PubMatic and Zynga team up to expand premium mobile gaming ads
Zynga players in North America could start seeing more commerce-heavy, personalized ads, as PubMatic opens direct access to premium mobile gaming inventory.
PubMatic said its new deal with Zynga opened direct access to premium mobile gaming audiences across Zynga’s North American titles, and that matters most for the ads players actually see in-game. The company positioned the partnership around more interactive commerce formats, including Click to Cart creative, alongside more efficient media buying and a cleaner path into premium inventory.
The timing fits a mobile ad market that is already tilting harder toward games. PubMatic said gaming apps accounted for 8.1% of U.S. app ad spend, up 42% year over year, while eMarketer expects 53.8% of the U.S. population to play mobile games in 2026, roughly matching shopping apps for reach. Even so, shopping apps still draw twice as much ad spend as gaming, a gap PubMatic used to argue that mobile games have mass scale and strong engagement without getting their share of full-funnel budgets.
For players, the practical shift is in format and placement. PubMatic said its OpenWrap SDK gives advertisers a streamlined, performance-ready supply path to premium gaming inventory with more transparency and control, and that Click to Cart can be integrated through OpenWrap to deliver dynamic, interactive, personalized eCommerce-driven ads. PubMatic also framed the move as a way to bring performance-driven capabilities into brand-safe environments, which points to more polished ad units designed to sit inside gameplay instead of breaking it up.
The company leaned on audience behavior to make the case. PubMatic cited eMarketer research saying only 20.3% of U.S. gamers generally dislike ads in games, and said players respond best to ads that are skippable, reward-based, relevant to their interests or matched to the game’s theme. That is the clearest sign of where mobile monetization is headed: less generic fill, more targeted commercial messaging that tries to feel native to the session.
Zynga already has the scale to make that strategy count. It agreed to acquire Chartboost on May 5, 2021 and completed the deal in August 2021, after describing Chartboost as a mobile programmatic advertising and monetization platform with more than 700 million monthly users and more than 90 billion monthly advertising auctions. Zynga says its combined portfolio has been downloaded more than 10 billion times on mobile and reaches more than 175 countries and regions, giving PubMatic a huge audience to test how aggressively premium game attention can be monetized without pushing players away.
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