The ‘Mobile’ Category
Every month seems to bring a new company bent on cracking the code of mobile advertising. One of these is ThinkNear, which aims to bring elusive scale to hyperlocal ads. In this discussion with AdExchanger, CEO Eli Portnoy talks about the company's value proposition and challenges it has faced.
AdExchanger: What problem is ThinkNear solving?
EP: There are two fundamental problems we're solving. The first is enabling hyperlocal campaigns at scale. The trickiest thing about hyperlocal is that you're essentially filtering yourself out of an audience. To really do hyperlocal campaigns of scale, you need to start off with a very big base of impressions. In that sense we're a universal buying club when we're plugging into a bunch of different inventory sources, and providing advertisers with one access point, to go out and get that inventory.
The second thing that we're doing is, because we work in an RTB environment, we're able to offer all of the advantages to advertisers of using us to buy their media. It's more cost effective. All of the RTB advantages that you would think of in the online display space, also apply in the hyperlocal mobile media space.
Are you leveraging mobile data for display media across digital channels, or are you just using mobile data for mobile display? How do you make those differentiations?
Let me give you the history. We started the company in January 2011, and the first big hypothesis was hyperlocal mobile display is just a huge opportunity for small businesses. The closer someone is to the point of sale, the more likely they are to transact. If we can offer small businesses the opportunity to reach customers who are close by, that'll be a really unique opportunity, especially because no other digital channel can do that.
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Adelphic Mobile announced the launch of its company and its “Predictive Data Platform” which it says features AudienceCube, "a new targeting technology that leverages data predictive of campaign performance to find and engage mobile audiences." Read the release.
Co-Founders Changfeng Weng and Jennifer Lum, whose mobile ad experience includes Apple iAd, Quattro Wireless, Nokia, Enpocket and m-Qube, discussed the company and its offering with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: What's in a name... "Adelphic Mobile"?
JENNIFER LUM: It comes from the Oracle of Delphi, who is the all-seeing oracle. We feel like it encapsulates and represents the spirit of technology in our company because we are focused around leveraging and using data intelligently to see and understand everything that is involved in an ad transaction.
AdExchanger.com: Can you talk a bit about how the idea for the company came about?
CHANGFENG WANG: My background has been a mixture of dealing with high performance data mining and data processing. For example, my early work at Engage provided an understanding of how to make an ad effective. Looking at the difference between online advertising and mobile advertising, it became clear to me what was missing in the pie and what would become important. So we began working on this idea and how to get this for a long time.
JENNIFER LUM: The one other thing is that through Changfeng’s later work at both Enpocket (acquired by Nokia) and Quattro Wireless (acquired by Apple), he was able to implement algorithms and other pieces of technology that substantially improved the performance of both of those networks. Changfeng and I came to know each other through working at Quattro together where I was his main internal customer. We developed a great relationship there.
As I was trying to figure out my next move after transitioning out of Apple iAd, Changfeng approached me about what he'd been working on and invited me to partner with him and I jumped at the chance.
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The Apple product development machine continues to produce new instrumentation for the hungry, digital hoards as last week's announcement of its third-generation iPad appeared as anticipated as any of its iPad predecessors. Though not revolutionary given the presence of the first two, the new iPad may present unique opportunity to various parts of the digital media ecosystem - including ads.
And so, AdExchanger reached out to a selection of executives working in online ads and requested their thoughts on the new iPad. Specifically:
"How will the latest iPad update impact the audience buying opportunity available through the iPad?"
Click below to read the responses, or scroll for more:
- Amanda Richman, President, Digital at MediaVest (Publicis)
- Brian Stoller, Managing Partner, Mindshare North America (WPP)
- Bryan Jones, CEO, Collider Media
- Sal Candela, Mobile Director, PHD (Omnicom)
- Marcus Startzel, GM of North America, Millennial Media
- Gabriel Cheng, Associate Media Director, Ansible (IPG)
- Paran Johar, CMO, Jumptap
- Nathan Adkisson, Strategist, Big Spaceship
Amanda Richman, President, Digital at MediaVest (Publicis)
"The growing abundance of tablets in the marketplace makes content more accessible than ever, creating an always-on connection with consumers. With each iPad update we see more video consumption, more scale in the tablet space, and more client conversation around creating meaningful experiences instead of ads. Equally important is their updated approach to advertisers. With lower points of entry and greater flexibility, they're in a better position to convert the iPad3 momentum into iAd deals."
