On December 12th, at the 12th China Enterprise Global Image Summit Forum, eclicktech, a global leader in intelligent international marketing services for enterprises, officially launched several key breakthroughs in the field of programmatic advertising in collaboration with Alibaba Cloud. The advancements are based on Alibaba Cloud’s AI platform PAI, Tongyi large models, and Alibaba Cloud’s big data + cloud-native technologies.

According to MAGNA’s latest “Global Advertising Forecast” Winter Edition, media ad revenue in 2024 is expected to reach $933 billion, a 10% year-over-year increase. The growth is driven by search/e-commerce ads (up 12%), short video (up 12%), and social media ads (up 18%). Digital media (DPP, including search engines, retail, social media, and short video platforms) will see a 13% rise in ad sales, reaching $659 billion. The report also points out that artificial intelligence is providing organic momentum for the advertising market in two ways. Directly, nearly all tech companies are launching and promoting "AI-driven" services and products to a broad audience, increasing overall ad budgets. Indirectly, within the advertising technology ecosystem, AI is being used to optimize creative costs, dynamic versions, and programmatic effectiveness to improve the return on investment for brands.

As one of the first marketing technology companies to implement an AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) strategy in the international marketing sector, eclicktech has been closely collaborating with Alibaba Cloud’s team since signing a strategic deepening agreement in August 2023. The partnership aims to accelerate the full-scale application of AI in outbound marketing, focusing on programmatic model training, content efficiency improvements, and ad accuracy, achieving remarkable results.

01 Programmatic AI Algorithm Efficiency Improved 7x, Computational Costs Reduced by 25%

According to Roger Lu, Senior Technical Director at eclicktech, programmatic advertising refers to automating, streamlining, and intelligentizing each step of the ad delivery process to improve efficiency and achieve goals. It involves various stages, including ad prediction, audience targeting, tagging, creative production, template creation, bidding, and win rate calculation, making it a highly systematized and engineered business model.

Since its founding, eclicktech has continuously invested in every aspect of programmatic advertising. On the media traffic side, the company built its own SSP platform and launched the zMaticoo SDK, which is officially certified by Google Play Index. In collaboration with ad aggregation platforms and other partners, the company has accumulated a vast resource of traffic. At the same time, on the DSP and DMP platform side, eclicktech has continuously upgraded and optimized its algorithm models, data mining, and analysis capabilities to improve ad performance and build a unique technological advantage.

In the fast-evolving landscape of generative AI, Roger Lu stated: “Based on the latest advancements in large models and algorithm technologies, we have deeply researched and iterated on ad prediction algorithms—from traditional machine learning to deep neural networks, from user growth to deep behavioral event marketing, and from offline statistical features to real-time user behavior sequences. We have also incorporated large language models based on Transformers. These developments enhance prediction accuracy and return on investment while providing users with personalized and rich creative experiences.”

In addition to these specialized explorations, eclicktech, relying on the frameworks, tools, and computational support provided by Alibaba Cloud, has made breakthroughs in four key areas: algorithm upgrades, content efficiency, ad precision, and attribution capability.

Algorithm Upgrades: With Alibaba Cloud’s AI platform PAI, eclicktech has rapidly iterated on programmatic AI model training. By using inference acceleration frameworks and efficient resource scheduling, inference efficiency has been increased by 7x.

Content Efficiency Improvement: By integrating Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi model with eclicktech’s vast advertising data, deep data mining and analysis help to accumulate high-value data across the entire advertising chain, continuously improving programmatic AI model training outcomes.

Ad Precision Enhancement: Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s big data technology and Spark LakeCache, task execution times have been reduced by over 30%, with insights previously available in hours now achieved within minutes. By adopting an elastic mechanism, computational resource costs have been reduced by around 25%.

Attribution Capability Support: Alibaba Cloud’s big data platform offers eclicktech massive data volumes, high computational performance, and flexible system storage and retrieval, continually enhancing Yidian Tianxia’s attribution capabilities.

02 Strategic Partnership for Global Expansion, Driving Marketing + AI Industry Transformation

An Lin, Director of the Research Center at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, believes that the rapid development of AI humanoid intelligence brings value not only in efficiency improvement but also in reconstructing business processes and changing industry rules, generating entirely new structural opportunities.

At the strategic level, Alibaba Cloud will continue to focus on core principles such as full-stack, global, and open technologies. At the technical level, Alibaba Cloud is committed to building a full-stack AI technology system, making systematic investments and deployments in areas ranging from underlying hardware, computing, storage, networking, databases, and big data analytics. On the business side, Alibaba Cloud is keen to respond to customer needs in an increasingly complex internal resource scheduling and external market environment, fully utilizing the value of digitalization. From an ecosystem perspective, Alibaba Cloud is committed to supporting more Chinese companies' globalization with open-source capabilities and continuously refining its AI model capabilities to make AI accessible to more industries and enterprises.

An Lin emphasized that due to this, Alibaba Cloud highly values its strategic collaboration with eclicktech in the global programmatic advertising market. Together, they will explore and innovate in the development of new digital media technologies and strive to expand their AI-driven, engineered, and systematized marketing capabilities across more online and offline marketing scenarios, opening up broader growth opportunities.

Roger Lu, Senior Technical Director at eclicktech, also stated that the company has accumulated extensive and long-term client resources in the e-commerce sector, with deep experience in creativity, production, delivery, and operations. In the future, eclicktech plans to explore more applications in the mid- and long-tail programmatic advertising sectors to maximize value. Furthermore, the development of generative AI technology is driving the rapid expansion of sectors such as short dramas, games, and AI applications, which brings new advertising demands, new traffic resources, and new advertising marketing scenarios for Yidian Tianxia. Programmatic advertising will play a critical role in the development of these sectors and become a major strategic focus for eclicktech.