  Image ad understanding is a crucial task with wide real-world applications.
Although highly challenging with the involvement of diverse atypical scenes,
real-world entities, and reasoning over scene-texts, how to interpret image ads
is relatively under-explored, especially in the era of foundational
vision-language models (VLMs) featuring impressive generalizability and
adaptability. In this paper, we perform the first empirical study of image ad
understanding through the lens of pre-trained VLMs. We benchmark and reveal
practical challenges in adapting these VLMs to image ad understanding. We
propose a simple feature adaptation strategy to effectively fuse multimodal
information for image ads and further empower it with knowledge of real-world
entities. We hope our study draws more attention to image ad understanding
which is broadly relevant to the advertising industry.
