Yesterday, Tencent, owner of WeChat, showed that AI and advertising is alive and well in China, saying its Marketing Services revenue increased 22% year-over-year to RMB43.6 billion (~$6.4 billion) in Q2.
The company said growth was supported by improvements to its AI-driven ad recommendation model and to AIM+ (AI Marketing Plus), its automated campaign management system.
Unity offered an even more explicit connection between AI performance and its Q2 financial results reported last week. “Strategic Grow” ad revenue increased 63% to $329 million, driven by momentum at Vector, its AI-powered ad system.
On the earnings call, Unity CEO Matt Bromberg said Vector grew 23% quarter-over-quarter and is now at “substantially over $1 billion in annual run rate.”
During Q2, Unity began feeding signals from its runtime, which reaches roughly 3 billion players each month, directly into Vector’s AI models.
Bromberg described that data as a potential strategic advantage:
“If you’re Meta, you own your apps. If you’re us, you have access to the 3 billion people playing a made-with-Unity game, and that’s going to put us in a really good spot over the long term. We began implementing signals from the runtime into Vector towards the end of the second quarter.”
Success inspires spend: “When our customers are seeing return, they’re spending more with us, and our revenue goes up,” Bromberg said.
Read:
- Tencent Announces 2026 Second Quarter Results (August 12) – Tencent (PDF)
- Unity Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results (August 6) – Unity (PDF)
From tipsheet: Before AI creates entirely new advertising formats, it is improving the economics of the existing advertising machine. Better signals can improve AI models, better models can make better advertising decisions and better decisions can translate into better advertiser outcomes and more spend.
Related: Viant’s Q2 revenue grows 34% to $104 million including impressive CTV growth (August 10) – Viant (PDF)
MEASUREMENT
Making measurement faster
Incrementality testing has a cold-start problem. Advertisers increasingly rely on causal measurement to understand the incremental return on ad spend, but new products, markets and KPIs lack the historical data typically needed to design an experiment.
Haus is introducing ColdStart to address that gap.
The product borrows historical data from comparable KPIs to estimate geographic patterns and noise, allowing Haus to design an incrementality experiment without waiting for history to accumulate around the new KPI.
Once the experiment begins, measurement switches to the actual KPI. Haus gives the example of a movie studio launching a new film: historical ticket sales from comparable releases can be used to design the experiment before the new movie has generated sales history of its own.
Read: Measuring Impact from Day One: How to Measure Incrementality Without Historical Data (August 7) – Haus
From tipsheet: Speed the measurement, speed the loop. The faster an advertiser can establish whether spending caused an incremental outcome, the faster it can learn and make the next capital-allocation decision. ColdStart attacks one source of latency by moving causal measurement closer to the initial investment.
COMMERCE MEDIA
Why we Vibe-d
John Furner, President and CEO, Walmart on LinkedIn Tuesday:
“…People are discovering and shopping in more places, and businesses need better ways to connect with them along the way.
That’s why we acquired Vibe[dot]co. They’ve done a great job of building a platform that makes streaming TV advertising simpler and more accessible for businesses of all sizes. Now that they’re part of Walmart, we can build on what they’ve created with Walmart Connect and help more businesses reach customers and better understand what’s working.”
From tipsheet: Retail media is moving upstream into media decisioning. Walmart already has the downstream commerce signal. Vibe gives it another place to make and optimize the upstream media decision.
Related: Opinion: “Walmart’s Wall: Will The Vibe Deal Make It Meta, Or Another AOL?” (August 12) – TJ Hunter, CMO, Keynes on AdExchanger
CONNECTED TV
Infinite supply? Concentrate the economics
YouTube is making it harder for new creators to qualify for ad and Premium revenue sharing.
Beginning February 1, 2027, new creators applying to the YouTube Partner Program will need 1,000 subscribers plus either 8,000 qualified watch hours over the previous year or 20 million qualified Shorts views over 90 days, double the current watch-hour and Shorts requirements.
Read: New opportunities to earn and changes to the YouTube Partner Program (August 10) – YouTube
Independent analyst Eric Seufert sees the change as part of a broader convergence between YouTube and streaming services: “So the two categories are converging from opposite directions: YouTube is professionalizing its monetized creator base as the largest SVOD services expand down the monetization ladder toward free, ad-supported distribution.”
Read: The golden age of YouTube monetization has passed (August 11) – Mobile Dev Memo (subscription)
YouTube CEO Neal Mohan offered a complementary signal this week on LinkedIn, describing the design principles guiding the company as it simplifies and declutters the service. Among them: “Make content the star” and “Prioritize relevance ruthlessly.” Read more. (August 11)
From tipsheet: YouTube doesn’t have to shrink its effectively infinite supply of content to become more like programmed television. Its recommendation system can concentrate attention and economics around a smaller portion of that supply, increasingly performing the programming function that a television network’s schedule once did. Infinite supply, concentrated economics.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- In-region inference, open models, and new European infrastructure for sovereign AI (August 12) – Mistral AI
- From assistance to execution: How enterprises put AI to work (August 12) – OpenAI
- Introducing Grok 4.6 (August 12) – SpaceX
TECH
Opinions
- “All Ad Agents Are Not Created Equal” (August 12) – Adam Epstein, CEO, Gigi on Gigi’s blog
- Interview: “Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk: ‘The ad network is going to be the story over the next two years.’” – The Trade Desk’s The Current
MORE
- Reddit expands its partner ecosystem with Skai and Mediaocean’s Innovid (August 11) – Reddit
- Tubi Media Group Partners with Gracenote to Unlock Additional Value in Content Discovery and Programmatic CTV Advertising (August 12) – press release
- Yahoo Adds Real-Time Automated Ad Placement Options (August 12) – MediaPost
- OpenAI gives advertisers more ways to measure ChatGPT ads (August 11) – Ad Age (subscription)
- Prebid[dot]js third-party plugin for Chrome DevTools MCP – GitHub