Helping a Leading Mobile Gaming Company Reach New Players at Scale
When one of the world’s top mobile gaming companies came to Samsung Ads, they weren’t looking for “just another ad channel.” They’d already maxed out search, blanketed social, and squeezed every drop from the usual suspects. What they needed was a way to keep growing when it felt like they’d already reached everyone.
“Our client is already running on every major channel,” said Ryan Garcia, a senior leader on the CTV to Mobile Conversion team. “At that scale, incremental growth is the hardest thing to find. They needed to keep adding new users, get people to play their games, and ultimately spend within the app.”
The stakes were high but clear: The company’s Samsung Ads campaign had to hit Day 7 return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) targets. After years of saturating search and social, could connected TV drive new growth?
A Solution That Speaks Our Partners' Language
By the time the client arrived at Samsung Ads, they’d already tapped into the biggest digital social and search platforms on the planet. What they hadn’t done was claim the most valuable screen in the house, the television.
Samsung Ads opened that door with direct access to Samsung Smart TVs. That meant exclusive, front-and-center visibility on prime real estate that no other demand-side platform could offer.
“What we offer is inventory that no one else has,” said Garcia. “Our native placements on Smart TVs aren’t available anywhere else. The opportunity lies there because it’s a new environment and it’s incremental.”
Another uniquely-Samsung benefit? The ability to flip the risk equation, and offer CPI-based pricing.
“One of our biggest differentiators is that clients pay based on installs, not impressions,” said Saejun Cha, Samsung Ads product marketing manager. “They don’t risk a large upfront spend without knowing whether it will perform, and that gives them confidence.”
To maximize performance, Samsung Ads used first-party audience signals to identify high-value game players, then layered in insights from mobile measurement partners (MMPs) to track which viewers were most likely to install. Campaigns dynamically optimized bids by time of day, device type, and content viewed, while rotating creative to distinguish between net-new users and returning players.
“Within our universe of Smart TVs, we’re carving out Venn diagrams of overlap between Samsung’s audience and the client’s audience,” said Cha. “Then we optimize across inventory, time of day, and pricing to make sure we’re hitting their goals.”
For gaming advertisers – where success hinges on turning installs into loyal, paying players – that performance-based model spoke their language.
From Couch to Click: Making TV Work for Mobile Gaming
For years, mobile gaming companies funneled 90% to 95% of ad budgets into social and search, simply because those channels were easier to measure. But that reliance created a measurement bias. Just because spend was trackable didn’t mean it was the most effective.
TV, by contrast, was long seen as ideal for awareness but impossible to tie to performance. Samsung Ads turned that assumption on its head. By linking Smart TV exposures directly to mobile installs through MMP attribution, they proved that TV could be both a branding play and growth engine.
Because Samsung Ads controls exclusive native placements on the Smart TV home screen, the client reached audiences they simply couldn’t touch elsewhere. “This was the first time many gaming advertisers could put their ad directly on the Smart TV home screen,” Garcia explained. “It’s where consumers are spending more and more time, and that’s a big shift in behavior.”
By pulling over 300 viewer signals from across 77 million Samsung Smart TVs, Samsung Ads can optimize native ads according to viewer geography, time of day, type of content, and TV model type. These signals influence where to place the ad on the screen, the most effective type of creative to use, and best practices for CTA themes.
The client wanted proof that TV could drive real mobile growth. Using its MMP as the source of truth, Samsung Ads tied CTV exposure to app installs within 24 hours and tracked revenue over the first seven days. To ensure these weren’t installs that would have happened anyway, the gaming company layered on their own geo-lift studies to prove that Samsung Ads wasn’t just delivering installs, but delivering incremental ones.
“With Samsung Ads, we can close the loop and show that TV can drive app installs and revenue,” said Garcia.
By shifting from CPM to CPI and applying machine learning optimization, the campaign delivered stronger performance at a lower cost. The client reduced cost-per-install by nearly one-third, gaining significantly more installs that would have cost 70% more under a CPM model. Just as importantly, the approach attracted high-value users who make in-app purchases and helped the client surpass 50% of its Day 7 ROAS goals.
“The key takeaway is that this channel delivered real incremental reach and measurable impact beyond what our client was getting from saturated social and search campaigns,” said Garcia.
Scaling Together: From Experiment to Growth Partner
The campaign did more than deliver results – it reframed the relationship. What began as a test of a new channel became proof that Samsung Ads could be a true growth partner.
“At the end of the day, the client wanted to know two things: could we reach new audiences, and could we do it profitably?” said Cha. “The answer was yes on both fronts. And that opened the door to scaling together.”
With measurable performance, exclusive access, and a model designed for mobile gaming, Samsung Ads helped the client see opportunity where others only saw limits.
What started as a single campaign now serves as the blueprint for future growth.
