Call for Workshop Papers
As of the second quarter of 2024, the worldwide internet user spent more than 6.5 hours daily across all devices interacting with online content almost entirely sponsored by advertisements. At almost $700B global market size in 2024, and expected to reach $870B by 2027, digital advertising has already surpassed traditional ads in global spending and continues to grow. Digital advertising and in particular computational advertising is perhaps the most visible and ubiquitous application of machine learning and one that interacts directly with consumers. When done right, ads connect us to opportunities to enrich our lives and creep us out when done badly. Recently at the forefront of political battles between governments, large multinational corporations, and consumers, digital advertising remains a dynamic industry and research area.
Looking at the published literature, while some might view computational advertising as a mature field, the reality is the opposite. The industry is undergoing rapid transformation, moving beyond simple rule-based and identity-based targeting. The shift to privacy-preserving techniques (such as differential privacy, federated learning, and zero-knowledge proofs) and the need for modeling in a post-cookie, inferred-identity world dominate current research. Furthermore, the exponential advancement and integration of Generative AI (GenAI) are fundamentally changing the creative and campaign optimization processes, leading to breakthroughs in automated ad creative generation, personalized interactive experiences, and the development of intelligent, pay-for-use shopping agents. The challenges of measurement, causality, and maximizing user experience in this new, fragmented ecosystem ensure that the research agenda for computational advertising is vast and urgent.
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The AdKDD workshops held in conjunction with KDD conferences in the past years (2017-2025) continue to generate interest from academia and industry - as one of the top venues specifically for advertising research. We believe this is a unique forum for folks interested in aspects of digital advertising to get together, exchange notes, and get a pulse for the state of the art, especially in the industry. We have also had several inquiries on whether we would repeat this workshop for 2026 and are confident we will have an engaged and productive workshop session. Although we have considered creating a separate conference dedicated to advertising, we believe KDD is still the best venue for our attendees.
Topics
The workshop focuses on three main aspects of computational advertising.
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Evolution of computational advertising: Online advertising has progressed beyond the notion of traditional desktop ads to ads that are native, social, mobile, and contextual. In tandem, the rise of new mechanisms, such as header bidding, complex ad exchanges, repeated auctions, ad blockers, viewability trackers, and increasing application of Generative AI models, challenge the traditional notions of advertising. There also continue to exist controversial issues in advertising, such as privacy, security, fraud, ethics, and economic attribution. We invite papers that are focused on some of the above aspects.
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Large-scale and novel ad targeting: Recent advances in real-time, big data systems, and easier accessibility to different types of data make it possible to design more personalized and efficient ad targeting systems. We invite papers that advance the state-of-the-art in related areas of ad targeting.
Deployed systems & battle scars: We particularly encourage papers that highlight experience in deploying real-time ad targeting systems, data, and audience insights, as well as position papers on the future of online advertising.
Submission Instructions
Following the KDD conference tradition, reviews are single-blind, and author names and affiliations should be listed. Submitted papers will be assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, insightfulness, depth, clarity, and reproducibility. For each accepted paper, at least one author must attend the workshop and present the paper.
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Submissions are limited to a total of six pages, including all content and references, must be in PDF format, and formatted according to the new Standard ACM Conference Proceedings Template. Additional information about formatting and style files is available here.
All accepted papers will be archived on the AdKDD website, and we are also working on having them published in official proceedings as well.
Please note: All of the attendees need to register through the main conference of KDD. In addition, in line with earlier KDD workshops, we do not provide separate registration only for the workshop itself.