We sat down with Ben Fenster, co-founder of Anzu, to talk about identity resolution, attention measurement, and why in-game advertising has been living in a cookieless world longer than most people realize.
When you talk to someone who’s been building in the gaming ad space, one thing becomes clear fast: they’ve been dealing with the death of the cookie since day one. There were never cookies to begin with.
That’s the world Ben Fenster has been operating in. As co-founder of Anzu — the company that pioneered intrinsic in-game advertising, placing real brand ads directly inside the game environment — Ben and his team have had to solve identity, measurement, and attribution without any of the crutches the rest of digital marketing has been leaning on. The result is a set of hard-won lessons that apply well beyond gaming.
We had him on Deconstructing Data recently, and I came away thinking every marketer dealing with identity fragmentation should hear what he had to say.
Gaming Was Cookieless From Day One — Here’s What That Forced Them to Figure Out
Most of the digital advertising world spent the last few years in a slow-motion panic about cookie deprecation. The gaming world just… never had them.
“In the gaming space, it’s mainly native apps. So we don’t have access to cookies. We already started in a cookieless environment right off the bat.”
— Ben Fenster, Co-Founder, Anzu
What that forced Anzu to do was get very good at layering multiple identity signals — and knowing which one to reach for depending on the platform.
Consoles are authenticated by default. If you’re logged into PlayStation or Xbox, the platform already knows who you are. Mobile is messier — you might get an advertising ID, you might get a login email, and increasingly you’re getting relay emails from Apple or Google that mask the real address. PC games with strong multiplayer components tend to get users to log in voluntarily because they want to save progress and play with friends.
Ben’s approach: don’t bet on any single identifier. Use all of them.
“You always need to support multiple solutions and understand the traffic of the publisher, then use the right solution for their use case.”
— Ben Fenster, Co-Founder, Anzu
One signal I’m obviously biased toward — IP addresses. We have 86 million households mapped to IPs at BDEX, and Ben confirmed what we see with our clients: in the US, console and PC players tend to be on static residential IPs, which makes household-level matching surprisingly reliable. It’s not perfect, but when stacked with other signals, it adds real value.
The broader point is that the gaming industry figured out probabilistic and deterministic ID strategies out of necessity. The rest of digital marketing is now being forced to catch up.
Viewability Was Never the Right Question
One of the things I found most interesting in this conversation was Ben’s take on attention measurement — specifically, why the industry kept chasing the wrong metric.
“Viewability kind of answers a question no one was asking. Whether you had an opportunity to see the ad — what people really want to know is: did someone actually notice it?”
— Ben Fenster, Co-Founder, Anzu
That’s a pretty clean distinction. Viewability tells you the ad was technically on screen. Attention tells you whether a human brain registered it.
The IAB released guidelines on attention measurement at the end of 2025, which is helping move it from sales pitch to actual currency. But Ben is quick to point out it’s not a single score — different methodologies (eye-tracking panels, ML predictive models, surveys, psychological approaches) will give you different numbers, and they won’t always agree with each other.
Anzu’s answer was to partner with Lumen, a company that specializes in eye-tracking research, to build a rigorous picture of how in-game ads actually capture attention. What they found was that specific attention thresholds unlock significantly better downstream outcomes — but you have to get to the right threshold first.
“It’s more about: if it’s too low, something’s wrong — rather than if you have an endless amount of it, it’s incrementally better. Understanding specific thresholds that help you understand if you’ve maximized your opportunity — that’s what matters.”
— Ben Fenster, Co-Founder, Anzu
In other words, attention is a guardrail, not a campaign goal. Once you’ve cleared the threshold, you’re playing a different game: driving the actual business outcomes that matter.
Attribution vs. Incrementality: Most Marketers Are Confusing the Two
This is the part of the conversation I think is most underappreciated. Ben drew a line between attribution and incrementality that I wish more marketing teams would internalize.
“Attribution tells you what got credit. Incrementality tells you what caused the result. It’s really important to separate them.”
— Ben Fenster, Co-Founder, Anzu
Attribution is about giving touchpoints credit in a model. Incrementality is about asking the harder question: would this conversion have happened anyway without the ad?
The honest answer to that question is often uncomfortable. Ben mentioned working with brands — large ones, insurance companies and banks — where a single campaign analysis takes six to eight months just to collect and process the offline purchase data needed to close the loop.
“They would run millions of dollars of spend and it would take them 6 months to understand if it was worth it. That’s just crazy.”
— Ben Fenster, Co-Founder, Anzu
What’s changing now is the same thing that’s changing everywhere: AI is compressing that timeline. What used to require months of data science work is getting faster. And critically, Ben pointed out that you can now measure at scale without tying it back to the individual — which matters a lot given where consent regulations are heading.
“They can even do that without tying it to the individual. And without open source models from Meta and Google, and the huge advances in AI and data crunching capabilities, this wouldn’t have been possible.”
— Ben Fenster, Co-Founder, Anzu
The Bigger Picture
What I keep coming back to from this conversation is how much the gaming ad world has been a forcing function for better marketing infrastructure. When you’ve never had cookies, you build around their absence. When your attention metrics need to hold up against eye-tracking data, you get serious about what you’re actually measuring.
The rest of digital advertising is now being pushed toward the same rigor — by cookie deprecation, by consent regulations, by buyers who want to know if their spend actually moved the needle. The tools Ben’s team has been building for years in gaming are increasingly the tools everyone needs.
If identity resolution, attention measurement, or incrementality are challenges you’re wrestling with right now, it’s worth looking at what the gaming industry already solved.
Learn more about Anzu’s in-game advertising platform at anzu.io, or connect with Ben Fenster on LinkedIn.
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: BDEX helps brands build authentic connections with their audiences through the power of data and AI. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