Brian Stoller, Managing Partner - Leader Digital Strategy, Mindshare North America (WPP)
"There is nothing intrinsic about the Retina HD display, the quad-core GPU, or the 5MP camera, or any of the other new iPad’s features that make it dramatically any better of an experience than the iPad has already been for media buyers to leverage audience buying. With more features, and more iPad’s in market, we will obviously see another increase in audiences sizes.
Where ad buyers have not taken advantage of the iPad's opportunities resides in understanding scenarios for when a user chooses the iPad over mobile phone, PC, or (dare I say) television for consuming content. Casual shopping appears to be a use state that expands among iPad users, along with video consumption.
The biggest value to advertisers is in the ‘media meshing’ capabilities of the iPad through Social TV platforms. 71% of tablet owners have gone online while watching TV (Ipsos MediaCT, Fall 2011). The emerging trend of audiences simultaneously consuming iPad and TV media can unlock conversations with and among consumers. To this end, the real challenge to the media buying industry will be de-duplication of cross-device audiences within privacy guidelines."
Bryan Jones, CEO, Collider Media
"The Apple iPad announced last week gives users access to an improved tablet, one with higher resolution, faster connectivity, and graphics that will enable more rich media and video to be consumed. On the surface, the changes to the iPad look to have a minimal impact on mobile advertising. However, this announcement will impact the number of users, the diversity of such users and the amount of media consumed. With the launch of the iPad 3, the price of the iPad 2 was reduced by $100. This price reduction allows a larger and more diverse audience to purchase the iPad and further its adoption into the mainstream. And, with the exceptional screen, more lean forward media (movies, tv shows, etc.) will be consumed. The end result for advertisers is that the audience segments on mobile are now mirroring those historically found on television. To the extent the mobile advertising industry is able to identify and target these audience segments in a way that aligns with the dollars allocated to TV advertising, significant marketing spend will flow away from traditional TV and into mobile as advertisers look to effectively engage with their target consumers."
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Maria Alegre is CEO and co-Founder of Chartboost, a direct-deals marketplace for mobile game publishers.
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AdExchanger: Can you share a brief background on Chartboost?
MA: Sure, our team comes from Tapulous, the company behind Tap Tap Revenge, which was the number one music game on the iPhone. Tapulous was there, on day one, when the [Apple iTunes] App Store launched. Sean Fannan, my co‑founder, was the first employee and engineer at Tapulous, and he built the whole back-end as the company’s products went from zero to 50 million users.
When I joined [Tapulous], there were 10 people. As Tapulous first business hire, I worked on monetization, virtual goods and advertising deals, etc.
Walt Disney bought the company a year and a half ago, and we took that experience to build a platform to help other game developers be more successful in the App Store.
For us, being more successful means launch more hits, and then make more money.
What would you say are some of the key learnings from your Tapulous experience?
The number one learning was the importance of distribution power. For gaming companies, that's their most important asset. They launch more games and they end up creating a network, and this network defines their distribution power because, every time they launch a new game, they can promote it to all their users in their network. The bigger the network is, the more guaranteed the success of the new game is going to be.
This was our biggest learning, and we want to help companies manage that in order to launch more hits, but also manage distribution power to make more money, and that's when you sell advertising deals with other games.
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Micah Adler is CEO of Fiksu, a mobile marketing technology company.
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AdExchanger: How did Fiksu get its start?
MA: Going back about six and a half years now, I was a full‑time academic as a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, in an area of expertise around algorithms, combinatorial optimization, analysis of randomness and a number of things that might sound somewhat esoteric but actually ended up being very relevant to the stuff that we're doing here today.
I had a non-standard path through academia in that I went through the whole tenure process. I got tenure and as soon as I got tenure, I left and haven't been back since. What happens when you get tenure is that you typically get a sabbatical. I used the sabbatical to found a company which I would describe as ad search engine arbitrage -buying up ad space on Google, Yahoo, MSN and six other search engines. Basically, we were getting more money out of the clicks than we were paying for them. This company called CourseAdvisor was doing this in the for‑profit education space so it could also be described as search to .edu lead gen.
