CTV and mobile gaming: The winning strategy to reach your core audience

Connected TV (CTV) delivers reach, but is attention fully there?

Second-screen behavior has been studied for nearly a decade, with early research showing that smartphones were almost as common a TV companion as the remote control. More recently, streaming platforms like Netflix have openly acknowledged that content is increasingly being designed for distracted viewers, reinforcing that TV moments are now multi-screen moments by default.

Attention is more fragmented than ever, leading marketers to question reach as a standalone measure of success. One place where attention increasingly shows up is gaming. Gaming has long been boxed into a narrow stereotype, but the reality looks very different.

Today’s gaming audience is broad, everyday, and mainstream: parents, professionals, and household decision-makers. Publishers are responding to this audience shift – you can see it in how streaming platforms are experimenting with games (LG, Netflix, YouTube to name a few) to keep attention locked on the big screen and not the second screen. However, gaming IP is consistently breaking box office records, and even non-gaming platforms like The New York Times and LinkedIn have leaned into casual games to drive engagement and growth.

These aren’t causal proof points; they’re relevance signals.

TV and mobile gaming: Better together

We’ve all picked our heads up from our phones and missed the big play or the key moment of an episode. Mobile gaming’s role in this behavior can’t be ignored. It’s a growing form of entertainment and a real attention opportunity. Brands that plan across both can turn passive moments into something memorable, at scale. 

CTV remains foundational for reach, and that’s exactly the point: for brands already buying CTV at scale, extending into mobile gaming is the natural next step. It’s how you show up across attention, not just screens, reaching the same audiences whether they’re watching or playing.

How it works

• Use case: Extend live sports sponsorships beyond the TV screen
  • Problem: Live sports deliver massive reach, but fans second-screen during halftime and ad breaks, fragmenting attention and diluting the impact of TV investments.
  • Solution: Plan TV and gaming together by extending live sports sponsorships into gaming moments when fans pick up their phones, while also using gaming signals to reinforce reach across CTV, keeping the brand present across both screens during the same cultural moment.
    
• Use case: Reinforcing back-to-school buys with high-attention shopping moments
  • Problem: Parents second-screen during primetime, so back-to-school (BTS) TV ads compete with phone-time and lose impact.
  • Solution: Pair primetime CTV with gaming moments parents engage with at night. Extend gaming-derived parent audiences into CTV buys to reinforce BTS messaging during active attention, driving higher consideration than TV-only. Layer in shoppable formats to close the loop.
    
• Use case: Amplify trailer bursts across screens
  • Problem: Trailers on TV and streaming are often watched while distracted, limiting recall and frequency.
  • Solution: Pair CTV trailer bursts with high-attention gaming moments that reinforce the same creative, and extend frequent gamer audiences into premium streaming buys to drive reach and recall across both screens.

The marketers who will win

As attention continues to move across screens during TV moments, the advantage will belong to marketers who:

• Recognize that gamers aren’t a niche; they’re everyone and everywhere
• Leverage the same audience and contextual signals across screens
• Plan around moments of attention that matter to your brand
• Measure the combined impact of CTV and mobile gaming together

If you’re thinking about how to bring CTV and gaming together in a way that reflects how audiences actually experience these moments, reach out to learn how Unity’s CTV and gaming solutions work together in practice.