Roku partners with Unity to drive user acquisition for mobile apps through CTV

Roku and Unity today unveiled a strategic product and commercial partnership to empower mobile app businesses to seamlessly extend their app install campaigns into TV streaming inventory. 

Marking a significant leap forward, the partnership, now in beta testing, combines Roku’s premium inventory with Unity’s user acquisition technology, offering mobile app marketers a uniquely streamlined experience for executing TV streaming campaigns.

“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.”

As Roku’s influence nears about half of all U.S. broadband households and considering that, as of September 2023, over 82 of the top 100 games rely on Unity for their growth, these platforms hold a distinctive advantage. This unique positioning enables app marketers to harness a diverse array of devices and screens, facilitating the engagement of potential users and fostering incremental growth, the companies say. 

The strategic partnership links Roku’s expansive premium TV streaming inventory to Unity’s Luna app marketing platform, empowering mobile app marketers to incorporate connected TV seamlessly into their user acquisition strategies. The partnership not only closes the measurement loop for enhanced optimization but also allows marketers to leverage Roku’s Action Ads for a frictionless experience. 

Viewers can use their Roku remote to effortlessly initiate the game download onto their chosen mobile device and seamlessly return to their TV streaming content. Furthermore, app marketers gain the capability to measure the entire spectrum of their TV streaming campaigns, from the initial exposure of TV ads to the ultimate mobile app download, facilitating more cost-efficient growth strategies.

“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.”

After the beta testing phase, Luna will collaborate with a select few partners to amplify their expansion on the Roku platform.

Roku currently announced a partnership with Spotify for video ads on the popular music and podcast platform.