Programmatic advertising is moving beyond the traditional concentration of mobile growth budgets on Meta, Google and TikTok, as performance marketers look for additional sources of measurable customer acquisition. Moloco has launched its Agency Partner Program with a small founding group of agencies, naming Admiral Media among its initial partners. The relationship gives Admiral Media closer access to Moloco’s machine-learning-driven advertising platform as the ad-tech company expands from mobile app advertising into connected TV and the broader open internet.

The performance advertising market has spent years building around a relatively small number of dominant platforms.

For app developers, gaming companies and ecommerce brands, Meta, Google and TikTok remain major destinations for user acquisition. But rising acquisition costs and increasing pressure to find incremental audiences are pushing agencies and advertisers to look beyond those established channels.

That is the market context behind Moloco’s Agency Partner Program, a new initiative designed to deepen collaboration between the performance ad-tech company and selected advertising agencies.

Admiral Media has been named one of the program’s founding partners.

The partnership is notable less for the title itself than for where Moloco is taking its advertising platform. The company built its reputation around machine-learning-powered programmatic advertising for mobile applications and is now expanding into connected TV (CTV), the open internet and broader digital advertising environments.

For agencies managing performance campaigns across multiple channels, that expansion could create another route to incremental reach without abandoning measurable acquisition objectives.

From mobile advertising to broader programmatic buying

Moloco’s technology uses machine learning to automate elements of programmatic media buying and identify users who are likely to deliver value to advertisers.

The company’s initial focus was mobile app advertising, where user acquisition teams have long faced the challenge of finding high-value users at sustainable costs.

The model is increasingly being applied beyond mobile.

CTV represents a particularly important expansion because television advertising has historically been associated with brand awareness rather than the granular performance measurement expected by digital acquisition teams.

The convergence of CTV and performance advertising could change that dynamic.

For agencies, the appeal is straightforward: advertisers can potentially extend performance-oriented strategies into additional inventory while maintaining a focus on measurable outcomes.

Why Admiral Media was selected

Admiral Media’s appointment as a founding partner reflects its existing relationship with Moloco and its broader performance marketing activity.

The agency says it has managed more than €500 million in advertising spend for more than 150 app, game and ecommerce brands.

It also maintains partner relationships with other major advertising platforms, including Snapchat, giving its teams experience operating across multiple digital acquisition channels.

Admiral Media has also developed an internal AI Creative Factory, which the company says has helped clients achieve improvements of up to 55% in click-through rate, 45% in return on ad spend and an 18% reduction in customer acquisition cost.

Those figures are company-reported performance claims rather than independent industry benchmarks, but they illustrate the broader direction of performance advertising: media buying and creative optimization are increasingly being treated as interconnected machine-learning problems.

AI is changing both sides of the advertising equation

Programmatic advertising has relied on automation for years.

The newer shift is the growing use of AI and machine learning to determine not only where advertisements should appear, but which users, creative variations and signals are most likely to produce valuable outcomes.

That creates a more complicated technology stack for advertisers.

A modern performance campaign can involve demand-side platforms, mobile measurement partners, customer data, creative-generation systems, attribution tools and analytics platforms. Agencies increasingly need to understand how those systems interact rather than optimizing each component separately.

Moloco’s machine-learning approach sits primarily on the media-buying side of that equation, while Admiral Media’s AI Creative Factory addresses creative production and optimization.

The combination points toward a broader performance marketing model in which media, creative and measurement become increasingly algorithmic.

The importance of incremental reach

For advertisers, however, the central question remains relatively simple: does another platform generate customers they would not otherwise have acquired?

Incrementality has become increasingly important as advertisers diversify beyond major walled gardens.

Finding users outside Meta, Google and TikTok can provide additional scale, but only if those users represent genuine incremental value rather than audiences that would have converted through another channel anyway.

That makes measurement and attribution particularly important.

A DSP or programmatic platform can provide access to additional inventory, but agencies still need to determine whether that inventory produces profitable customers, improves return on ad spend or reduces acquisition costs.

