Moloco on April 15, 2026, announced the launch of Moloco Ads for Performance CTV, an extension of its mobile performance advertising platform to connected television. The product applies the same compound AI system the company has built over more than a decade to CTV inventory, making real-time impression-level optimisation against specific marketing outcomes available on the living room screen. For an industry that has long struggled to make CTV behave like a performance channel rather than a brand awareness vehicle, the launch marks a notable technical step.

The announcement came via press release dated April 15, 2026, from Moloco, a company founded in 2013 that describes itself as an AI-native performance advertising business. Its technology reaches two billion consumers across more than two million mobile apps, according to the company.

What the product actually does

Moloco Ads for Performance CTV is not a repackaged brand campaign tool. According to the press release, every impression is optimised in real time against specific marketing outcomes - not after the fact, and not against demographic proxies. Attribution runs through the advertiser's mobile measurement partner (MMP) of choice. That means performance data flows back through whichever MMP an app marketer already uses - platforms such as Adjust, AppsFlyer, Branch, or Kochava - feeding the optimisation loop with the same signals the marketer trusts for their mobile campaigns.

This is a meaningful distinction. The majority of CTV advertising still uses traditional demographic targeting and measures performance only retrospectively. According to the press release, many existing CTV solutions "can feel like they're made for brand buyers and retrofitted for performance, optimising for reach and frequency." Moloco's approach builds in the performance architecture from the start rather than adding it on top of a reach-and-frequency system.

The product is built on three declared pillars. First, access to premium, brand-safe, household CTV inventory across a growing network of supply partners. Second, measurement transparency through full publisher-level reporting integrated with the buyer's preferred MMP. Third, independence - described as operating as an open platform that never favours its own inventory or audience data over what is best for the advertiser. The optimisation itself draws on Moloco's depth of mobile performance expertise, applied now to television screens.

Early performance data

According to the press release, early results show up to 1.5x higher return on investment on CTV than on mobile when campaigns run across both channels simultaneously. That figure, while preliminary, is notable. It suggests the CTV channel is not merely a complementary reach extension but can outperform mobile on a return basis for some app marketers.

A second data point concerns post-view conversion speed. According to the press release, approximately two-thirds of users who install an app after viewing a Moloco-delivered Performance CTV ad do so within six hours of exposure. The speed of that conversion window matters for attribution. In CTV environments where the path from ad exposure to install typically runs through a separate device, a tight conversion window reduces the ambiguity that normally complicates cross-device measurement.

Fanatics Betting and Gaming, which operates Fanatics Sportsbook, provided a use case in the release. Blair Hilton, Director of Performance Marketing at Fanatics Betting and Gaming, said the product was "a key component of our college basketball strategy for Fanatics Sportsbook this March," adding that "performance exceeded expectations and enabled us to reach a broader audience efficiently." The timing - March 2026, coinciding with the college basketball tournament - suggests the product was already live with select advertisers before the public announcement.

Why this matters for the CTV measurement gap

The broader CTV advertising market is large and growing. According to eMarketer estimates cited in the press release, global CTV ad spending currently stands at $40 billion to $45 billion and is projected to continue rising. Despite that scale, the channel has remained stubbornly difficult for performance marketers.

PPC Land has documented the measurement gap at length. The IAB's October 2025 report on Conversion APIs for CTVidentified measurement and attribution as top challenges for 73 percent of advertisers, and found that two-thirds of advertisers improved return on ad spend after implementing Conversion APIs. The report framed the absence of standardised outcome tracking as an existential risk: CTV platforms without proper conversion measurement "will lose performance budgets to more measurable channels." Moloco's MMP integration addresses exactly this problem for its advertiser base.

The IAB Tech Lab similarly identified six critical technical barriers preventing CTV from reaching its programmatic potential, among them missing universal conversion API standards and inadequate measurement frameworks. The absence of standardised creative IDs and inventory ownership clarity has forced many performance marketers to treat CTV as a brand channel by default rather than by choice. A platform built around MMP integration and publisher-level reporting sits squarely in the gap these reports have identified.

Programmatic buyers have become more explicit about these demands. A January 2026 survey from Proximic by Comscore, covering more than 200 industry decision-makers, found that 82 percent now consider AI-powered optimisation essential when evaluating partners. CTV had consolidated as programmatic advertising's primary growth engine, with 45 percent of marketers increasing programmatic CTV budgets by reallocating from linear television.

Moloco's AI architecture

The company describes its system as a "compound AI system developed over more than a decade." The phrase points to a layered architecture rather than a single model. In retail media contexts, Moloco executives have described the approachas a "tech first" perspective drawing from machine learning practices used at major technology companies, with real-time personalisation powered by transformer models.

For CTV, the core technical requirement is real-time bidding decisions against live streaming inventory - a latency-sensitive problem that differs structurally from mobile. CTV environments involve multiple devices, platforms, and ad servers with limited interoperability and restricted user identifiers. Reaching the two-billion consumer scale that Moloco's technology currently achieves in mobile is a longer-term prospect in television. However, the company's experience with probabilistic modelling and MMP signal integration from mobile gives it a head start on the feedback-loop architecture that CTV performance advertising requires.

