Inside Zynga’s Bid to Make Gaming Ads as Measurable as the Open Web

Mobile gaming commands enormous consumer attention, yet that attention hasn’t always converted into proportional ad dollars. As evolving privacy standards rewrite how digital targeting works, the distance between engagement and investment only widens as brands raise their standard of proof, seeking to verify exactly who is seeing their ads before spending real money to reach them. Identity infrastructure like LiveRamp’s RampID offers an approach that now allows gaming platforms to make authenticated inventory available at the gamer level, enabling brands to accurately connect and activate their first-party touchpoints to that authenticated inventory and more reliably reach intended audiences. The larger the authenticated audience, the more reach available to the brand.

Corentin Leydis, Head of Programmatic Sales & Agency Relations at Zynga, has spent more than a decade in mobile gaming advertising, long enough to watch brands hold back from the channel due to the difficulty in verifying who they were reaching. He sees Zynga’s partnership with LiveRamp as the way to give them that proof. Because Zynga owns its games, it owns the direct relationship with the player, and that owned-and-operated position generates the authenticated, first-party audience data that identity infrastructure needs to work for advertisers.

“Many companies may be able to say they are RampID-enabled, but the real value comes when that infrastructure is paired with a large, direct, authenticated audience,” Leydis says. “Zynga has both the pipe and the fuel. Because we are a publisher, we own the game and the relationship with the player. Thanks to that ownership, we are able to share a unique, privacy-safe signal with advertisers.”

The distinction goes to the heart of a problem that held gaming back for years. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency and the decline of the third-party cookie had eroded the legacy signals advertisers once relied on, making it harder to confirm who was actually seeing an ad inside a game. Gaming’s attention was never in doubt, but advertisers could not easily connect that audience to their own customers, and premium inventory went undervalued as a result. Zynga’s ownership of its logged-in players closes that gap directly, something the networks that aggregate inventory without owning an audience cannot do.

Proof, then precision

Brand marketers want more reliable signals and Zynga delivers them through deterministic CRM matching. RampID functions as a Rosetta Stone, translating gaming engagement into proportional ad spend by reliably matching a brand’s known customers to gamers rather than relying on the probability of a cookie or device ID. It also pulls gaming out of its mobile silo into a universal identity that can be translated across laptops, living room TVs, tablets, and other connected devices and channels where that gamer can engage. Proving that value to media buyers comes down to showing them the receipts.

Before a campaign even launches, a brand can activate its loyalty segments and audiences using RampID as the bridge to see how many of its real-world buyers are already inside Zynga’s games. “A brand can match their targeted audience, and from that pool, we can show that we have a significant portion of their customers playing our games,” Leydis notes. “Through that data, we can demonstrate the match rate in a way that matters to them, focused on real people.”

With that baseline of addressability in place, Leydis is already looking to the next step: translating gaming-native behaviors into insights brands can act on.

Beyond the garden walls

For years, the walled gardens of Meta and Google held the upper hand on the open web by keeping identity, scale, and activation under one roof. A universal, deterministic identifier starts to even that out, letting independent publishers match audiences across devices the way those platforms always have.

“The open web was such a patchwork of different IDs, or no ID at all, and you couldn’t really connect the dots,” says Leydis. “Now with RampID, you’re able to have an interoperable ID that enables persistency across all platforms.”

Identity is only half of it. Zynga pairs that addressable audience with third-party verified attention scores that outperform desktop and CTV, so brands can judge gaming on measured outcomes rather than reach alone. Competing on attention and measurement at once is what positions Zynga, and the open web with it, as a credible alternative to the closed platforms.

“I see RampID as more than a one-time integration. It forms the foundation for a more addressable, measurable, and insight-driven gaming offering,” Leydis concludes. “Over time, this helps Zynga give brands a clearer way to understand how gaming fits into their media mix, link gaming exposure to broader audience strategies, and show the value of high-attention gaming environments.”

“Advertisers have always known that gamers are an incredibly engaged audience,” said Travis Clinger, Chief Connectivity & Ecosystem Officer and GM, International at LiveRamp. “What held the channel back was the inability to connect that engagement to real customer data in a meaningful, measurable way. That’s exactly the problem this partnership solves. Zynga’s massive directly-owned authenticated audience, third-party verified high attention scores, and now a durable, interoperable identity layer through RampID means they are in a position to compete for media dollars on exactly the terms advertisers care most about. This partnership is about giving brands a new high-engagement channel that earns its place in the plan; not only because it’s novel, but because it performs.”