Mobile ad technology company AppLovin announced Tuesday that its self-service advertising platform, AppLovin Ads, is now generally available and open to all advertisers after a months-long beta.
The platform is powered by Axon, the company’s AI recommendation system.
In a blog post, CEO and co-founder Adam Foroughi celebrated the launch — “14 years in the making” — and outlined AppLovin Ads’ features. He also reiterated the company’s longstanding performance marketing philosophy:
- “We don’t do brand marketing. Every advertiser on the platform buys based on measurable performance.”
Read: AppLovin Ads is now open to all advertisers (June 23) – CEO Adam Foroughi on AppLovin’s blog
The interview below offers a window into how AppLovin views AI, automation, recommendation systems and the future of performance marketing.
AppLovin Senior Director of Consumer Sam Appelbaum answered a selection of questions from tipsheet via email.
tipsheet: To date, AppLovin has primarily served highly-sophisticated performance marketers, particularly in gaming. With the launch of the self-serve AppLovin Ads platform, you’re now inviting a much broader set of advertisers. How do you think about that transition?
Sam Appelbaum: We’ve always believed in underdogs. The businesses that are hungry, building something real, and just need the right engine behind them. We proved that model in gaming. The big publishers were skeptical of us early on, so we focused on indie studios. Those small teams grew into gaming companies worth nine and ten figures.
Now we’re doing the same thing for consumer brands. Take Plateful, an Israeli cookware brand that came to us doing $4 million a year in revenue. Within a year, they were at $16 million of revenue, with the majority of their spend on AppLovin. This year, they’re on pace for $80 million.
We want to get every advertiser in the world on AppLovin so they can grow in ways they never thought possible. A big part of that was making it fast to get started. We’re close to one-click campaign and ad creation, meaning any business can be up and running in minutes, no creative team required. Tools like that used to be reserved for brands with massive budgets and dedicated user acquisition teams. We’ve changed that.
On that note, is there an AppLovin Ads sweet spot among marketers: gaming, ecommerce or another category entirely?
We’ve been working with gaming studios for years, and most of the big ones are already on the platform. The frontier right now is the consumer vertical, which goes beyond just e-commerce. It’s any business that can set a performance target and prove ROI. And within that, there isn’t one category we’re focused on. It’s performance. An advertiser comes to the platform, sees they’re making money, and puts in more money. Right now, we’re seeing that work for physical goods brands, apps, and increasingly lead-gen businesses like auto insurance, health insurance, and home services. There’s a lot of runway for brands that haven’t tried us yet.
CEO Adam Foroughi has described advertising on AppLovin as “buying revenue.” Does that principle still hold as AppLovin and its Axon AI engine open to a much broader set of advertisers through AppLovin Ads?
That’s the whole premise of AppLovin Ads. You spend a dollar, you acquire a customer, and you make more than a dollar back over that customer’s lifetime. That’s what advertisers on AppLovin have always expected, and it’s what the self-serve platform is built around.
What makes that possible at scale isn’t the advertiser’s sophistication, it’s Axon, our AI engine. Any business can set a performance target, whether that’s a ROAS goal, a cost per purchase, or cost per lead, and the model goes and hits it efficiently. You don’t need years of performance marketing experience to get results. The expertise is in the platform, and that’s what opens this up to a much broader set of businesses.
As you open the platform to everyone, what should marketers continue to control themselves and what should they increasingly trust AppLovin Ads to do on their behalf?
The strategic layer belongs to the advertiser: the objective, the budget, the growth goals. No algorithm should be making those calls.
Everything after that, AppLovin handles. Advertisers should trust the system because it’s built around one outcome: generating revenue that exceeds advertising cost. If that stops happening, spend stops. AppLovin isn’t optimized for budgets or reach. It’s optimized for advertiser return. A marketer trying to manually override that is working against themselves.
Where advertisers really move the needle is creative. Every ad is three screens: a fullscreen video, an interactive end card, and for ecommerce brands, a dynamic product ad that serves personalized product recommendations to each user. Each screen is its own conversion lever.
The platform learns from creative diversity, so the more variety an advertiser feeds it, the better it performs. The brands seeing the strongest results aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones testing the most.
A recent blog post you published argues that silos hold back performance. How is AppLovin Ads an opportunity for marketers to break down those silos?
The silos I describe in the post (finance, leadership, creative) all share a common root: they were built around channels that reward opacity. When you can’t directly connect spend to outcomes, you fill that gap with proxies. Brand lift studies. Fixed budget cycles. Blended ROAS benchmarks. Those become the language the organization speaks, and eventually they become structural.
AppLovin Ads makes the cost of those silos visible fast. Finance can evaluate marginal return in near real time instead of waiting on monthly budget cycles. Leadership can compare new channel performance on a like-for-like basis rather than blended averages. And creative gets direct feedback on what’s working, which is what you need to get them thinking like media buyers rather than brand custodians.
