The Energy Drink That Vanished From a Video Game

The can was there until it wasn’t. In 2018, while playing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the people who would start Frameplay noticed an energy drink in the game. It looked like an ordinary piece of a modern world. Then a software patch anonymized it. The small act of erasure made the scene less convincing and suggested a business opportunity: if a game had room for a plausible product, why shouldn’t the product have a real sponsor?

That observation is more interesting than the usual boast about “reaching gamers.” Frameplay’s founders, Jonathon Troughton and Eric Rossi, were asking a design question before they asked a media question. A vending machine, pitch-side board or shop sign can belong in a virtual place. A full-screen video demanding thirty seconds before the next level rarely does. One earns its keep as scenery; the other borrows time from play.

The business hiding in the scenery

Frameplay calls the format “intrinsic in-game advertising.” In plain terms, an ad appears on something that could reasonably carry one in the game world: a billboard along a racing circuit, a sign beside a soccer pitch, an object in a simulation. The player can keep playing. The brand gets a place in a scene where attention is already concentrated. The studio gets another way to earn from the game.

The company sits between two customers who want different things. A marketer wants reach, targeting, reporting and a safe place for its logo. A developer wants revenue without wrecking retention or surrendering the visual identity of a game. Frameplay’s SDK connects to game engines and lets studios specify ad spaces. Its developer platform offers real-time reporting, ad-format controls and brand approvals. Agencies can create and manage campaigns through the advertising platform. Frameplay also offers managed work, while the exchange makes pooled inventory available to buyers.

That is also the business model. Brands and agencies spend money on campaigns. Developers integrate the technology and earn advertising revenue. The public materials do not state a price list or revenue split, so the useful economic detail is the transaction itself: Frameplay needs enough appealing game inventory to interest advertisers and enough advertising demand to make integration worthwhile for studios.

The first problem was the interruption

The familiar mobile-game bargain is an interruption: watch a video, collect a reward, resume play. It can work, but its mechanics are hard to mistake for the game itself. Frameplay’s alternative depends on an ad feeling appropriate to the world around it. A branded board makes sense in a stadium. It may be absurd in a medieval dungeon. The format needs designers who know the difference.

Frameplay’s 2022 survey of more than 1,200 players gives this design instinct a number. Fifty-four percent said interstitial ads were distracting; 43 percent said the same of adjacent ads, and 24 percent of intrinsic placements. This was a survey of reported preference, not proof that every embedded ad improves a game. Still, it explains why the studio’s veto matters. Put the wrong brand in the wrong place and the ad ceases to be scenery.

“Your game. Your design.”Frameplay’s pitch to developers

There is a practical copyable lesson here for any product that sells access to someone else’s audience: give the host control over the experience. Frameplay’s developer controls include placement selection, format management, approvals and performance reports. The studio is not merely supplying empty pixels; it is lending the credibility of a world it built.

Then came the harder question: did anyone see it?

A web ad can be counted when it loads, and a click offers an easy action to measure. Neither maps neatly onto a billboard in a moving 3D scene. The player may sprint past, turn away, drive behind an obstacle or stare at a wall. Frameplay developed Intrinsic Time-in-View, a duration measure for how long an ad is viewable during play. In its own explanation, the company argues that a clickable intrinsic ad would risk an accidental tap that breaks play. The absence of a click is a product decision, but it leaves the advertiser demanding another kind of evidence.

Frameplay has tried to make that evidence familiar to media buyers. It contributed to IAB in-game measurement guidance, worked with Nielsen on mobile in-app Digital Ad Ratings certification and added Integral Ad Science measurement for impressions and invalid traffic. Comscore and Happydemics have studied brand lift. None of these turns a glance into a sale by magic. They do make the ad less alien to the people responsible for a budget.

Frameplay’s 2022 gamer survey; more than 1,200 respondents. These are self-reported views, not a controlled comparison of sales.

Johnsonville offered a more concrete test in 2022. Working with Frameplay and GumGum, the sausage brand placed creative in mobile sports, casual and simulation games. A Comscore study reported that 56 percent of exposed gamers recalled the ads and measured nearly a 14-point lift in purchase intent. Recall and stated intent do not reveal the campaign’s cost or prove incremental sales. They do show the kind of evidence an advertiser can take into a planning meeting.

From one believable object to a buying channel

The company’s trajectory has been less a parade of new ad shapes than an effort to make a peculiar one routine. It launched a Unity SDK in 2019 and its first campaign in 2020. Hiro Capital led an $8 million Series A in December 2021. By 2024, Frameplay had launched programmatic workflows and an exchange. In October that year it announced a preferred partnership with Adverty and AdInMo, companies that also sell in-game placements. The arrangement pooled their inventory for buyers. Competitors, in other words, became suppliers to a larger storefront.

That change says something about the market. An agency is accustomed to buying across many sites or apps without negotiating each placement as a bespoke sponsorship. Games have been harder to package that way because their worlds, cameras, audiences and technical stacks differ. An exchange is an attempt to turn many small, idiosyncratic places into something a media plan can use at scale. The danger is that scale can flatten the distinction that made the format attractive: a good in-game ad is specific to the game.

Leadership shifted alongside the buying model. In October 2024, Sandy Shanman became chief executive and co-founder Troughton became president. The company pointed to Shanman’s experience in retail media and monetization. By 2025 Frameplay was discussing a Walmart Connect partnership, another sign that it wanted to sit in the ordinary commercial plumbing of advertising rather than wait for a one-off brand stunt.

The original PUBG can remains a useful test of that ambition. The best version of this business makes a game world slightly more plausible, pays the people who made it and gives the sponsor honest evidence of exposure. It also knows when to leave a wall blank. In a place built for play, restraint is part of the inventory.