Here is the thing about gaming that should keep every CMO in America awake at three in the morning: it is, by every measurable standard, the largest media channel on the planet. Bigger than streaming. Bigger than social. Bigger than whatever the hell the metaverse was supposed to be before Mark Zuckerberg pivoted to building a virtual conference room nobody asked for. Ninety percent of people connected to the internet play at least one game a month. Three and a half billion human beings. And the advertising industry, the people whose entire job is to find humans where they actually spend their time, has spent the last two decades treating gaming like a weird cousin at Thanksgiving. Smile politely. Don't make eye contact. Change the subject to CTV.

I've been talking about this since 1998. Clinton was in the White House. Google was a research paper. And some of us were already saying: the game is the medium, the medium is the message, and you people are going to be very, very late.

They were late.

Itamar Benedy founded Anzu eight years ago on a thesis that sounded either visionary or clinically insane: that you could put real, programmatic, brand-safe advertising inside the three-dimensional world of a video game without making every gamer on earth want to set your headquarters on fire. Not slapped-on banners. Not unskippable pre-roll. Actual in-game surfaces rendered natively in 3D, bought and sold through the same programmatic pipes that move billions through display and video.

When I sat down with him, he said it plain: "we are not, maybe not yet 1% of our journey achieved yet." Eight years in. Real revenue. One percent. That's either the most honest thing a founder has said to me in a decade, or the most terrifying.

There is a liturgical calendar in ad tech. Every January, someone publishes a trends report. Every trends report includes a section about why this is finally the year of gaming advertising. Every year, the industry nods along, does nothing, and goes back to arguing about CTV measurement.

This has been happening since the Blackberry was a status symbol. Same slide. Same pie chart. Same gap between attention and ad dollars. It has the cadence of a religious observance: an annual confession of faith with no actual conversion.

Itamar has lived inside that gap for nearly a decade. He told me it's going to be "significantly bigger than I originally imagined, but at the same time, it's going to take much more time for the market to really mature." Bigger than he thought. Slower than he thought. Both true at the same time. That's not optimism. That's the specific kind of patience that only comes from getting punched in the face by a market that keeps saying yes while behaving like no.

I asked Itamar whether brands actually understand gaming or just realized everything else is failing. He didn't flinch. "It's a combination," he said.

Reason one is cold arbitrage. He described it without any romance: "just a good media opportunity. I can buy traffic for cheaper. The performance is going to be better. I don't care if it's gaming. Gaming is the excuse." This is not a gaming bet. This is a media-buying bet that happens to land inside a game.

Reason two is desperation dressed in strategy. Other channels are wheezing. Social reach is collapsing. Linear TV is a hospice patient. CTV is measured with the rigor of a horoscope. Meanwhile hundreds of millions of people are spending hours inside gaming environments with no ad model whatsoever. Itamar called it "this need for hard to reach" audiences on platforms that "don't have an ad-based model." They are the audience that got away.

And then there are the brands who come for neither reason. They come because McKinsey told them to. Itamar didn't sugarcoat it: "a lot of brands are still doing gaming for the wrong reasons because of FOMO of their competitors, because McKinsey and BCG told them in their last report that they need to be more in gaming." But then he reframed it: "even if clients for the wrong reasons come to gaming and then have a great experience, then ultimately it serves the goal."

The door doesn't care why you walked through it. Only that you did.

During COVID, someone had what they believed was a brilliant idea: run a Netflix campaign inside Anzu's gaming platform that told players to stop playing and go watch Netflix.

Let that land.

You are inside the one place the consumer has chosen to be. They are engaged. They are in flow state. And your message is: leave.

Itamar walked me through the logic: "people were either playing games or on Netflix. So a campaign that said, go back to Netflix..." He admitted "it sounded very creative, but there's something about taking people out of the gaming industry to Netflix" that "wasn't really received well by some of the gaming community people."

That's the diplomatic version. The non-diplomatic version is that it was the advertising equivalent of walking into someone's house and suggesting they go visit the neighbors.

And the punchline that makes the whole thing poetic: "Netflix for a long time said no gaming and no advertising and no cable linear TV. These three things are basically almost everything that they do today." The company that told gamers to leave the game and watch TV is now a gaming company with an ad-supported tier as its fastest-growing revenue line.

The lesson isn't about Netflix. The lesson is that gaming is a destination, not a waystation. Your job is to exist inside the experience so naturally that your presence makes the world feel more real. Not to redirect. Not to extract. To belong.

Here's where the industry's laziness turns into something almost theological. "Gamers." One word in a pitch deck, used to describe a fourteen-year-old playing Candy Crush on a bus, a Call of Duty platoon on PlayStation 5, a League of Legends esports viewer, and a fifty-five-year-old doing the daily crossword on her iPad.

Itamar was blunt: "3.5 billion people play at least one game a month. 90% of the people connected to the internet. And defining them as one group." He paused, and you could hear eight years of explaining this in his voice. "You really need to break it into smaller pieces of types of gamers."

What Anzu actually does, stripped of positioning language, is virtual digital out-of-home. Itamar said it himself: "a lot of what we do is basically a digital out-of-home experience inside the game. But the whole principle of digital out-of-home is that it's not a real digital experience. There is no measurement. There's targeting and personalization, which we do offer."

The surfaces are in-game. The infrastructure is ad tech. That's the play.

And that's where we stop giving it away for free.

Itamar told me things in the next forty minutes that I genuinely have not heard from anyone else in this industry. About the specific metric he believes will reshape gaming advertising in two to three years, and why the click is, in his words, like a soccer team where "only the strikers get recognition" and "some of the biggest soccer players in the world will not be considered great players." About the genre myth that Anzu itself believed for years, the assumption that racing games are a natural fit and fantasy games are hopeless, and why their own data proved them completely wrong. About gaming companies that were already using fake ads to make their worlds feel more realistic, and what happened when those fakes got replaced with real ones.

He told me why the gaming industry spent years trying to build an advertising business by going to war with the very companies that make advertising work, and why that was catastrophic. He told me there is "very little innovation in advertising" and that "there's so many big companies that the difference between them is the color of their logo."

He told me who he'd bring to a desert island to build something from nothing. Why his co-founder of fifteen years and three companies gets the first seat. Why Elon Musk would be his CTO but explicitly not his CEO. Why he wouldn't ban the genius who needs worship, the optimizer, or the talker, because "if you know how to manage this group of people, each one brings a different perspective."

He told me the single startup mistake he'd never repeat, the one still embedded in Anzu's legal name: Anzu Virtual Reality. And why the vision was right but the sequencing nearly killed the speed.

And when I asked him what he hopes people say about him when he's not in the room three years from now, he gave me five words.

Those five words are in Part 2.

Your competitors are already reading it.

[UNLOCK THE FULL INTERVIEW →]