We took a technology and algorithmic approach to the marketing side of things and I brought in a team of 16 PhDs to work on the core algorithmic search engine marketing technology. We built a pretty phenomenal system for search engine marketing and sold the company almost exactly two years after the launch to the Washington Post.
Along the way, I founded a second company called Adverplex, which does similar things - not just in the for‑profit education space but across a number of verticals. About three years ago, I caught the mobile bug and did a little bit of looking at the size of the industry and how big the industry was going to go and how pervasive mobile was going to be throughout our lives and our commerce. The numbers that came back in the research that I was doing were just absolutely astounding - how big and how important mobile was going to be. Basically, I dropped everything else I was working on and decided it's time to get into mobile.
So, what problem is Fiksu solving?
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Alex Moukas is CEO of Velti, a global provider of mobile marketing and advertising technology. Velti announced the acquisition of CASEE, a mobile ad exchange and mobile ad network in China, last month as the company expanded its footprint in China. Read the release.
In January, Moukas discussed his company and trends in the mobile space with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Regarding the mobile advertising space and the recent developments there, what's surprising you about mobile development?
AM: There are a couple of different things. First of all, as a company, we span across mobile advertising and marketing. In terms of nomenclature, mobile advertising is like banner ads. Mobile marketing is what happens after the click. In terms of things that are surprising, we feel the US market is growing extremely fast on the marketing side right now. Yet, obviously, the advertising side is what everybody is focusing on, because that's where the closest analogy to the online world is. We play there through our Mobclix advertising exchange. It's where Millennial is focused on 100 percent; however, for us as a company, in addition to the significant growth in the advertising space, we also see significant growth on the marketing side of the business. That's number one.
Number two, we see different surprising developments in different parts of the world. In the US market, a lot of our customers approach tablets as an extension of mobile, as opposed to an extension of their online budgets, and that makes a huge difference. And in other parts of the world, we're seeing the leapfrogging of mobile development cycles, especially in parts of Asia.
Can you share with me a typical use case for what you're seeing right now on the marketing side of the business? How does that client engagement work?
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As publishers look to take advantage of the ad exchange model and max out yield of their inventory, one emerging opportunity has been the private exchange (or marketplace, depending on whose terminology you're using) where a publisher provides exclusive access to buying partners looking to purchase on a per impression basis. In addition to providing better controls around channel conflict, the private exchange model can provide higher CPMs for publishers while buyers get exclusive, "first look" access at remnant inventory among other potential benefits.
So with an eye to mobile and its abundance of inventory today - both direct and remnant - AdExchanger.com asked a selection of industry executives in the mobile space the following question:
"Today, when is a mobile private exchange relevant to a marketer's needs?"
Click below or scroll down for more:
- Sal Candela, Mobile Director, PHD
- Dave Gwozdz, CEO, Mojiva
- Scott Spencer, Product Management Director, Google
- Are Traasdahl, CEO, Tapad
- Anne Frisbie, VP & Managing Director, North America, InMobi
Sal Candela, Mobile Director, PHD (Omnicom)
"There clearly is an abundance of mobile ad inventory in the market, but running on brand-safe content at scale isn’t always easy.
Typically, mobile ads have been bought directly from publishers, or in aggregate through networks. The challenge is that direct buys don’t offer enough scale and most networks are ‘blind’, meaning marketers only get a sample of where the ads are running.
With the emergence of private exchanges in mobile, marketers and agencies now have a simpler way to reach their audience in premium environments. These private exchanges can be very beneficial as they provide the benefits of a network - one point of contact for coordination and less time dealing with paperwork – with the bonus of running on an approved list of properties that meet brand requirements."
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Anupam Gupta is President and CEO of Mixpo, a video advertising technology company.
AdExchanger.com: How did your experience in product management at Microsoft prepare you for Mixpo?
