AppLovin

Deciding What AI Should Never Control in Advertising

Eric Picard of Fluency argues that while LLMs and AI agents will become part of advertising workflows, the industry must clearly define what parts of campaign operations AI must never control. He warns that LLMs are probabilistic and therefore unsuitable for making irreversible budgetary or execution decisions without human-in-the-loop governance. Picard outlines three lessons from running automated advertising at scale: platform APIs do not teach operational wisdom, governance must be encoded into automation from the start, and the most valuable automation scales a buyer’s strategic thinking while keeping deterministic execution for money-moving systems.

Wall Street’s Tough Take on Ad Tech Earnings

Publicly traded ad tech companies reported mixed Q2 results but faced sharp negative investor reactions, highlighting Wall Street’s skepticism about their ability to compete with Big Tech. AppLovin, The Trade Desk, Criteo, Taboola and Teads all saw sizable share-price drops after earnings despite some revenue growth, while PubMatic, Magnite and Zeta Global posted positive stock moves. Analysts and investors cited the growing share of ad spend going to Meta, Amazon and Google, rising expectations around AI-driven performance, and a preference from marketers for scale and convenience over best-of-breed stacks. The quarter also accelerated consolidation and take-private activity, including Nielsen’s agreed $2.15 billion purchase of DoubleVerify and Novacap’s $1.9 billion take-private of Integral Ad Science. Observers say measurement vendors may reposition toward multi-signal activation and omni-channel measurement to regain investor appeal.

Liftoff Says It's More Than A Gaming Company

Liftoff, a mobile app marketing and performance platform, held its first earnings call as a public company where CEO Jeremy Bondy emphasized that the business is no longer primarily a gaming play. Bondy said more than half of Liftoff’s demand now comes from non-gaming advertisers (finance, travel, shopping, productivity, prediction apps) and cited a third-party in-app advertising market projection of $136 billion by 2030 from the company’s S-1. Liftoff reported Q2 revenue of $220 million, up 35% year-over-year and marking its eleventh consecutive quarter of revenue growth. Bondy highlighted Liftoff’s supply-side technology (SSP/SDK) and its AI-powered optimization platform, Cortex, as central to scaling non-gaming performance marketing. The stock dipped a little over 5% in after-hours trading following the results.