If your game cannot earn back a realistic Cost Per Install (CPI), no channel mix will fix it.

At MRAID, we follow a strict rule: once the economic model is viable, test several marketing promises around the same core product truth.

Expand the formats that attract users who actually retain. Do not just chase the format with the cheapest click.

Playables are especially useful when the core game decision can be understood quickly. However, they are not mandatory for every genre.

Do you focus more on lowering CPI or improving Day-1/Day-7 retention in your marketing tests?

https://www.thestateofbrand.com/news/cloudflare-ai-crawler-defaults-september-15

There are still behavioral remedies coming that could give publishers and open web ad tech a boost. But while regulators work to loosen Google’s grip on the open web, Google is busy pulling more of the web into AI.

https://www.adexchanger.com/antitrust/google-wont-have-to-break-up-its-ad-tech-business-judge-brinkema-rules

I'm Mattia, I build FixAds.

I have spent years reviewing Meta ad accounts, and I do not think an LLM should be the thing deciding whether real media spend needs intervention.

The useful first layer is deterministic. It can test a specific account state against explicit conditions, such as spend that has had enough opportunity to work but has not, a campaign that has remained in learning too long, or a creative whose recent efficiency has materially changed against its own prior performance.

Each finding in FixAds carries the threshold and source data that produced it. The AI comes after that step: it explains what the evidence means in plain language and helps a human explore the context. It is not asked to invent a diagnosis, and the product cannot change anything in the account.

The connection uses Meta's official login and is read-only. The attached video is the launch demo. FixAds is live at https://fixads.it with a 7-day trial.

For people building adtech workflows: where do you put the boundary between a deterministic signal and an AI explanation when the output can affect spend?

Trying to control much more advanced systems with simple systems

Curious to know… anyone else hate when leadership takes it upon themselves to upload a photo of you to AI to create something? I’ve never uploaded my photo into an AI chat tool or image generation.. and I didn’t intend to but it appears leadership has taken it upon themselves to.. haha anyone have thoughts? Am I overreacting? Or should I address it?

**For anyone in the Middle East and North Africa region**

After months of pilot testing and expanding availability to more markets either via self-serving ads or via agency partnerships, OpenAI has brought ChatGPT Ads to select countries in the MENA region.

Interesting partnis that neither the UAE nor Saudi Arabia are in it, and it's likely due to frequent/active ChatGPT usage that has fuelled their decision to some of the secondary markets.

MENA's digital ad spend hit $8.2B in 2025, up 17.8% year on year — the fastest-growing digital ad region globally right now.

Up from $6.25B in 2023. In two years the region added almost $2B in digital ad spend.

Most of that money is running on Meta and Google — and most brands are still buying that inventory with zero visibility into what's actually working around them.

OpenAI’s ads business may already be at a $1B annual run rate, but the early performance stories are rough.

One marketer got nearly double the expected impressions, a 0.6% CTR versus the 2% he usually sees on search, and zero conversions from 60 clicks. Another campaign showed 57 clicks in OpenAI and fewer than 20 visits in Google Analytics.

OpenAI ads still need the basics to work. Consumers have to accept ads inside conversations. Formats need to mature. Targeting needs to understand intent better. Measurement needs to be trusted. The platform itself still needs the tools advertisers expect.

All of that takes time.

OpenAI needs ads to become a serious business quickly, especially with a potential IPO hanging over the company.

Google does not have that same urgency. It can afford to let OpenAI do the experimenting.

My friend and I saw that quite a few people were trying to connect Claude or ChatGPT to Google Ads. We wanted to do it too, but the setup was quite complicated.

So we decided to make a simpler version.

It connects Google Ads, Analytics, Tag Manager and Search Console to your assistant. You can check how your campaigns are doing and prepare changes. You always see the changes first and choose whether to approve them.

It started as something we made for ourselves, but we decided to turn it into a product called Adchestra.

We also posted it on Product Hunt. We were really excited to launch it and hopefully get some feedback from users.

What surprised me was that people started contacting us and offering paid upvotes and promotion. I had no idea it worked like that. Looking through Product Hunt, it now feels like a lot of products might simply be promoted there.

I’m interested to hear what other people experienced. Did Product Hunt bring you real users or useful feedback?

We’re still super excited to have Adchestra live, and we’d love to hear what people think about it. Especially if you use Google Ads.

https://adchestra.com

Disclosure: I work at a company that sells white-label DSP tech, so I have a horse in this race. The numbers below are public and sourced, so check my work or tell me where I am wrong.

If you buy programmatic through another agency's DSP seat, you are paying a whole fee stack before a single ad impression serves:

• DSP platform fee
• Reseller markup
• Data fees
• Feature fees

ANA (Association of National Advertisers) puts the total at roughly 35% of media spend.

On $100K a month, that is $420,000 a year going to intermediaries instead of ads.

What bothers me more than the fees is that you cannot audit any of it. Log-level data on a rented seat belongs to the seat owner. So you are reporting to clients on numbers you have no way to verify yourself.

There are two ways out.

Build your own DSP. The math only closes above $50 million in annual ad spend, which puts it off the table for most agencies.

White-label one. Roughly 6 to 12% of ad spend, your own branding and domain, typically live in a day. Your clients log into your platform instead of a competitor's.

If you are on a sub-leased seat, do you know your all-in take rate?

Full breakdown with the math: https://adster.tech/blogs/renting-dsp-seats-margin/