Advertising Technology Blog

In-app bidding is increasingly dominant over waterfall for mobile game ad monetization, especially for hyper-casual games needing high fill rates and eCPM. For casual and mid-core/hardcore games, hybrid strategies with IAP benefit from bidding's efficiency. ML-driven bidding improves performance, leading to higher revenue. Publishers should transition to bidding via A/B testing.

Celebrating Women’s History Month, the Elevate Brunch at GDC united women leaders in gaming and tech. Three themes emerged: building supportive communities, turning adversity into opportunity, and imagining better versions of ourselves. The event highlighted the power of collaboration and resilience, emphasizing that when women advocate for each other, they drive industry-wide change. A special thanks to the inspiring speakers who contributed to this empowering discussion.

Moloco Singapore offers a collaborative culture focused on customer value and machine learning innovation. Teams work together to solve challenges like e-commerce fraud detection and market expansion. The diverse, growing team of 30+ members enjoys a vibrant spirit with shared meals and a multicultural environment. Employee testimonials highlight leadership, vision, and direct impact. Ideal for career growth in mobile advertising.

Wayfair partners with Moloco to enhance its advertising business through machine learning. The collaboration integrates Moloco Commerce Media to deliver personalized ads using real-time shopper behavior, improving ad performance and customer experience. New Sponsored Display units help suppliers maximize ROAS. Wayfair's Head of Advertising Product praises the partnership for exceeding expectations. The white-label, API-based solution enables retailers to serve tailored ads, boost yield, and achieve significant revenue growth.

Retail media networks are set for major changes in 2025, prioritizing AI-driven personalization and onsite advertising. Advertisers will demand performance outcomes like cost per order, pushing RMNs to adopt outcome-based buying. Investments in sales, go-to-market, and self-serve platforms will democratize access, turning retail media into a core profit driver. Winning RMNs will combine ML tools with streamlined operations to deliver measurable results.

Retailers can build effective ad platforms by leveraging first-party data, machine learning, self-service automation, and outcomes-based performance. Learning from Google, Meta, and Amazon, RMNs should use purchase intent signals, AI for targeting, automation for scalability, and closed-loop attribution to prove ROI, transforming digital presence into powerful advertising solutions.

Amazon launches Retail Ad Service to provide retailers with its onsite ad tech, including contextual ads and native demand. Aimed at smaller retailers, it poses risks of data sharing and conflict of interest. Independent solutions like Moloco offer similar AI-driven capabilities without these drawbacks, allowing retailers to maintain control and competitive advantage.

Onsite retail media ads remain the most critical driver of RMN growth, accounting for over 80% of ad spending. They offer higher ROAS, better margins, and brand safety. Leading RMNs like Amazon and Walmart generate most media revenue from onsite. Growth can be unlocked through ML optimization, self-serve platforms, and outcomes-based campaigns, even without massive traffic increases.

In an interview, Beth Berger highlights mobile apps as key growth drivers, with 88% of mobile time spent in apps and 3x higher conversion rates. She urges marketers to look beyond walled gardens using Moloco's AI to find high-value users on the open internet. She emphasizes maintaining control through partnerships, transparent measurement, and focusing on deeper funnel metrics like in-app purchases. AI enables personalization, but human strategy remains crucial for creative production and holistic user acquisition.

In-app bidding is increasingly preferred over waterfall due to efficiency, with around 80% of publishers now using it. It reduces latency, manual work, and improves ARPDAU by enabling simultaneous bids from all buyers. ML models in platforms like Moloco optimize bids in real-time, while waterfalls allow manual pricing control but risk inefficiency and reduced advertiser interest.

Retail media networks (RMNs) are rapidly growing but face myths about fragmentation and demand sourcing. Many consider building an SSP to attract demand, but this approach fails to scale. SSPs don't improve inventory performance, shift risk to advertisers, and risk commoditizing inventory. RMNs should instead leverage their unique first-party data and machine learning to drive relevance and performance, following models like Amazon, Meta, and Google to achieve sustainable growth.

Hitapps, a mobile game developer, uses in-app advertising and hybrid monetization to balance revenue and user experience. Early adoption of Moloco SDK boosted ARPDAU by 5-15%. Key challenges include privacy changes (ATT, iOS updates, Google's Privacy Sandbox) and loss of control in mediation. Hitapps evaluates partners based on demand quality, ease of integration, and ARPDAU uplift.

The open internet offers incremental growth opportunities beyond walled gardens. Supply path optimization is complex, with intermediaries inflating costs. Moloco's in-app bidding SDK creates a direct publisher-marketer path, eliminating fees to improve ROI. It enhances ML predictions with high-quality signals, giving marketers better transparency and control over ad rendering for improved engagement.

The Moloco SDK is a new solution for app publishers to maximize revenue by accessing Moloco's global advertisers directly. It is a certified bidding partner for AppLovin's MAX and Unity's LevelPlay. The SDK benefits both marketers (improved ROI, better performance, transparency) and publishers (direct demand, ML technology, creative control). Partners praise its high eCPMs and performance.

Advertising is key to e-commerce growth, as seen with Amazon and Walmart. Amazon derives 68% of profits from ads, while Walmart generates 12% of profits from Walmart Connect. Commerce media delivers high margins without heavy capital expenditure, enabling reinvestment in lower prices, distribution, and innovation. Balancing user relevance, advertiser results, and profit reinvestment is crucial.

Online retailers and marketplaces are converging. Marketplaces like GrabMart adopt 1P models for quick commerce, taking inventory risk. Meanwhile, retailers like Walmart embrace marketplace models to expand offerings without inventory. This convergence impacts ad businesses, requiring tailored strategies for diverse sellers and sophisticated advertisers, leveraging commerce media platforms.

The open internet offers vast, incremental scale for app marketers beyond walled gardens, but its complexity requires supply path optimization (SPO). With non-exclusive inventory and multiple bid requests per impression, advanced machine learning is crucial to select optimal paths, price bids accurately, and serve effective creatives in milliseconds.

Advertising new products in commerce media significantly boosts discoverability. Advertised products see 10-15 times more engagement and reach their first sale 50% faster than non-advertised ones. This rapid consumer feedback helps brands quickly assess market fit, make informed investment decisions, and optimize offerings. For retailers, integrating relevant ads into user experience enhances engagement and purchases, building a sustainable ad business.

Commerce media relies on two types of machine learning (ML): Organic and Ads. Organic ML predicts item click-through rates (pCTR) for ranking, evaluated via A/B tests. Ads ML predictions are part of a complex system involving bidding and budgeting; inaccuracies can misplace ads and reduce revenue. Separating these ML models allows teams to optimize independently without interference, a strategy used by big tech companies.

Moloco earned top ROI rankings in the 2024 Singular ROI Index, securing top 5 positions in iOS SKAN non-gaming and Android global ROI/retention categories. It achieved 'Golden 6' status for appearing in all categories. This recognition highlights the effectiveness of Moloco's machine learning in acquiring high-value users on the open internet.