Samsung continues to build a massive advertising ecosystem to support how publishers and brands reach consumers through gaming by creating experiences on the company’s smart televisions and mobile devices.

The number of gamers in the Samsung TV Universe increased significantly in 2021 to nearly 20 million — up from 16.4 million in 2020. Gamers spent an average of just over two hours per day gaming on their Samsung TVs, according to the company’s data.

Nick Barrionuevo, Samsung Ads Gaming Sales Partnerships, Industry Lead, believes gamers are setting trends in terms of how people will interact and consume content on smart platforms.

“The more opportunities to interact with gaming experiences through our platforms, we will see that as a trend connected to the metaverse in the future,” he said.

Samsung Electronics last month announced the Samsung Gaming Hub, which relies on cloud services to support gamers. It rolled out to all 2022 Samsung Smart TVs to eliminate the need for additional hardware or software downloads. The all-in-one game streaming discovery platform enables players to search, discover and play games from partners such as Xbox, NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Google Stadia, Utomik and, coming soon, Amazon Luna.

Earlier this month, Samsung Ads released the whitepaper Gamers in the Age of Streaming July 12, 2022. Its analysts analyzed deterministic one-on-one automatic content-recognition data from smart TVs, and more than 19 million connected consoles.

“The most surprising piece of data from the report — the rapid pace of adoption of ad supported streaming and gaming on Samsung TVs,” Barrionuevo said. “Gamers spend about 80% of the time with their TVs, but they are unreachable through traditional TV advertising, because they spend more than half of their time on streaming and one-quarter in gaming on our smart TVs.”

The data shows that console gamers grew by 21% in 2022 compared with 2021, and 2020 Xbox Series X and PS5 users spend 61% more time in-game than those with other, earlier generation consoles.

This 84% of gamers consume just 18% of the total linear minutes watched by all gamers in the Samsung Universe, making them virtually impossible to reach through linear.

Linear advertising is more likely to hit a small proportion of gamers — just 16% — who consume more than 80% of the total linear minutes watched by the group.

Barrionuevo said the analysis also looked at dayparting, a pay-per-click ad model in which marketers typically schedule ads for certain times of the day or certain days of the week. In this instance, analysts looked at the time of day consumers were gaming, whether during breakfast, daytime, National Prime Time, Late Night, Overnight, and more. 

“We wanted to divide the audience into three key segments and analyze their TV use by day part,” he said. “It helped us to understand their behavior across ad-supported streaming, gaming and linear TV consumption.”

He also said advanced capabilities in new game consoles help to drive additional time spent in gaming. Gamers are spending more time with their consoles compared with previous hardware generations.

For advertisers, the data collected from the ecosystem uniquely positions Samsung to reach advertisers through streaming, video content, gaming hub, smart televisions, or smart phones.

“As budgets shift to connected television through direct or programmatic, our data helps to identify where gamers are across our smart TVs and platforms or ad-supported video apps,” he said.