Unity today published a case study detailing how the company worked with Montreal-based Optable to build Audience Hub, a data collaboration platform that routes behavioral signals from 256 million monthly active gamers in the United States into addressable audience segments deployable across mobile, Connected TV, Digital Out-of-Home, and off-network premium inventory.

The case study, released on May 28, 2026, describes a project that moved from the initial decision to partner with Optable through to a beta launch in approximately six months. The document puts specific performance numbers on record for the first time, showing that gaming-derived audiences activated through Audience Hub outperformed standard contextual targeting across multiple campaign types and advertiser categories, sometimes by triple-digit margins.

The problem: data locked inside a single channel

Unity operates what the case study describes as one of digital advertising's richest behavioral datasets. The company's software development kit sits inside thousands of US games, generating high-frequency signals on player behavior - genre preferences, session frequency, in-game actions, and engagement depth - across an opted-in base of 256 million monthly active users.

The data existed. The access did not. Unity's inventory was confined to mobile app environments, and the behavioral signals it collected had no standardized pathway into the audience taxonomy that brand advertisers and agencies use when planning cross-channel campaigns. Brand teams plan against demographic, psychographic, and behavioral segments that remain consistent across channels; gaming signals, confined to a single context, simply did not map onto those frameworks.

That structural gap had real consequences for Unity's revenue mix. According to the case study, Unity's value proposition remained strongest with advertisers already operating within the gaming space, while demand from non-endemic brand advertisers stayed underutilized. Automotive, financial services, consumer packaged goods, retail - categories that allocate significant programmatic budgets - had no clear mechanism to use Unity's data as part of a media plan.

There was also a second, more technical obstacle. Brand advertisers increasingly wanted to match their own first-party customer data against Unity's gaming signals to build more precise segments. That kind of data collaboration requires infrastructure that lets two parties work on overlapping audiences without either side exposing raw data to the other. Unity had no such infrastructure before Audience Hub.

Manual processes compounded the problem. Translating Unity's behavioral signals into actionable audience segments required analysts to manually examine patterns, define segments, and test them against campaign performance. According to the case study, identifying patterns across game genres, player actions, session frequency, and engagement metrics traditionally required weeks of data analysis. That pace could not keep up with real-time advertiser demand.

Build versus buy: the Optable decision

Unity faced a choice between building the required infrastructure internally or partnering with a specialist provider. According to the case study, constructing privacy-preserving data collaboration, omnichannel activation integrations, and ongoing compliance infrastructure from scratch would have taken years. Optable, headquartered in Montreal at 1435 rue St-Alexandre, Suite 700, had already built the components Unity needed.

Alex Blum, COO of Unity, described the decision in the case study: "Optable became our connection to the programmatic landscape, giving our demand partners new ways to reach our audiences beyond gaming environments. The platform helps us make in-app inventory more accessible in programmatic, which has traditionally been difficult, and it opens a much larger addressable market for advertisers."

The partnership also carried Optable's existing commitment to privacy standards. Vlad Stesin, Chief Executive Officer of Optable, framed the broader context in the document: "Privacy regulations are dictating market shifts. With the decline of traditional IDs, advertising is becoming less effective for those who don't adapt and innovate. Unity had the scale and the data, but they needed the right infrastructure to expand activation to the larger programmatic ecosystem and to activate it in a way that aligned with where the industry was headed. Optable provided that foundation."

Optable had already demonstrated its identity infrastructure in a separate deployment with Triton Digital and iHeartMedia, where the company's ID Switchboard achieved a 2.4x higher fill rate for inventory using Unified ID 2.0 traffic. More recently, Optable announced an integration with PubMatic's AgenticOS in March 2026 and a partnership with Goodway Group in April 2026, positioning the platform as a key piece of emerging agentic advertising infrastructure.

Technical architecture: how Audience Hub works

Identity foundation

At the technical core of Audience Hub is Unity's direct SDK integration into thousands of US games. That integration provides access to the opted-in audience pool representing 256 million monthly active users. The SDK generates behavioral signals that are then organized through Optable's infrastructure into unified, addressable profiles.

Optable's platform connects those profiles to privacy-preserving opted-in identifiers including UID2, RampID, and ID5. This identifier bridging is critical: it translates Unity's mobile-native signals into the identity frameworks that demand-side platforms, agencies, and brands already use across the broader programmatic ecosystem. Without that translation layer, Unity's data would remain incompatible with standard buying workflows even if it were technically accessible.

Signal enrichment

Unity integrated third-party data enrichment through Experian, unlocking access to more than 3,400 standardized audience segments. That enrichment layer serves a specific purpose: it makes Unity's gaming audiences relevant to advertisers across verticals that would otherwise have no obvious reason to plan against a gaming dataset. Gaming behavior signals layer onto existing audience profiles, adding context on how familiar consumer segments - by demographics, life stage, or category interest - engage with interactive entertainment.

