At Advertising Week New York executives from Sony, PubMatic and Acxiom dug into key topics of AI, identity and how targeting fandoms on streaming and connected TV can offer a deeper level of engagement or connection – and potentially better drive action – than traditional demographics alone.
For many years targeting has been highly focused on demos, which alongside other data points help give advertisers an idea of who someone is.
“But fandom tells us what they love, what they’re really passionate about,” said Nicole Scaglione, VP of CTV/OTT & OLV at PubMatic, on stage during a panel session alongside Sony and Acxiom execs, while noting brands can ask whether it makes sense to connect with that fan using other sophisticated data points already available.
“Now we have this layer on top to bring through that more contextualized kind of connection that we really didn’t have before,” she explained.
For Sony, it has IP in games and music which can also shift to film and television (like as seen with the adaptation of The Last of Us into an HBO series).
But where “rubber hits the road,” per Sony’s Jason White, is in the August launch of Sony’s free ad-supported streaming Live TV offering on PlayStation 5, featuring 100 channels with content spanning movies, TV shows, anime, sports, creator content and more, and which can also house the company’s other IP.
“For us, fandom is the intersection of where users are, their passions are, where it hits media, and I think that that's an incredible opportunity for advertisers,” said White, VP of Ads at Sony Pictures Entertainment, on stage.
And the free streaming TV offering is housed within a fandom-type community platform itself via PS5 “which a lot of that passion and energy stems from…with the male gamer segment” as well as female gamers, he noted.
Sony taps PubMatic for programmatic
Coinciding with AWNY Sony announced PubMatic as its preferred partner to access its CTV streaming inventory (and engaged fandoms) programmatically.
From an advertiser perspective, part of the appeal is logged-in, authenticated users directly via the console experience that brands know consumers are passionate about.
“Having authenticated, logged-in users who we know are so engaged with and who have games that are beloved to them, just makes that connection so much more robust,” Scaglione said of PlayStation.
Stronger identity and fandom signals, she noted, also help determine whether one could then drive that person to not only see a brand but actually take action with it – pushing towards more measurable results and outcomes.
Behavioral signals help drive fans to adjacent affinities
As a platform, Sony sees that too, White said, and seizes on behavioral signals to build community by driving traffic from gaming into a streaming service or entertainment environment with distinct but adjacent fandoms, where there’s say a sports hub or an anime hub, for example.
Sony is gearing up for the highly-anticipate release of Grand Theft Auto VI, which already generated significant engagement and traffic to influencers sharing their thoughts on platforms like Twitch when Netflix released a sneak-peak in August.
Sony expects 50 million people to descend on the platform when GTA6 drops on November 19 in a fandom-type experience, White said. However, the company knows its users are also interested in media adjacent to game play, such as action, drama and car movies.
“We build that community by feeding them in from their gaming experience into their media experience, into the streaming experience in these hubs and kind of keep everybody in that community,” he commented.
And the new integration with PubMatic gives access to an attractive gaming fanbase that the company said is often hard to reach through other mediums.
“Streaming gives us an opportunity to build something fundamentally different from linear and broadcast,” said White in the announcement. “Our PlayStation audiences are highly engaged and highly loyal, but they have historically been difficult for many advertisers to reach. Partnering with PubMatic brings our premium inventory and authenticated audience insights closer to brands, agencies and performance-focused advertisers seeking more direct and measurable ways to invest in connected television.”
Signals get scale, but need identity to make it meaningful
Also on stage during the panel session, Sean Muzzy, global president of Omnicom’s data and identity business Acxiom, noted that these days the scale of data signals available to brands and streamers is much greater than in the past. Whereas previously, data points might simply be interest categories but now those signals are happening at a much larger scale and there’s more rich data to help unlock passion points.
However, the key for brands is connecting those passion signals and disparate datasets back to identity.
“The signals are kind of meaningless if they're not connected, filtered, and really understood and tied back to a person,” Muzzy said during the panel session.
In terms of how that manifests itself in CTV, he pointed to Acxiom’s Real ID identity product that he touted as “the modern rails to marketing” that enables it to be more effective and help connect different signals to users.
With that it moves from understanding what a person’s interest is “to actually saying, what is this person’s passion?”
Amid AI, CTV offers emotional, practical connection to fans
In a 1:1 interview with StreamTV Insider at AWNY Muzzy also discussed AI and an expected eventual shift towards so-called AI-managed experiences for consumers and their impact on brands’ ability to connect with and message to fans in the right places.
The rise of ChatGPT and other AI tools has meant the start of changes in consumer behaviors, including how and where people interact with brands and traditional search behaviors as they consider products and purchases.
For brands this brings up at least two lens considerations, according to Muzzy. There’s both a need to still connect to consumers on an emotional level, as well as ensuring their own brand-related data or content catalog, for example, is ready to be consumed by AI bots and can connect to consumers in what’s an evolving customer journey.
In a world of AI-managed experiences brands environments offering engaged consumers and communities, such as on PS5 and CTV, will remain vital to brands looking to connect.
And to Muzzy CTV, with its sight, sound and motion on the living room’s largest screen, still represents a powerful channel for brands to create emotional connection, while also benefiting from the digital, data-ready nature – particularly within an authenticated experience.
