If you still think gaming is just about joystick jockeys and teenagers yelling into headsets, Liat Barer would like a word. She’s the Chief Product Officer at Odeeo, a company that’s quietly rebuilding the emotional architecture of in-game advertising — and, let’s be honest, that sentence shouldn’t even make sense.

Barer’s newest creation, Game E-motions, treats gameplay like an MRI for the human psyche. It doesn’t just track behavior; it reads the emotional contour behind every moment — the frustration of missing a target, the surge of pride after a win, the relief of surviving a level you probably shouldn’t have. Then it lets brands slip into that exact headspace, not as intruders, but as accomplices.

In other words, Barer’s making ads that feel. Not just “personalized,” but psychologically relevant. Think: a sportswear ad popping up exactly when a player hits turbo speed, or a victory message from a snack brand after a hard-won match. It’s less “targeting,” more “timing meets empathy.”

And the scary part? It works.

The adtech industry has long been allergic to self-awareness. It’s like a bad roommate who doesn’t realize it’s the reason the Wi-Fi keeps crashing. For years, game developers built entire economies on interruption — ads that stopped the fun dead in its tracks. Players hated it. Developers hated it. But the machine kept grinding because, well, CPMs.

Barer didn’t buy into that false choice between fun and funding. Her vision is unapologetically anti-annoyance. She’s built Odeeo around ads that live within gameplay, not plastered over it — audio that flows naturally, contextual triggers that don’t yank players out of the story.

Under her watch, brands like McDonald’s, Costa Coffee, Hyundai, and even the UK government have figured out how to join the game instead of hijacking it. The results? Campaigns that actually get remembered — not resented.

If the rest of adtech is still bragging about “non-intrusive” formats, Barer’s already designing non-cringe ones.

Barer doesn’t see AI as a threat; she sees it as the ultimate creative collaborator. She’s not interested in replacing human creativity — she’s using AI to scale emotional intelligence.

Her vision for Game E-motions is almost cinematic: an ecosystem where AI crafts hundreds of unique audio moments per campaign, responding to player behavior in real time. One player hears encouragement after a loss; another gets celebration after a win. Each touchpoint is authentic — or at least feels that way, which, in advertising, is the same currency.

While other execs are busy promising that “AI will change everything,” Barer is already deploying it to make ads less robotic. Imagine that.

Then there’s the other half of her mission — the part that has nothing to do with games and everything to do with women who keep talking themselves out of power.

Barer calls it “self-editing,” and it’s the quiet killer of potential. She’s watched talented women opt out of opportunities because they didn’t tick every box, while men barrel in at 60 percent readiness and call it confidence. Her advice is pointed and refreshingly unpolished: “Apply anyway. Build anyway. Launch anyway.”

It’s not a slogan. It’s the survival guide of a woman who’s navigated the intersection of tech and gaming — two ecosystems notorious for confusing swagger with competence.

Adtech worships numbers: impressions, installs, lift, ROAS, whatever the buzzword of the week is. But Barer’s betting that the next frontier is emotional resonance — the kind of connection you can’t fake with pixels or polished slogans.

While everyone else is obsessing over optimization, she’s asking the bigger question: “What if advertising could actually make people feel something — and not just irritation?”

So when the industry writes its next chapter on in-game advertising, expect her fingerprints all over it. Because if emotion really is the new KPI, Liat Barer is the only executive who’s figured out how to measure the human heartbeat inside a machine.