The old era is over.
Since 2025, the global mobile-ad landscape has undergone a structural shift. Under AI-driven algorithms, major ad platforms have moved from "tag matching" to "content understanding". The traditional two-tower model is now passé, replaced by interactive towers that semantically match audiences likely to perform interactive actions — in this context, creative becomes the new targeting.
Source：《Hierarchical Structured Neural Network: Efficient Retrieval Scaling for Large Scale Recommendation》
The Strategic Shift: AI vs. AI
Marketers now face a critical choice: continue inefficiently scaling volume, or adopt strategy-level AI tools to respond to algorithmic change and build reusable formulas. AppGrowing and Youdao Ads released AI vs. AI: Global Mobile Games & Apps Trends 2026 to help marketers answer:
- We systematically map the key global mobile-marketing changes in 2025 and explain how ad-platform AI is reshaping mobile-marketing fundamentals.
- Based on AppGrowing's and InfunEase's massive ad datasets and cases, this report analyzes how creative assets serve as "user-recognition codes" that ad platforms interpret, filter, and distribute. It also explains how KOL comment analysis can leverage agents to overcome efficiency bottlenecks.
- The report selects four leading game and non-game apps as case studies, detailing practical UA and influencer strategies.
Three key insights of 2026
- Clarity of content direction matters more than a single viral hit
Ad platforms now prioritize consistent content signals across entire accounts over individual viral creatives. Focused creative direction and unified messaging are becoming key to stable ad delivery.
Take Century Games' "Kingshot" as an example: its creatives did not frequently attempt wildly divergent directions but instead extended around the core gameplay and user "satisfiers" to form a clear, stable creative strategy.
- Strong emotional cues and clear identity in creatives let algorithms locate target users faster
The smoother the emotional expression and the clearer the identity cues in a creative, the easier the system can determine which player segment it targets.
Take NEXON's Maplestory: Idle RPG as an example: leveraging IP affinity and centering on the Idle RPG core selling points — "easy, automatic, high return" — the game successfully crafts emotional vectors such as "satisfying grind, casual relaxation, nostalgic sentiment" that algorithms can recognize, enabling precise delivery.
- AI-driven full‑chain intelligence solves KOL-marketing complexity and inefficiency
Early manual comment translation was slow and outcome-dependent on experience. Even after adding AI insights, multi-step, cross-platform workflows still undermined efficiency. Therefore, InfunEase defined a "full-funnel AI empowerment" technical direction.
Conclusion
Today, in an era where algorithms define distribution logic, only teams that treat AI as a strategic operating system can win the next phase of growth. We hope AI vs. AI: Global Mobile Games & Apps Trends 2026 will serve as your starting point to gain a deeper understanding of algorithms and craft effective strategies.
A special thank you to Gamelight for their invaluable contribution and expert insights on AI-driven rewarded user acquisition and long-term value prediction.
