a message.

It is finding environments where people are already leaning forward.

Gaming is an unusually clear example because the user must continually act. Players move, choose, solve, build, compete, cooperate and progress. A brand entering that environment can therefore become part of an activity rather than an interruption surrounding it.

Recent research provides evidence that this can translate into measurable brand effects. Ipsos analyzed nine campaigns using data from 37,000 gamers across 16 European countries in 2026. Players exposed to the integrations showed an average 31% uplift in agreement that the advertiser was “a brand for people like me,” while prompted advertising awareness showed an average uplift of 96%.

That does not mean any brand placed inside any game will succeed.

It means that participation changes the creative possibilities.

What Does a Useful Gaming Activation Actually Look Like?

One example from Edelman's interview makes the idea tangible.

Super League built a virtual Regal Cinema inside Roblox. Players could participate in mini-games and earn a coupon for free popcorn at a physical Regal theater. Approximately 30,000 available coupons were earned on the first day.

Regal later activated the environment again, this time with Universal Pictures around a Minions release and another real-world reward.

The interesting part is not Roblox itself.

The mechanism is more transferable:

action → achievement → reward → real-world value

The consumer was not asked merely to view an ad for a cinema. The brand created something to do, something to achieve and something worth receiving.

Edelman summarizes the expectation simply: consumers increasingly “expect participatory rewards.”

A small business cannot necessarily build a Roblox world. It does not have to.

The same principle could mean giving customers visible progression through a learning experience, rewarding meaningful product use, creating challenges around a community goal, unlocking access through participation, or making loyalty feel like advancement rather than a discount database.

The strategic question is: What does the customer get to accomplish?

Gaming Audiences Are Broader Than Many Brands Assume

Another barrier is demographic perception.

Gaming is still sometimes treated as a specialist channel for young audiences. Current data makes that increasingly difficult to defend.

The Entertainment Software Association's 2026 U.S. study, conducted with YouGov, found that 67% of Americans aged 5 to 90 play video games at least one hour per week. The average player is 37. Among older groups, 50% of Boomers and 32% of the Silent Generation reported playing weekly.

This matters even for companies that never think of themselves as gaming brands.

Gaming is not an industry vertical in the same sense as automotive or financial services. It is also a behavior and a media environment that cuts across professions, income levels, generations and purchasing roles.

That is why Edelman's closing observation is particularly useful for B2B companies: “your buyers play video games.”

The relevant question is therefore not only, “Do we sell to gamers?”

It may be, “How many of the people we already sell to also behave as players?”

The Risk: Manipulation Disguised as Engagement

Gamification can also go wrong.

The same mechanisms that encourage useful participation can produce fatigue, excessive persuasion or manipulation when designed solely to maximize repeated behavior.

The 2026 academic review of gamification research explicitly recommends consumer-centered approaches that protect autonomy and privacy rather than relying on one-size-fits-all behavioral triggers.

That creates a practical test for marketers.

A useful gamified experience gives the customer a reason to value the interaction. A weak one merely gives the company another way to extract attention. Rewards, streaks and progression should make an experience better—not trap users inside it.

A Better Question for Your Next Campaign

The most useful insight from Edelman's argument is not that every company needs a game. It is that consumers increasingly understand digital experiences through feedback, progression and participation.

So before launching another campaign, ask three questions:

• What can the customer do rather than merely see?

• What signals meaningful progress?

• What value does the customer receive for continuing?

Those questions can apply to a Roblox activation, a loyalty program, a B2B onboarding process, a fitness product, an educational platform or a community.

Edelman explored this changing marketing environment on 21st Century Entrepreneurship, drawing from his experience leading Super League and helping brands engage audiences across gaming and gamified digital environments. The practical challenge for this week is simple: take one customer journey you already operate and identify the most passive moment in it.

Then ask how that moment could become participatory.

Because in a market full of messages competing to be noticed, the stronger opportunity may be to give people something worth doing.