The result is that an advertiser in, say, financial services or automotive can use Unity's data not because those consumers happen to be playing games but because the gaming signals add predictive insight on top of the existing audience definition.

Data collaboration

Built on Optable's data collaboration infrastructure, Audience Hub enables advertisers to match their own first-party data with Unity's audiences without exposing raw data on either side. Brands can upload their customer data to find existing customers or build lookalike audiences within what the case study describes as Unity's 3 billion gamer ecosystem - a figure that extends beyond North America to Unity's global reach.

This component reflects a broader trend across the programmatic industry. IAB Tech Lab's PAIR protocol, which establishes a standardized method for secure data matching of advertiser and publisher first-party data within data clean rooms, has been gaining adoption across the ecosystem. Unity's implementation through Optable achieves a similar outcome within the specific context of gaming behavioral data.

Activation framework

Audience Hub connects to the programmatic ecosystem through several integration types. These include direct connections to Unity's own ad servers for in-app targeting, DSP connections across major demand-side platforms that allow agencies and brands to access Unity audiences through existing buying workflows, and partner SSP integrations that activate Unity audiences across premium off-network inventory.

Cross-channel expansion is a structural feature of the system, not an add-on. Gaming-derived audiences can now be activated across CTV and DOOH environments where Unity's data previously had no reach at all. The case study describes this as extending gaming audiences "into the fastest-growing programmatic channels where Unity's data was previously inaccessible."

The infrastructure extends across CTV environments in a specific way: Optable's platform enables Unity to resolve the same gamer identity across mobile gaming sessions and CTV viewing behavior. That cross-environment identity resolution supports retargeting scenarios where a mobile game player can be reached on a connected television, and enables measurement of the incremental impact of coordinated cross-channel activation.

The agentic AI layer

One element of Audience Hub that separates it from conventional publisher audience platforms is the agentic AI component built on Optable's infrastructure. The platform uses an AI agent to analyze gaming behavioral signals at scale and generate audience segment recommendations aligned to specific advertiser objectives.

The practical effect is a compression of what was previously a weeks-long manual process into something that can respond to advertiser requests in near-real time. According to the case study, the AI agent identifies patterns across game genres, player actions, session frequency, and engagement metrics to isolate relevant signals and suggest audience compositions for unique advertiser goals. As more campaigns run through the platform, the system's optimization capability improves because it learns which gaming signals correlate most strongly with specific advertiser outcomes.

This approach is consistent with a broader industry direction that PPC Land has been tracking since late 2025, as platforms ranging from LiveRamp to Yahoo DSP to PubMatic have moved toward agentic architectures that reduce manual workload in audience creation, campaign management, and optimization workflows.

Campaign results: the performance numbers

The case study documents specific performance outcomes from campaigns run through Audience Hub. Results are benchmarked against standard contextual targeting, and the footnote on the performance data specifies that results derive from a single campaign period comparing Audience Hub-augmented targeting to standard app-based contextual targeting from May to June 2025.

In a test using interactive playable and end card ad formats, gaming-derived audiences achieved a 290% CTR lift and a 193% engagement lift versus a leading third-party segment benchmark. A public sector campaign using genre-based segments - specifically Sports and Action - delivered a 140% engagement lift compared to app-based contextual targeting. That specific result confirmed that player behavior translates to cross-channel engagement and can predict deeper content interaction in contexts entirely outside gaming.

Optimization performance also improved as campaigns accumulated. According to the case study, notable accounts demonstrated engagement lift progression from 140% to 169% within two weeks, suggesting the platform's learning loop was producing measurable gains within short windows rather than requiring extended ramp periods.

For non-endemic brand advertisers using gaming audience segments across Sports, Action, and Role-Playing categories, the platform delivered 32% CTR lift and 25% engagement lift. Those figures matter less as raw numbers and more as a demonstration that categories which historically found gaming inventory challenging to leverage were able to generate meaningful performance from gaming-derived audiences when activated through omnichannel infrastructure.

Business impact and market positioning

The operational changes that followed Audience Hub's launch are described in three dimensions. First, new revenue: categories that previously regarded Unity's audience as irrelevant or inaccessible now run material spend through gaming-derived audiences. Second, operational efficiency: audience creation and activation workflows that previously required manual work can now be configured and launched in hours rather than weeks. Third, market positioning: Unity is no longer competing solely on contextual targeting within gaming environments and now offers differentiated audience capabilities relevant to omnichannel brand planning.

The case study also outlines where the partnership is headed. CTV activation is described as a primary pillar of Unity's audience extension strategy, as more gamers shift consumption toward living room screens. The challenge the document identifies there mirrors the original Audience Hub problem: gaming data that was trapped in mobile needs to become actionable in CTV without sacrificing privacy compliance or identity resolution quality.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The Unity and Optable case study is notable not primarily for the performance numbers but for what the underlying architecture represents. Gaming has long been treated as a specialist channel, useful for endemic advertisers but not easily incorporated into the audience planning frameworks that brand teams use across broader programmatic buys. Audience Hub is a concrete attempt to close that gap at the infrastructure level, not through creative packaging of existing inventory but through technical integration of identity, enrichment, collaboration, and activation.

