Samsung Ads’ Karl Meyer On The Importance Of Reaching Gamers

Thought Leaders Circle member Karl Meyer, Head of Media and Entertainment, North America at Samsung Ads discusses how Samsung Ads uses ACR data to measure gaming and how they then use that data to help advertisers reach gamers, a notoriously hard-to-reach audience.

Karl Meyer: I think it's often the case that our marketer friends and advertisers forget that we use our ACR data to also measure gaming content. We do that well—we literally fingerprint gameplay and measure that with the power of ACR.

Samsung’s Rule of 40 is really playing out significantly for gaming. We're able to look at time spent on the TV, streaming versus linear and make some interesting callouts. 

First off, looking at gamers that stream, we found that the time they spend streaming has gone up a full five percentage points from 50% to 55% of time spent streaming, which is remarkable.

Then, you tack on somewhere around 25% watching linear. That takes quite a toll on marketers that are trying to go back to linear and target a gamer, when quite honestly, about 80% of them are not even watching traditional or legacy TV.

Samsung Ads is able to help them identify the gaming target using ACR. And to tack onto that, we also have unique data that we collect on connected consoles to smart TVs.

Through the HDMI connection, we're able to specifically identify Xbox households or PlayStation households. We serve ads up through the UI, identifying what games are about to be played on any of those consoles.

So that's a 1-2 punch. 

And then the third blow would be our AVOD service, Samsung TV Plus, that also serves the needs of gamers.

We're curating and aggregating content for gamers on that service. We’ve partnered with large media companies that have gaming content at the ready. And then we've got partners that quite honestly are household names in the gaming space like IGN, and we've done our own gamer channel as well.

It's our owned and operated channel where we go out, partner with content providers in gaming and serve that up. What we’ve also honestly come to realize is the e-sports audience is alive and well.

And so there’s certainly more to come there.

We're big investors in content and trying to build out our AVOD service, we grew it from 20-some channels on Samsung TV Plus to well over 160.

There's a real audience there. You'll see a few channels on Samsung TV Plus now that serve the gamer, with more to come down the road.