IN-GAME AUDIO · BRAND AWARENESS
Candyland ran Pakistan's most advanced in-game audio campaign to date. The gamer audience listened. Then they clicked at 1.8%. Here's the full story.
The Challenge
Candyland — Pakistan's largest confectionery group and home to brands like Cocomo, Jubes, and the Candyland Motherbrand — needed to reach a specific audience that conventional digital formats were failing to capture: young mobile gamers aged 16–30 who spend 2–4 hours daily in mobile games and systematically skip or ignore every other form of digital advertising.
This is not a small audience. Pakistan has 50+ million mobile gamers, and the 16–30 cohort represents a disproportionate share of confectionery purchase intent — both personal consumption and household purchasing decisions for families. But the format problem was real: display ads are scrolled past, video pre-rolls are skipped, and social feeds are so cluttered that FMCG brands are competing with hundreds of other advertisers for the same eyeballs.
The brand needed a format that reached gamers during their gaming sessions — not as an interruption, but as a presence inside the experience. And the medium needed to prove its impact with real engagement data, not just impression counts.
The Solution
Happy Ads deployed Candyland Motherbrand on in-game audio advertising via the Audiomob platform — placing audio ads during natural gameplay pauses and loading screens across Pakistan's mobile gaming ecosystem. The format plays audio when the player is already listening — game sound effects, music, and effects already have their attention — but does not interrupt or pause the gameplay. The Candyland jingle and brand message entered the gamer's experience without friction.
The campaign ran across Q1–Q2 2026 with targeting set to Pakistan's mobile gaming audience aged 16–30. Real-time listen-through optimisation identified which gaming environments and time slots delivered the highest LTR (listen-through rate) in the first 48 hours, and weighted delivery toward those contexts for the remainder of the campaign. Hyderabad emerged as the top-performing city with a 2.62% CTR — driven by Gangstar Vegas: World of Crime at 99.86% LTR.
With 1,399,921 impressions delivered to 244,877 unique users at a frequency of 5.72, the campaign achieved deep penetration with its target audience. The 85.71% listen-through rate confirms that the Candyland message was delivered in full to more than 8 in 10 gamers who received the ad — a completion standard that no other audio or video format in Pakistan's mobile landscape matches.
Key Results
1.4M
Total Impressions
85.7%
Listen-Through Rate
1.8%
Click-Through Rate
244K
Unique Users Reached
Key Insights
01
02
While Pakistan's three major cities typically dominate digital campaign performance, Hyderabad delivered the highest CTR in this campaign at 2.62% — driven primarily by the Gangstar Vegas: World of Crime environment with a 99.86% LTR. This finding is consistent with Happy Ads' in-game benchmark data: Tier-2 Pakistani cities show higher engagement with in-game audio formats, likely because the gaming audience in these cities has lower exposure to competing digital advertising and responds more strongly to the novelty of the format.
03
Pakistan's mobile gaming audience represents one of the most underexploited media environments in APAC. Most FMCG brands have zero presence in mobile gaming — no audio, no display, no interactive formats. While these same brands compete aggressively for TV ratings and Meta impressions, 50M Pakistani gamers spend 2–4 hours daily in an advertising-free environment. Candyland moved first. The brands that follow in the next 12 months will define the media landscape for the next decade.