The platform doesn’t dissolve silos on its own. The organizational work still has to happen. But it does surface the cost of those silos faster than most channels do. For brands willing to act on that signal, it can be the forcing function for conversations that were long overdue.
AppLovin has discussed its ability to automate the creation of ad creative itself. How much of that capability is available through the new self-serve platform today, and where do you see it going?
The interactive end card generator is live and broadly adopted. That matters because the interactive is where most of the engagement happens on our ad unit. It’s where clicks occur. Automating that removed a real bottleneck, especially for non-gaming advertisers who had no obvious template for the format. About 80% of our top advertisers are currently using interactives.
The bigger unlock is video. Advertisers come to the platform with social assets designed for a three-second hook, and our format is up to 60 seconds in a captive gaming environment. Those are different creative briefs. But existing assets are a legitimate starting point. They get a campaign live and give Axon something to learn from. From there, advertisers iterate into the format. The AI-generated video we’re testing accelerates that process significantly, producing assets that genuinely compete with human-produced work at a fraction of the cost.
Where it goes from here is full creative automation across the entire ad unit, video, interactive, and dynamic product catalog, generated automatically from a brand’s existing assets and product feed. Any business, regardless of size or resources, should be able to show up on AppLovin and compete effectively.
As advertiser demand expands through self-serve, how are you thinking about supply growth and marketplace balance?
Supply isn’t a constraint today. We have over a billion daily active users and we’re not close to fully monetizing the inventory we have. As the model improves and advertiser density grows, conversion rate per impression goes up and the same supply becomes more valuable. So the first job is to increase demand density, not chasing supply volume.
That said, there are real supply expansion opportunities in front of us. We’re seeing in-app purchase -only games shift to hybrid monetization. Most of the big games still don’t run ads. As we bring in more consumer advertisers , those games no longer worry about showing competitive gaming ads to their players. That unlocks a large pool of supply.
Beyond gaming, we’re thinking about the broader app ecosystem where our advertiser demand would lift CPMs meaningfully. More supply, better monetized, more value for everyone on the platform.
The way we think about it, supply and demand compound together. As millions of businesses come onto the platform, the conditions improve for more publishers to monetize. The two grow each other.
AppLovin acquired Wurl in 2022 to extend its reach into connected TV. How do you see connected TV fitting into the long-term vision for AppLovin Ads?
Television is one of the most under-monetized channels because there’s no true performance model for CTV advertising. We think that should change. It’s a longer-term opportunity for us, and we’re building toward it deliberately, while staying focused on what’s in front of us right now.
Stepping back, generative AI has captured most of the industry’s attention, but recommendation systems sit at the core of most advertising platforms, including AppLovin’s. How does AppLovin think about the relationship between generative AI and recommendation systems, and where do you see each creating the most value for advertisers?
These are different tools doing fundamentally different jobs. Generative AI creates content – it makes the ad. Recommendation systems help determine which products, content and experiences consumers discover.
Axon is our AI recommendation system, the engine that powers every campaign on the AppLovin Ads platform. It continuously improves as we add more advertisers, more data, and release better model versions. That compounding effect is what drives growth: a better model means better returns for advertisers, which means they scale their spend, which feeds more data back into the system.
Where generative AI creates real value for advertisers is in collapsing the creative bottleneck. We’ve used it to automate interactive end cards and video production, removing a barrier that was keeping smaller advertisers off the platform.
As recommendation systems become more effective at connecting businesses with the right audiences, both tools will create more value for advertisers but the recommendation system is what determines whether your dollar turns into profit.
Looking three to five years ahead, how does AppLovin think performance marketing will evolve as AI becomes more capable?
The gap between advertiser intent and advertiser outcome keeps shrinking. You tell the platform what you want – a profit target, a cost per customer, a lead value – and the system handles everything else.
We’ve opened early access to our AppLovin Ads MCP, letting advertisers create campaigns, upload creatives, and adjust budgets directly from Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any other MCP-compatible tool. The goal is a system where a business can onboard, generate high-performing ads and scale profitably without ever needing to talk to a human.
What gets more interesting over the next few years is what happens as more surfaces become measurable. Mobile works because the feedback loop is fast and traceable. As AI gets better at incrementality measurement, the performance model expands into channels that have historically been brand-only territory.
Ten years ago, a small business might spend its whole advertising budget on a billboard and hope the right person drove by. Today, that same business can set a profit target and reach the right consumer at the right moment. In three to five years, our goal is simple: any business in the world, whether it’s a local plumber, a pizza shop, or an app developer, should be able to grow with AppLovin. No expertise required. No gatekeeping. Just results.