Advertising Technology Blog

Ned Samuelson joins Moloco as Global Head of Business for Commerce Media, focusing on retail expansion and customer growth. With 12 years at Criteo, he led teams for clients like Macy's and Booking.com. Moloco's AI platform has grown ad spend 10x in 2 years, serving 100,000+ advertisers globally. Ned aims to drive incremental revenue for retailers.

The Moloco SDK is not just another ad SDK; it's a new value path for publishers, providing fee-free monetization. It improves ROI for marketers and revenue for publishers through direct ad paths, avoiding intermediaries. Moloco's AI handles ad decisioning, analyzing billions of opportunities daily to maximize performance. This SDK enhances auction dynamics and encourages higher marketer investment, boosting publisher earnings.

Commerce media audiences use purchase behavior and shopping intent for precise targeting. Moloco's Audience Targeting Suite offers three pathways: Smart Targeting using AI for automated optimization, Custom Targeting for specific segments based on events and metadata, and Predefined Targeting using retailer first-party data. Administration tools control audience access. Benefits include higher ROAS, data governance, and flexible implementation via CDP or CSV.

Moloco Ads is an AI-powered ad platform for Real Money Gaming brands. It offers access to 3M+ independent apps and 2B daily active users, larger than TikTok and Instagram. The platform optimizes for CPA and ROAS, driving high-value depositors. It provides full transparency, brand safety, and supports user acquisition and re-engagement. Trusted by brands like DraftKings and Fanatics, it solves challenges of rising CAC and regulatory compliance.

Moloco is recognized as a Premier Partner by AppsFlyer for the third consecutive year, highlighting their joint commitment to advertisers. The partnership provides flexible measurement solutions, incrementality testing, and granular attribution controls. Moloco's experimentation platform enables A/B testing and structured experiments for actionable insights. This collaboration empowers data-driven marketing decisions and unlocks new growth opportunities.

Moloco is recognized as a top marketing platform in the 2025 Singular ROI Index for the second consecutive year across all eligible categories. The index ranks partners based on billions in ad spend and trillions of impressions. Moloco excels in gaming and non-gaming, on iOS and Android, and is part of the 'Golden 9' and 'Quadrant of Growth' (low cost, high revenue). The article highlights Moloco's ability to drive ROI beyond walled gardens, with coverage across regions and verticals alongside Meta, Google, Apple Ads, and TikTok.

With U.S. tariffs rising, advertisers demand certainty. Retail media networks (RMNs) can deliver outcomes like 400% ROAS, shifting from impressions to revenue. RMNs use first-party data and machine learning to optimize in real time, ensuring every ad dollar drives sales. Moloco’s platform enables outcome-based bidding at campaign and SKU levels, offering guaranteed returns. In uncertain economies, certainty is key, and RMNs are poised to thrive.

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.