He used the example of a consumer journey of one displaying interest in a product for home furnishings on a website or other environment.
“The ability to now kind of connect that data with CTV, it's never been easier before. You know, in the past, the addressability was not as near time,” Muzzy told us. “It took a little bit longer to do, but now you can create almost an experience where it becomes both emotional and very practical as well.”
And again, brands connecting to the right audience in the right place to drive better connection and outcome can also benefit from deeper understanding of viewers’ passion and bringing together disparate signals.
But while panel session discussed video gaming, fandom and passion can be seen in many ways and facets, including sports.
Acxiom in June introduced a Fan Graph, which connects intelligence across 260 million U.S. consumers and 2.6 billion global consumers to create a comprehensive, privacy‑compliant understanding of sports fandom.
And Muzzy noted that as a brand, “the more I can understand about their passion points, then I can connect with them in the environments where they are really invested from a time standpoint, consuming, engaged.”
Targeting fandoms programmatically at scale
Another reason that the conversation around targeting fandoms on CTV and streaming is important today, per Scaglione, is the ability to do so at large.
“I think this is the first time that we've really been able to target fans at scale programmatically,” Scaglione said.
With Sony it’s bringing together logged-in PS5 users within the console ecosystem alongside content in one place for advertisers, she noted 35 million people authenticating into the FAST offering on the platform, with 65% of the Sony PlayStation audience male, aged 25-44.
“It's the content and the device together [with logged-in users] that help us find, identify, and be able to target, action upon, and measure this audience that we haven't really before,” she continued. “And Sony PlayStation bringing this audience to the market is different than just gaming or content on different devices. This is really bringing both of those signals together in one place.”
Identity layers with fandom or passion point signals can now be enriched with behavioral and commerce signals to ultimately help better achieve outcomes that brand desires or give understanding if a fan is likely to take action, Scaglione explained.
It also plays into a notion of identity shifting the marketing funnel, where White called out “community stuffing” at the top of the funnel with audience targeting, then learning more about the person with the identity layer to drive down to what he termed “the torso of intent and consideration,” or mid-funnel where first and third-party data comes in, to ultimately pull viewers to lower-funnel or action outcomes.
Still, for targeting fandoms on CTV to be more effective, the panel cited needs for better connectivity between publishers, advertisers and measurement providers, with White likened the current complexity of connecting the CTV ad tech pipes akin to a Super Mario Brothers scenario.
Streamers foster, target fandoms too
On stage, White noted that knowing who viewers are and what they’re passionate about isn’t only about advertising (although fandoms help attract ad budgets) but can also help inform content and IP outcomes, saying the content applications go hand-in-hand with ads.
Indeed, fostering fandoms on CTV also plays into streamers’ own strategies, many of which too appear to be coalescing around and trying to cater to various fandoms via content and new product features.
Be it large audience-drawing tentpole content like sports or franchise-specific fandoms like NBCUniversal’s Bravo Universe or ITV’s smash hit reality TV series Love Island, with UK and USA versions that also became massive U.S. hits on Peacock.
Part of the appeal and focus on fandoms is about tapping into communities and affinities that help extend conversations beyond the broadcast itself – to the benefit of both streamers and brands.
To illustrate some of the passion and how fandom can help extend the conversation, cultural relevance and fan engagement of content well beyond viewing an episode or game alone, Studio 55 and ITV Studios (global IP owner of the franchise) at AWNY this week released several fandom-focused stats around Love Island and the reason fandoms aren’t just a buzz word but have real meaning.
A few stats:
- Love Island generated 43 billion social media views globally so far in 2026 - but half of all social engagement happens outside the show’s peak broadcast window, making it an always-on conversation (Source: Tubular Labs, January - 26 August 2026)
- Behind those views are approximately 400,000 pieces of social content, of which approximately 370,000 are user generated. Of that, just 317 were tagged as branded or paid, showing the huge scale of the brand’s organic conversation. (Source: Tubular Labs, January - 26 August 2026)
- 7% of people who watched Love Island 8 USA researched outfits, products and brands associated with love island. This represents approximately 2.2 million potential real-world buyers who watched Love Island 8 who have already made an action to convert. (Source: ITVS x Toluna Research Study 2026).
- Across 14 brands associated with Love Island 8 USA, there was a +4 percentage point uplift in positive brand impression, +3.5 percentage point uplift in positive recommendation, and a +6.9 percentage point uplift in brand consideration when LoveIsland 8 was on air (Source: YouGov Brand Index).
- International brand partner Poppi saw a 20% uplift in dollar sales during its LoveIsland USA campaign. (Source: Poppi).
“The attention, intent and the passion Love Island fans bring, can translate to a meaningful impact for the brands that know how to activate that fandom, said Lou Black, host of Love Island USA AfterSun. “By this we mean the brands that succeed are the ones that treat fandom as a community they can contribute to, not just a space they can disrupt.”
And as passion and other signals get tied to identity, brands stand to have better understanding of fandoms and paths for deeper connection and more effective targeting – ultimately potentially leading to better outcomes.