This is where agency expertise can become valuable.

An experienced performance agency can compare results across platforms, allocate budgets dynamically and evaluate whether a new source of inventory is actually expanding the advertiser’s addressable audience.

CTV could become the next testing ground

Moloco’s move into CTV is especially relevant to agencies working with app and ecommerce advertisers.

CTV offers premium video inventory and increasingly sophisticated audience targeting, but advertisers have historically had fewer direct-response capabilities than they enjoy in mobile and web advertising.

As measurement infrastructure improves, CTV is becoming more attractive to performance marketers.

Moloco’s expansion suggests the company sees an opportunity to bring its machine-learning approach into that environment.

For Admiral Media, being part of the founding agency group could give its clients earlier access to evolving capabilities as Moloco expands its platform.

“Moloco has become an important part of our growth strategy for clients scaling beyond traditional acquisition channels,” said Andre Kempe, Founder and CEO of Admiral Media.

The agency views the partnership as an opportunity to work more closely with Moloco as the platform expands into CTV and the open internet.

What the partnership means for advertisers

For apps, games and ecommerce companies, the practical value of the partnership will ultimately depend on campaign performance rather than partner status.

The potential benefit is access to another performance advertising channel, combined with agency expertise in campaign strategy and optimization.

Advertisers evaluating such a platform should consider several factors:

• Incrementality: Are campaigns reaching genuinely new users?
• Measurement: Can conversions and downstream value be attributed reliably?
• Inventory quality: Where are advertisements appearing?
• Creative performance: Can campaigns adapt creative to audience signals?
• Scale: Can the platform expand beyond mobile without sacrificing performance?
• Economics: Does incremental reach produce profitable customers?

These questions are becoming increasingly important as programmatic advertising expands across mobile, web, CTV and other connected environments.

A broader shift in performance advertising

Moloco’s agency program arrives at a time when performance marketing is becoming less dependent on any single acquisition channel.

The next phase of programmatic advertising is likely to be defined by cross-channel reach, machine-learning optimization and increasingly sophisticated measurement.

For agencies, that means platform relationships are becoming more strategic. Rather than simply buying media, agencies are expected to understand algorithms, creative systems, attribution and audience data.

For advertisers, the objective is equally clear: find additional sources of high-value customers without sacrificing the measurement discipline that made digital performance advertising attractive in the first place.

Admiral Media’s position as a founding partner gives it a closer relationship with Moloco as that transition develops. Whether the partnership ultimately delivers meaningful incremental growth for clients will depend on how effectively the two companies translate machine-learning-powered buying into measurable business outcomes.

Market Landscape

The programmatic advertising ecosystem is becoming increasingly fragmented beyond the largest digital platforms.

Demand-side platforms, retail media networks, CTV platforms and open-web exchanges are competing for performance budgets as advertisers seek incremental reach and alternatives to traditional walled gardens.

AI is accelerating that shift by allowing platforms to process larger volumes of behavioral, contextual and conversion data when optimizing campaigns.

At the same time, advertisers face a measurement challenge: more channels mean more potential duplication, attribution complexity and inconsistent performance signals.

The strategic advantage for agencies will therefore increasingly come from the ability to connect media buying, creative optimization and measurement rather than treating them as separate functions.

Moloco’s expansion into CTV and the open internet fits directly into this broader evolution.

Top Insights

• Moloco has named Admiral Media a founding Agency Partner, strengthening collaboration around machine-learning-powered programmatic advertising for performance-focused advertisers.
• The partnership gives apps, games and ecommerce brands another potential acquisition channel beyond Meta, Google and TikTok’s established advertising ecosystems.
• Moloco’s expansion from mobile into CTV and open-web advertising reflects broader convergence between programmatic buying and performance marketing.
• Admiral Media’s AI Creative Factory adds machine-learning-driven creative optimization to the agency’s broader media buying and performance marketing capabilities.
• Advertisers will ultimately judge the partnership on incremental reach, attribution quality, customer acquisition economics and measurable return on advertising investment.

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