Activating your CTV supply: a guide to gamer audiences

In many cases today, the gamer and CTV household are one and the same. That presents some serious opportunities for publishers. Consoles are already plugged into living room screens, people move between games and streaming apps in the same session, and households are building their own viewing paths rather than following a broadcaster's schedule. 

The real opportunity here is to recognise, evidence, and monetise the attention that behaviour represents. Gaming audiences are a fantastic consumer group across categories like finance, auto, FMCG, and entertainment, and they live in CTV, because the console is already connected to the TV. 

Let’s take a look at the three steps to identifying, engaging, and retaining them.

1. See gamer households clearly

Research consistently shows that 83% of internet users worldwide are gamers, 80% of those gamers are adults, and 45% are female. Streaming is split relatively evenly across income groups: 37% of UK online streamers come from high-income groups, 36% from the middle groups, and 27%) from the lowest. 

Parents, older relatives, and kids all play, often on different devices in the same home, then share the same screen for CTV viewing. For marketers, this means the starting point for targeting should be the household, not a single profile. 

What’s more, several users share the same device and subscription, so you rarely know exactly who is on the sofa. Even with a subscription product, you can't be certain whose eyes are on the screen - it could be a solo viewer, a couple, or the whole family on a shared Amazon account. 

That reality makes one-to-one identity matching on CTV both difficult and risky. Cookies aren't available, personal data is handled differently in a big-screen environment, and pushing a story about precision you can't defend is exactly where ‘smoke and mirrors’ creeps into publisher pitches and falls apart under agency scrutiny.

But what you can see are patterns - frequent console use, particular app combinations, or consistent viewing around gaming adjacent content. It’s important to build household-level graphs that describe likely gamer behaviours, and be transparent about where you're using inference. Combine what you already know - device types, app mix, time of day, and content categories - with gaming-specific signals. Then work with specialist teams to validate and enrich those segments.

2. Use content as your targeting superpower

Linear TV has been stitching stories about audiences around programming since the 1950s. Today, CTV and FAST channels hand viewers more control, letting them curate their own content journeys, whether they focus on mainstream genres or more niche interests. The key here is to treat content as an intent signal. 

Map your content catalogue against gamer-relevant themes. High-energy entertainment, creator style content, motorsport, fantasy, anime, tech, and e-sports are all strong candidates for gamer affinity packaging. For instance, a channel full of extreme challenges or fast cars provides a very different audience signal to a daytime soap opera, and will index against a different gaming demographic. When viewers actively choose those content categories and watch them back-to-back, they create exactly the contextual signals you need. 

In other words, build curated deals on the channels that make intuitive sense to buyers, and you're doing something traditional TV advertising has always done well: matching the right audience to the right environment.

3. Prove and amplify your gamer audience 

Once you’ve identified gamer households and the right moments to reach them, you need to determine what they find valuable and put that in front of them. Gamers respond best when the creative respects how they experience media. 

That doesn’t mean every ad needs to be fully playable, but CTV creative can certainly borrow from gaming motifs: clear value, simple structure, and a strong visual hook. Even a washing powder brand can influence purchase decisions in a gamer's world by moving away from using their generic awareness creatives. 

Working with a unified gaming platform lets you align CTV creative with in-game or around-game formats and connect big-screen attention with other touchpoints in the player’s journey. Buyers won’t accept vague assertions about ‘gamers on CTV,’ so start with controlled tests - for example, a gamer affinity package alongside a generic CTV buy, comparing attention and completion rates. 

Also, partner with platforms that provide attention data and brand lift studies, to build solid case studies that can actually withstand scrutiny.

Once you have proof points, make some noise with them. Sales teams should talk publicly about how your CTV environments reach modern gamers, sharing campaign stories and simple data snapshots. Visible momentum on LinkedIn and elsewhere makes it easier for conversations to turn into live deals - routing premium gamer-seeking demand into your inventory and building a track record that compounds over time.

Remember, the path to gamer revenue isn’t some magic toggle in the ad server. But the opportunity is real: consoles are already in the living room, the attention is already there, and the audience is already bigger than most buyers assume. It comes down to repeating a few grounded steps with gaming-native partners until a nice idea becomes a reliable revenue stream.

Talk to iion about reaching gamer audiences through CTV.