Bridging the big screen and the small screen: Unity and Samba’s strategic partnership

Consumer attention has never been more fragmented. Streaming and gaming now account for a significant and growing share of time spent across households. Yet for many advertisers, TV and mobile have remained separate strategies with separate workflows, data, and measurement frameworks. Unity’s preferred partnership with Samba is designed to change that for programmatic buyers.

Where TV viewership meets mobile gaming

Samba is a global leader in AI-driven media intelligence, with first-party viewership data from 50 million smart TVs across more than 40 countries. This viewership data has long helped advertisers understand what audiences watch. What it has not always been connected to is where those same audiences spend time when they are not watching TV — and increasingly, that is in mobile games.

Samba's intelligence comes from the Samba Knowledge Graph, a unified media intelligence layer that provides insights on interests, behaviors, and purchase intent for 1.5 billion opted-in user profiles globally. By connecting that knowledge graph to Unity's first-party gaming signals, advertisers can plan, target, and measure across TV and mobile gaming as a single audience.

What this partnership enables

For advertisers activating across Unity’s mobile gaming inventory, the Samba integration provides three core capabilities:

• Cross-screen planning: Use Samba’s viewership data to identify relevant audiences within Unity’s mobile gaming supply. You can extend CTV and linear TV campaigns into mobile gaming environments without rebuilding your strategy or audience definitions from scratch.
• Precision targeting: Combine Samba’s behavioral and contextual TV signals with Unity’s first-party advertising data within Unity Audience Hub to build curated audiences based on real-world viewership. For entertainment advertisers, this helps you reach gaming audiences based on what they actually watch, not just demographic proxies.
• Unified measurement: Measure the lift and performance of mobile gaming campaigns against TV viewership to understand how the two screens work together across the consumer journey. This supports more informed budget allocation and optimization in your programmatic media plans.

The case for a unified screen strategy

Mobile gaming represents a significant and growing share of consumer attention. For programmatic teams, the value is not just incremental reach. It is the ability to reach light TV viewers where TV cannot, manage frequency across both screens instead of each in isolation, and measure the combined contribution to campaign outcomes.

If you are already investing in CTV, the ability to extend those strategies into mobile gaming — and measure across both — means gaming can move from a standalone line item to an integrated part of your screen strategy.

Samba is Unity’s preferred TV data partner, and the partnership is live for marketers running audience-led campaigns across Unity’s mobile inventory.