Roku And Unity Partner To Bring The Power Of TV Streaming Advertising To Mobile App Performance Marketing

New partnership makes extending campaigns into TV streaming easy and impactful for app marketers on Unity

Today, Roku, the #1 TV streaming platform in the U.S.^*, announced a strategic product and commercial partnership with Unity, the world’s leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D (RT3D) content, to help mobile app businesses easily expand their app install campaigns to TV streaming inventory. This partnership offers mobile app marketers the only seamless experience in executing TV streaming campaigns, combining Roku's premium inventory with Unity's user acquisition technology and expertise. Utilizing Roku's Action Ads provides viewers with a seamless path from ad view to download and a frictionless discovery flow, while empowering advertisers with click-through measurement benefits.

This first-to-market partnership comes as TV streaming advertising continues to grow; GroupM expects TV streaming advertising to grow by 13.2% globally in 2023 to $25.9B. With Roku’s reach approaching half of U.S. broadband homes, and with at least 82 of the top 100 games using Unity to grow their games^** (as of September 2023), these two platforms are uniquely positioned to help app marketers leverage more devices and screens to engage potential users and drive incremental growth.

Built for performance marketing, Unity’s solution for Roku bridges the gap between TV streaming advertising and app user acquisition. By connecting Roku’s scaled, premium TV streaming inventory to the Luna app marketing platform, the partnership will enable mobile app marketers to leverage connected TV as part of their user acquisition campaigns, and close the measurement loop for enhanced optimization. Roku's Action Ads enable a frictionless experience, where a viewer uses their Roku remote to initiate the download process of the game onto their chosen mobile device, after which they return to their TV streaming viewing. Additionally, app marketers will be able to measure the performance of their TV streaming campaigns from initial TV ad exposure to mobile app download—enabling them to drive more cost-efficient growth.

Campaign setup, management, and optimization will be a seamless experience within the Luna from Unity platform. App marketers will log in to Luna from Unity and select Roku from a list of marketing channels. This enables mobile app marketers to easily buy cross-channel media through a single platform.

“Mobile app marketers seek to maximize their budgets and ad opportunities. TV streaming has become the right performance channel to enable growth and provide channel diversity in a highly competitive market,” said Miles Fisher, Senior Director, Head of Emerging and Programmatic Sales at Roku. “Roku’s scale, tech, and direct connection with the viewer are uniquely positioned to make the largest screen in the home work harder for mobile performance marketers on Unity.”

“The driving force behind this partnership is to turn CTV into a high-scale performance channel for apps and games,” said Omer Kaplan, SVP Revenue and Operations for Unity Grow. “Savvy app marketers today know that they have to harness every available channel to drive truly incremental and cost-efficient growth, and CTV represents a huge and largely untapped opportunity. By coupling that scaled inventory with Luna from Unity’s robust campaign management and optimization technology, this partnership unlocks unique value for app marketers who are looking to drive performance on home TVs. We believe that there is no better combination of partners more suited to making CTV a successful performance marketing channel to add to app advertisers' UA toolkit.”

^*based on hours streamed, December 2022, Hypothesis Group

^**top 100 games from data.ai based on 7-day average of worldwide downloads, both on Apple App and Google Play Stores (as of Sept. 19, 2023)