Brief:

• Google’s mobile advertising business, AdMob, formed a partnership with game development platform Unity Technologies that will help marketers reach more gamers, according to a statement. The new partnership gives Google’s advertisers direct access to Unity’s global mobile gaming ad inventory.
• Marketers can now use Google's universal app campaigns that also place ads in search, Google Play, YouTube and the Google Display Network. The partnership between the two companies is available now to Unity developers and Google advertisers.
• Unity claims to be the world’s most popular real-time development platform for mobile games, with 3 billion devices reached and more than 24 billion installs in the last year.

Insight:

The partnership expands Google's reach into mobile gaming at a time when Facebook is also ramping up in this area. More than 50% of all new mobile games are developed with Unity's platform, according to the company. The Unity ad platform reaches 1.5 billion devices and serves more than 9.4 billion ad impressions on a monthly basis, giving mobile marketers a chance to reach a large audience that is comparable with those of social media apps like Facebook and Instagram. 

Facebook in March opened its Ads API to game developers, letting them integrate interstitial and rewarded video ads, powered by Audience Network, into games. The social network let developers create games for its HTML5 cross-platform Instant Games service, which gives users a way to play games on News Feed and Messenger without downloading other apps.

Unity benefits from the agreement with AdMob because developers will have access to a wider group of advertisers worldwide than the company reaches through its own ad solutions. The agreement should also help game developers make more money from advertising. Already, the partnership has resulted in video completion rates of 87.3% compared with the overall average of 32.5% among publishers such as NHN Entertainment, Yodo1 and Doodle Mobile, based on internal reports cited by Unity.

Mobile gaming is on track to be a $70.3 billion market in 2018, according to a forecast by Newzoo. One out of every three app downloads is a game, which also benefit from high user engagement compared with other content. Almost two-thirds (60%) of Americans play video games daily, while 36% play them on a smartphone, the Entertainment Software Association found.