AG: Broadly speaking, it taught me to listen closely to customers and partners for insights and to use that input as the north star for our value proposition and roadmap. From an industry standpoint, my team and I managed an online consumer service used by more than 300 million people globally that delivered billions of impressions per month – what was then called MSN Messenger, now Windows Live Messenger. This experience gave me an opportunity to work with agencies and advertisers. We developed a number of new ad formats for Messenger. And it taught me to focus heavily on delivering measurable value and impact.
What problem does Mixpo solve?
There’s both a problem and opportunity that we address. I’ll start with the latter.
As we all know, online display advertising has evolved significantly over the last decade. What started out as static ads – I think Prodigy was the first ever to post a display ad – migrated to rich media and then in the last few years, more dynamic ads – meaning ads that are assembled on the fly based on the viewer’s demographics and interests. Dapper and Teracent were the two main companies enabling dynamic ads and were subsequently bought by Yahoo! and Google respectively. Now video advertising is following a similar trajectory, flat pre-roll ads – YouTube, circa 2008 – then interactive video ads – and now dynamically personalized video ads. That’s the opportunity we address, the ability to provide advertisers with spontaneously tailored, interactive video ads that run on any screen – computer, tablet, smartphone – and any in any format – pre-roll, in-banner, in-app, on mobile web. The result is greater brand impact and the ability to reach consumers broadly with video.
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Dorrian Porter is the founder and CEO of Mozes, a mobile audience engagement platform.
AdExchanger.com: You've seen the mobile industry change quite a bit since Mozes was founded in 2005. What is one change in the company's strategy that you'd make at the beginning if you could?
DP: We pre-maturely pitched the concept of a broad mobile marketing platform when we should have been pitching simpler tactics because the market was fairly nascent at the time. For example, mobile contests have been a popular use case so we should have simply called ourselves a mobile contesting platform. Now that we have almost 12 million unique US mobile consumers using the service, our customers are thinking beyond mobile contests and becoming more strategic. They are exploring other types of mobile engagement like voting, trivia, user generated content, and mobile commerce. We’re getting much more interest and traction as marketers become more sophisticated about their mobile marketing strategies and campaigns.
What problem is Mozes solving today?
Today, marketers at most brands are spending over 80% of their marketing budgets in traditional media, yet yearn for more ongoing engagement with consumers and comprehensive measurement tools on how their offline and online marketing efforts pay off. Mobile engagement allows brands to engage at the “point of inspiration,” and bridge the physical and digital worlds. Marketers who use Mozes create a more holistic view of the customer and run more integrated campaigns, which leads to more effective conversations and interactions across all brand touch points.
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With the iPad's strong growth and now the recent announcement by Amazon to provide a lower-end, $199 Kindle Fire tablet, marketers may need to start thinking about how the tablet - and its audience - fits in their plans going forward.
With that in mind, AdExchanger.com asked a group of industry experts from the mobile advertising side of the ad ecosystem the following question:
"Where should the tablet fit as part of a marketer's media plan?"
Click below or scroll down for more to read the answers:
- Pat Connolly, Head of Strategy, Conde Nast Ideactive
- Ryan Griffin, VP/Group Director, Media + Mobile, Digitas (Publicis)
- Michael Nevins, VP of Mobile, Undertone
- Michael Lieberman, Group Account Director at Joule, a GroupM company (WPP Group)
- Joe Chasse, Director of Media & Analytics, Modea
Pat Connolly, Head of Strategy, Conde Nast Ideactive
"With the evolution of the iPad and the recent release of the Fire, it’s less a question of "where" does the tablet fit into a brand’s media mix, but where doesn’t it. While the tablet marketplace is certainly still evolving, and far from ubiquitous, the access to information in multiple forms, creates a convergence of all media on a single mobile device. Whether it’s reading the new tablet-issue of the New Yorker, watching Hulu or browsing the web, the tablet becomes less a medium, and more the new reality of how consumers navigate the information around them.
With this new reality, also comes the discussion of owned media complementing paid investments. As tablets drive media convergence, the best and most relevant content and experiences will win over the time-starved consumer, in the growing battle for screen real-estate. This represents new opportunities for brands to create content and experiences that connect with consumers and create value throughout the customer journey.
In short, if you’re asking the question 'where does it fit,' you’ve already missed the point."
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