When Ads Learn to Think: UBMax and the Future of Digital Advertising
By the time you finish reading this paragraph, Ocean Engine’s UBMax will have optimized tens of thousands of ad impressions, testing, learning, and adapting in real-time. Not with human hands hovering over bid buttons, but with something else entirely: a digital advertising system that has learned to think.
UBMax signals a fundamental transformation in marketing itself—where business strategy, audience understanding, and creative excellence converge under algorithmic intelligence rather than human guesswork.
The advertising industry has evolved through distinct eras: manual media buying in the 1990s, programmatic automation in the early 2000s, and now artificial intelligence in the 2020s. UBMax represents the culmination of this evolution — not just automating individual tasks, but orchestrating entire marketing strategies with machine precision and human-level insight.
App Promotion | Lead Generation | E-Commerce Traffic | |
Scenarios | Support game promotion scenarios (pre-registration, large-scale promotion, existing game activation) and internet service application promotion scenarios. | Support advertisers in all lead generation industries, including automotive, real estate, home furnishings, education, etc. | Support products from e-commerce platforms outside Douyin (Single-product delivery, multi-product delivery) |
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What makes UBMax different?
Most advertising platforms optimize campaigns in isolation, creating disconnected strategies and lost opportunities. UBMax eliminates these silos with a holistic approach that aligns directly with your business objectives and the products and services you’re actually promoting.
Using advanced AI technology, this approach delivers better targeting precision, personalized creative experiences, and improved performance across ByteDance’s entire advertising network.
Here are the five key advantages that set UBMax apart:
1. Product-level optimization
Instead of optimizing generic campaigns, UBMax optimizes around your actual products and services. By understanding what you’re selling and who wants to buy it, the platform delivers more targeted advertising by using product insights to predict conversions more accurately.
2. Multi-tier goal setting for enhanced performance
By fully capturing client objectives and employing multi-goal, multi-phase bidding and modeling techniques, the system maintains stable traffic volume while optimizing for better downstream conversion performance.
3. Streamlined creative operations with data-driven decisions
The platform works like an experienced media buyer, analyzing campaign data to find optimization opportunities. AI automation applies proven strategies to adjust spending, bidding, and creative placement while automatically fixing common problems like traffic loss, budget waste, and scaling issues.
4. AI-powered creative automation for maximum reach
Advanced AI generates and optimizes creative assets at scale, dramatically reducing production costs while increasing performance. Edge AI technology personalizes every creative touchpoint, delivering unique visual and messaging combinations tailored to individual user preferences and behaviors.
5. Enhanced traffic precision with expanded scale opportunities
Smart conversion models analyze real-time performance and traffic data to optimize campaigns instantly. With access to ByteDance’s entire traffic network, UBMax delivers multi-scenario exposure and cross-platform reach while automatically directing budgets to the highest-performing ad placements.
What happens to creatives in the era of digital advertising?
It’s tempting to think that creativity might be the first casualty in this new world of AI-driven advertising. In fact, creative strategy has never been more important. With UBMax handling the complexity of media buying, advertisers are free to focus on crafting premium content that resonates with their target audience, which is what ultimately drives action.
Here’s what it looks like in practice.
1. From static to dynamic: Traditional creative development involves creating a small number of carefully crafted assets that run for extended periods. UBMax now enables a new model where hundreds or thousands of creative variations can be tested simultaneously, with the system automatically identifying and scaling the top performers.
2. Modular creative systems: Smart agencies are developing modular creative frameworks where individual elements (headlines, images, calls-to-action) can be automatically combined in different ways. This allows for exponential scaling of creative variations without proportional increases in production costs.
3. Performance-driven design: Creative decisions increasingly rely on data rather than subjective judgment. Color choices, layout decisions, and messaging strategies are validated through real-world performance rather than focus groups or creative director preferences.
Proof of performance: How UBMax transforms business outcomes
While automation sounds promising on paper, its true value lies in what it delivers in the real world. The following case studies—from gaming to home furnishing and nutrition—showcase how UBMax is helping to transform business outcomes across different scenarios and industries.
App Promotion — Gaming
During the holiday rush, a mobile gaming company hit a critical inflection point when user acquisition opportunities skyrocketed alongside fierce competition and escalating costs.
UBMax transformed this challenge into opportunity by intelligently identifying overlooked user segments, countering competitor moves with dynamic bidding adjustments, and continuously optimizing budget allocation toward top-performing creative and audiences.
Key results:
- +30% increase in delivery volume
- +15% boost in ROI
- -23% reduction in wasted ad budget
Lead Generation — Educational institution
A leading educational institution faced the challenge of efficiently increasing the volume of its online advertising during daily campaigns while keeping costs stable. In essence, they needed to boost the number of form submissions and drive more user inquiries, all the while maintaining a steady growth in traffic with strict cost control in place.
The institution adopted UBMax’s automated optimization system. This system not only alleviated the manual workload but also, through intelligent model control, managed to enhance the advertising reach under the premise of stable costs.
Key results:
- +604% increase in average ad consumption
- -14% reduction in conversion costs
E-Commerce Traffic — Nutrition
A major children’s calcium supplement brand needed to significantly increase their traffic acquisition through CID campaigns. Although they had built strong brand awareness in China, their return on investment was disappointing and traffic volume remained too low to meet business targets. They urgently needed to improve both profitability and traffic volume.
The company deployed UBMax’s intelligent optimization system to solve both problems simultaneously—maintaining strict ROI control while scaling to meet aggressive traffic targets.
Key results:
- +68.5% increase in GMV vs. non-UBMax campaigns
- +322% increase in CVR vs. non-UBMax campaigns
The future of digital advertising
As more than just a new ad product, UBMax signals a shift in how modern advertising operates. By automating performance at scale and allowing teams to focus on strategy and creativity, UBMax is helping businesses move faster, think smarter, and achieve more.
If you’re ready to simplify operations, improve ROI, and future-proof your digital advertising approach, now is the time to explore what UBMax can do for your business.
Ready to take the next step? Contact us today to learn more or get started.
