If you’re a mobile platform with access to a vast amount of gaming data, well, then it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that you’re gonna launch an AI-powered ad platform.
AppLovin has Axon and now Unity has Vector AI, which was made generally available to all Unity advertisers and developers on Wednesday, roughly three months ahead of schedule. Unity announced the rollout during the company’s earnings call Wednesday morning.
Vector is the successor to Audience Pinpointer, an ad network Unity developed in-house and released in 2021 that uses machine learning to evaluate real-time in-app behavior to determine which bids are most likely to generate the best ad performance.
All of the Android and iOS traffic that previously ran through Unity’s ad network is now running on Vector, which, according to Felix Thé, Unity’s SVP of product and engineering, is “more than an ad network.”
“We rebuilt the prior version from the ground up,” Thé said. “Our goal is to make sure we’re always cognizant of the latest and greatest machine learning trends, because the innovation is pretty fast in our space.”
Don’t hate the player (or the game)
A rebuild was also necessary, however, because the prior version needed a little love.
Back in 2022, Unity had what it referred to as “issues” with Audience Pinpointer when it mistakenly ingested inaccurate data from a large customer, which corrupted Unity’s training data and messed with the tool’s performance.
Vector AI is a different animal.
It’s a system designed to improve the effectiveness of Unity’s ad network by using self-learning models that analyze large data sets from across the Unity ecosystem, Thé said.
There are two main components of AI and machine learning, he explained. One is the model itself, and the other is the data used to train the model.
Unity is in a unique position, Thé said, because beyond monetization tools it also has a very popular platform that developers use to create games, which is a rich source of player engagement data.
“There’s a huge opportunity for us to work with developers to unlock further insights about players and games,” Thé said.
Unity’s game plan
Vector ingests information from across Unity’s ecosystem about everything from how much time people spend in a game, how many levels they complete, the features they interact with and other in-game behavior to device information and signals related to retention and churn.
The system uses an adaptive model to learn on its own and improve as it gets more information about what makes an ad effective with a certain audience.
“The best way to think about the self-learning aspect is that the model has the ability to basically decide how much of the new information it wants to learn, how much it wants to reject and how much of the old information it wants to preserve,” Thé said.
For example, say there’s a sudden surge in traffic for an advertiser in a certain region or in a particular game and the uptick feels anomalous compared with typical traffic patterns. Before “deciding” to learn from this data, the model will automatically isolate it first to see if the pattern repeats itself or is also being observed in other segments of Unity’s traffic.
Outlier data is quickly discarded. But if what appears to be an anomaly turns out to be a trend, the system figures that and starts to learn.
“At any given time, we’re handling billions of requests and we have millions to choose from, which is a pretty complex combination problem,” Thé said. “What we’re offering our customer is the best set of decision-making to match a user with an ad that will give them the best bang for their buck.”
French game developer Voodoo, which owns BeReal, tested Vector while it was in beta and saw an improvement in return on ad spend for in-app purchases across iOS and Android. Voodoo has also been able to keep growing its number of new users without the cost going up too much or quality going down.
“We were able to boost our ad spend thanks to the increased efficiency and returns,” said Oğuz Ayar, the studio’s lead user acquisition manager.
Playing the long game
Which is all well and good. But what about the reporting?
AI-powered ad platforms have a tendency to be black boxes that make it hard for advertisers to understand how or why decisions are being made.
According to Thé, Vector provides transparency on how campaigns perform, including which geographies and cohorts are driving results. But the point of an AI-powered system is to just let it cook (as the kids say).
“The nature of machine learning and AI models is that you don’t typically design the system with interventions or overrides,” Thé said. “The reporting itself is transparent, but the product is meant to be used in an automated way.”
Next up, Unity is planning to improve its model and strike partnerships with game developers for access to additional data and other inputs that will help improve performance and user acquisition. This is only Vector 1.0, Thé said.
“What we’re aiming to do with Vector is to reestablish our commitment to the industry at large,” he said, “and we’re making significant progress on it.”
