Unity has a gameplan for programmatic.
On Tuesday, the game engine, which has a growing advertising business, announced the appointment of Chris Feo as its new SVP of programmatic.
Feo is joining Unity from Experian, where he spent nearly five years as SVP of global sales and later as chief business officer. Before that, he held executive roles for almost 11 years at cross-device company Tapad, which was acquired by Telenor in 2016 and later sold to Experian in 2020.
For those keeping score, that’s over a decade and a half under the same umbrella.
So, why make a move now?
First-party data play
Unity has a trifecta of first-party data, audience engagement and scale that was pretty enticing, Feo told AdExchanger.
Roughly 70% of the top 1,000 mobile games are developed using Unity’s software, which also serves approximately 68 billion ad impressions per month via Unity Ads and ironSource, its mediation and monetization platform.
Because Unity powers so many games, it has a deep pool of first-party data from player interactions that it’s just now starting to use for programmatic advertising.
In June, Unity launched Audience Hub, a tool that combines an advertiser’s first-party data, Unity’s first-party data and data from third-party partners, including Experian and Roku. Advertisers can use the platform to build curated segments or lookalike audiences and activate them across gaming inventory, connected TV and open web display.
Unity built the product together with data collaboration platform Optable so that advertisers can securely combine their first-party data alongside third-party signals.
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A big part of Feo’s job will be to help grow the platform and attract more brand marketers to advertise programmatically in games.
Gaming’s ‘year of mobile’
For years, mobile gaming has been dominated by performance marketers and user acquisition teams focused on driving installs and other short-term goals.
Unity has an AI-powered ad platform, called Vector, which is specifically focused on UA.
But brand advertisers have been way slower to embrace gaming, in part because they haven’t been able to get the same addressability and measurement they expect from other media channels, Feo said.
That’s why gaming still gets treated as experimental and always on the verge of mainstream adoption, despite its massive audience and high levels of engagement.
“It feels like our ‘year of mobile,’ but maybe longer,” Feo quipped.
Traditionally, advertisers had to buy gaming ads in bundles of apps or contextual categories, he said, rather than targeting specific audiences or user segments.
“If you wanted to find males 18 to 40 with a certain household income who own an SUV and are credit worthy, for example, like you’d be able to buy on display, that wasn’t really available,” Feo said.
Programmatic is a priority
The idea behind Audience Hub is to bring audience demographics and targeting to mobile gaming ads – and everyone has a different piece of the puzzle.
Advertisers have CRM and demo data. Unity has data on how much time someone spends in a game, their in-game behaviors, their device type and the types of games they play. Data partners like Experian, meanwhile, can overlay information like household income or recent purchases.
This cumulative data paints a more accurate picture of who gamers are – an audience of more than 3.3 billion people worldwide, spanning all ages, genders and regions.
“We’re building capabilities so that brand marketers can feel comfortable and scalable inside of this highly-engaged channel,” Feo said.
As of Q2, Unity’s total ad-supported revenue was just under $300 million. It’s still a relatively small business line, but Unity has big ambitions.
“Gaming has the users,” Feo said. “We just need to keep building the programmatic brand marketing business.”
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