A January 2026 report from Moloco and BCG, covered by PPC Land, surveyed 238 senior marketing leaders across 17 verticals and found that 72 percent prioritise AI-driven ad formats, while channels with direct engagement and first-party data access - including in-app marketing - demonstrate stronger positioning as AI reshapes discovery. The CTV launch extends that in-app logic to the television screen, where user attention is high but the feedback loop has historically been thin.

The competitive landscape

Moloco is entering a market already attracting significant investment from multiple directions. The CTV performance category has been active throughout 2025 and into 2026.

LG Ad Solutions launched its Agentiv AI platform in October 2025, introducing agentic capabilities for CTV campaign management and measurement. Magnite acquired streamr.ai in September 2025 to lower CTV creative and campaign setup barriers for small and medium-sized businesses. PubMatic and MNTN partnered in October 2025 to bring performance marketers into premium CTV inventory, generating a 10 percent publisher revenue uplift.

Ogury extended its persona-based advertising to CTV in February 2026, bringing a multi-dimensional audience targeting approach to a channel that has historically relied on genre and demographic categories. Smartly integrated with Amazon DSP in early March 2026 to bring AI-powered creative optimisation to streaming TV campaigns through Amazon's premium inventory.

Moloco's differentiation among these competitors lies primarily in its mobile heritage. Most CTV performance entrants approach the channel from a television or programmatic background. Moloco arrives from mobile app marketing, where MMP-based attribution, real-time bidding at scale, and outcome-focused optimisation have been standard practice for years. The argument is that the technical DNA is better suited to genuine performance advertising on television than retrofitted brand solutions.

Samsung's cloud gaming platform expanded to Europe in August 2025 with AI-powered advertising optimisation through a Moloco partnership, demonstrating that Moloco's technology had already found pathways into screen-based environments beyond mobile apps before this CTV launch. The December 2025 AppsFlyer Performance Index, covered by PPC Land, ranked Moloco fourth globally in mobile app media power, with particular strength in RPG and Casino gaming categories and regional leadership positions in Japan and Korea.

Moloco's broader positioning

According to the press release, Moloco's solutions reach over 200 countries and territories. The company operates offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Korea, China, India, Japan, and Singapore. Its two business lines are Moloco Ads, the mobile performance advertising platform, and Moloco Commerce Media, an AI-native retail media solution enabling retailers and marketplaces to build advertising businesses.

The company frames the CTV launch explicitly in terms of convergence. As mobile, connected TV, and retail media continue to converge - three channels that have historically operated with separate technology stacks, measurement systems, and buying processes - Moloco positions itself as a single AI platform capable of operating across all three. That is the commercial logic behind extending mobile performance infrastructure to the television screen rather than building a separate CTV product.

Sunil Rayan, Chief Business Officer and General Manager of Moloco Ads, said in the press release that CTV "represents one of the biggest untapped opportunities for app marketers today" and that Performance CTV brings "the measurability and precision that app marketers expect from mobile to the world of television." The claim of bringing genuine mobile-grade performance to CTV is central to the product's positioning. Whether the early ROI figures hold as the platform scales beyond initial advertiser relationships will be the key test for that claim.

Technical infrastructure and MMP integration

The MMP integration is worth examining in technical detail. Mobile measurement partners sit between the advertiser and the advertising platform, providing independent attribution for installs, in-app events, and user-level metrics. In mobile, they are the standard of record. In CTV, their role has been limited because the path from ad exposure to app install crosses device boundaries - a user sees an ad on a television set and installs the app on a phone or tablet.

Moloco's system routes attribution through the advertiser's existing MMP, meaning the CTV campaign data appears in the same dashboard alongside mobile campaign data. Publisher-level reporting provides granularity on which streaming supply sources are driving performance, rather than aggregating all CTV inventory into a single opaque bucket. This level of transparency has been a consistent demand from performance marketers moving budget into CTV, and one that many existing CTV platforms have not provided.

The product does not specify which MMPs are supported at launch, but the press release states integration runs "through the advertiser's mobile measurement partner of choice." For app marketers already working with major MMP platforms, that framing implies compatibility without requiring a new measurement setup - a practical consideration for teams that have invested in their existing attribution infrastructure.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Moloco, an AI-native performance advertising company founded in 2013, with offices across the US, UK, Germany, Korea, China, India, Japan, and Singapore.

What: The launch of Moloco Ads for Performance CTV - a connected television advertising product that applies the company's mobile AI optimisation system to CTV inventory, with real-time impression-level bidding, attribution through the advertiser's MMP of choice, and full publisher-level reporting. Early results show up to 1.5x higher ROI on CTV than mobile in cross-channel campaigns, with approximately two-thirds of resulting installs occurring within six hours of ad exposure.

When: Announced on April 15, 2026.

Where: The product is available globally, with Moloco operating across more than 200 countries and territories.

Why: CTV ad spending reached an estimated $40 billion to $45 billion globally, according to eMarketer, yet most CTV platforms still rely on demographic targeting and retrospective measurement. App marketers have lacked a CTV solution built around the MMP-based attribution and real-time outcome optimisation they use in mobile. Moloco's launch attempts to close that gap by extending its mobile performance infrastructure to the living room screen, at a time when performance advertisers are increasingly reallocating budgets from linear television and mobile toward CTV.

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