Moloco launches an agency partner program, in part to expand beyond mobile programmatic. As other DSPs move their business closer to clients, inadvertently or consciously avoiding agencies as middlemen, one is looking to recruit more agencies to its cause as it seeks to expand its client base, as well as help them get closer to delivering on outcomes. Although not exactly a pure DSP, performance ad-tech firm Moloco, which specializes in mobile advertising but is expanding beyond into CTV and other media realms, is launching an agency partner program that involves a handful of agencies at the outset, Digiday has learned. Among the media agencies Moloco is launching the program with are Dentsu UK & Ireland, PMG, M+C Saatchi Performance, SplitMetrics, RocketLab, Admiral Media, and others, totaling about a dozen. Sunil Rayan, Moloco's chief business officer, explained that the aim to get closer with media agencies is threefold: One, to educate them on how to talk about AI advertising and how it relates to outcomes; two, how performance marketing and AI overlap, mainly from an outcome metrics POV; and three, to scale more through partners. Rayan, who's an ex-McKinsey and Google exec, said some of the partner agencies, including PMG, helped to build out three pillars on which the agency partner program is based. "We actually worked with the partners to co-design it on what matters to them and what matters to us," he said. They include co-selling and pitching jointly; co-building the program; and sharing case studies that he said put the agency front and center. "It sets up these agencies to feel like they're core part of the of the value," added Rayan. One goal of Moloco in creating the program is to expand beyond the mobile and app-advertising space and into newer ad opportunities including CTV and streaming. That's in part where PMG came into play. Mary O'Brien, who heads programmatic at the independent media agency, explained that the agency has enjoyed "exponential growth" in working with Moloco's mobile programmatic operation. "We've had channels that have been just like lower-funnel performance drivers, like a Google or social platforms that do really well on some of those more app-based KPIs," said O'Brien. "But I think for programmatic we just hadn't quite unlocked what could drive really efficient returns. Moloco was a partner that we tested and just saw amazing success from." That success drove the agency to work with Moloco into expanding into the CTV space, she added. "CTV also being an app-based environment, there was this hypothesis that could we translate some of the performance we saw on mobile into the CTV ecosystem," said O'Brien. "So we were an alpha partner within Moloco's performance CTV product. And we've seen significant growth in some of the early tests we saw of that product. It's just been a overall like growth channel for our partnership." And where exactly does the AI part of it fit in? The core framework, as Rayan dubbed it, starts by filtering ad requests to sift out fraud, then looks to match the right audience. The next step applies an ad recommendation algorithm that seeks the highest probability to convert, sets a price level, and then bids. If accepted, the AI assesses the data for attribution ability to determine whether or not to bid again. Buy expanding into the performance CTV space, does the DSP plan to take more of a chunk out of the big boys of that space, be it The Trade Desk, Amazon or Google? Rayan sidestepped the question by pointing to what he believes Moloco does best. "There's always an optimal curve in every single platform, and we just tell customers, 'Okay, you figure out what's the best incremental dollar to spend over and above the wall gardens'," he said. "It could be sometimes in wall gardens, or sometimes outside of wall gardens. We believe the open app economy and open CTV economy has a lot of user retention, and it's an under monetized asset. So as a result, your incremental dollars will probably be better spent in platforms that can actually generate the value for you."

Kerry Flynn / Axios: Sources: marketing tech startup AppsFlyer raised a $1B Series E at a $2.7B post-money valuation; Moloco, Google, Meta, and Unity acquire minority stakes