The scale of the dataset - 256 million monthly active users generating high-frequency behavioral signals across thousands of games - gives this a different character from most publisher audience initiatives. Gaming signals are unusually dense: players generate far more behavioral data per session than users of most other digital environments, and that density is what allows the kind of audience precision the case study documents.

The timing is also meaningful. The deprecation of third-party identifiers and tightening privacy regulations are pushing programmatic buyers toward first-party data partnerships and secure collaboration frameworks as the practical alternative to cookie-based targeting. PPC Land has been covering how IAB Tech Lab's PAIR 1.1 protocol is helping standardize these secure matching flows across the industry. Unity's move through Audience Hub represents one publisher's response to exactly that structural pressure, using Optable's infrastructure to make its data interoperable with standard programmatic buying workflows while keeping raw data unexposed on either side of any collaboration.

The Blitz Gaming and Magnite partnership from late 2024 pointed in a similar direction for gaming publishers seeking programmatic demand access. What distinguishes the Unity and Optable case is the end-to-end infrastructure detail - covering identity resolution, third-party enrichment through Experian's 3,400+ segments, data clean room collaboration mechanics, cross-channel activation integrations, and an agentic AI layer for segment creation - and the documented performance data from May-June 2025 campaigns.

For media planners, the case study provides a reference point for incorporating gaming inventory into omnichannel plans as something more than a niche contextual buy. For publishers with substantial first-party behavioral data sitting in channel-specific silos, it provides a specific technical and commercial model for how that data might be made interoperable with broader programmatic workflows.

Timeline

  • May-June 2025 - Campaigns run through Audience Hub generate benchmark performance data, including 290% CTR lift and 193% engagement lift for interactive ad format tests vs. leading third-party segment benchmarks
  • June 2025 - Unity's Audience Hub launches publicly, combining insights from Unity's ads ecosystem with Experian and Roku, following a beta phase launched approximately six months after the decision to partner with Optable
  • July 2025 - IAB Tech Lab releases PAIR 1.1 protocol to simplify encrypted data matching for publisher and advertiser first-party data collaboration
  • October 2025 - IAB Tech Lab's Agentic RTB Framework opens for public comment, with Optable listed as a participating organization
  • November 2025 - IAB Tech Lab's agent registry includes Optable Audience Agent as the sole "Private" deployment type classification
  • January 2026 - Agentic AI infrastructure takes center stage in programmatic as multiple platforms deploy autonomous campaign tools
  • March 12, 2026 - Optable's Audience Agent integrates with PubMatic's AgenticOS, marking an early live demonstration of the Advertising Context Protocol operating across real programmatic infrastructure
  • April 27, 2026 - Optable and Goodway Group announce partnership embedding Optable's Agentic Audience Platform across more than 70 Goodway Group team members
  • May 28, 2026 - Unity and Optable publish full case study documenting Audience Hub's infrastructure, performance benchmarks, and strategic outcomes

Summary

Who: Unity, the game engine and interactive experience platform, and Optable Technologies Inc., a Montreal-based data collaboration company headquartered at 1435 rue St-Alexandre, Suite 700.

What: A published case study documenting the design, technical architecture, and campaign performance of Audience Hub - a data collaboration platform that converts Unity's mobile gaming behavioral signals from 256 million monthly active US gamers into privacy-preserving audience segments for activation across mobile, CTV, DOOH, and premium off-network programmatic inventory. The platform incorporates Experian enrichment covering 3,400+ standardized segments, secure first-party data matching between Unity and brand advertisers, and an agentic AI layer for segment creation and optimization. Campaign benchmarks from May-June 2025 show CTR lifts of up to 290% and engagement lifts of up to 193% against leading third-party segment benchmarks.

When: The Optable partnership decision and the development timeline leading to Audience Hub's beta launch took approximately six months. Campaign performance data cited in the case study was collected during May-June 2025. The full case study was published on May 28, 2026.

Where: The platform operates across Unity's SDK integrations in thousands of US games, with activation extending through DSP connections, partner SSP integrations, and cross-channel reach into CTV and DOOH environments across North America.

Why: Unity's first-party behavioral data from 256 million gamers was confined to mobile app environments and could not be accessed by brand advertisers planning against standard audience taxonomies across channels. The decline of traditional identifiers and tightening privacy regulations increased pressure to build interoperable, privacy-compliant audience infrastructure. Audience Hub addresses that structural gap by connecting gaming behavioral signals to the identity frameworks and buying workflows of the broader programmatic ecosystem, creating revenue opportunities from non-endemic brand advertisers while maintaining data governance compliance.

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