“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

The latest wave of consolidation among gaming and ad tech players has the industry talking about upcoming advertising opportunities. It’s about fundamentally understanding and connecting with consumers across all the channels they care about in ways they deem most valuable. As with any massive media shift – and make no mistake, a massive shift is underway – the marketplace drivers are multifaceted.

Everyone is a gamer now 

But the pandemic accelerated the trend. As Eric Seufert writes, this is particularly notable in terms of the growth in capital availability for upstart gaming companies and projects that we’ve seen during the pandemic.

Gaming just keeps getting bigger 

As a form of entertainment, video games are now bigger than movies and sports combined. That makes video games super-interesting from a mass media standpoint.

The channel crossover is breaking existing models 

For a long time, we’ve talked about linear viewers, OTT viewers, CTV viewers, mobile viewers – the list goes on. But viewers don’t think of themselves that way. It’s been up to broadcasters, platforms and media owners to give consumers the flexibility they want – and they have. Now, it’s up to gaming companies to do the same.

All companies need to get closer to consumers 

As gaming companies and ad tech companies come together to enable and monetize the growing and converging world of gaming, they’re doing so in a landscape where identity is becoming scarcer than ever. They need to be able to keep their data within their own fortresses while making it multi-channel-aware. This is where the ad tech play is so important.