VivaKi Bakes Adelphic Mobile Audience Tech Into Its Trading Desk

Digital advertising agency VivaKi will use Adelphic Mobile’s targeting capabilities to enhance its Audience on Demand (AOD) Mobile platform, the companies said today. Ad targeting and consumer privacy issues continue to complicate mobile ad buying. Adelphic – a three-year-old company founded by executives from Apple, Quattro Wireless (acquired by Apple) and Millennial Media – addresses these challenges by using what it refers to as “privacy safe” user identification data that is matched with exchange, network and publisher inventory.

The company looks at patterns of data based on a device’s operating system, carrier, location, time of day and other demographic data. The company then compares the data to the type of audience that advertisers are looking for, delivering ads based on the audience’s predicted ROI.

“The big challenge in mobile has been coming up with consistent IDs across the mobile web and apps,” said Jason Pope, VP of AOD Mobile at VivaKi. “We’re excited about Adelphic because they’re staying away from things like PII [personally identifiable information] and are able to build profiles based on information that preserves a consumer’s privacy.”

Given the growing criticism of ad products that rely on third-party consumer data, finding alternatives are crucial, Pope noted: “If we can successfully build up a product that’s not reliant on third-party data but has second-party data as an option, that could be game-changing, but there’s work that has to be done to make that happen.”

Through the new partnership, VivaKi and Adelphic are developing custom audience segmentations that will enable advertisers to better target mobile consumers. While Adelphic also offers cross-device identification capabilities, VivaKi is focusing on its mobile capabilities, but “cross-device is something we’re talking about,” Pope added.

VivaKi expects to test the custom segmentations with one or two customers by mid-June and release the product by July. AOD Mobile also has partnerships with DoubleClick Bid Manager (formerly Invite Media) and BlueKai, a data management platform firm.

AOD Mobile has the smallest user base of the AOD suite, which includes channels for display, social and video, according to Pope. “AOD Mobile isn’t where [AOD] Display or Social are, but it’s still developing,” he said.

Founded in 2008 to provide digital solutions for Paris-based ad holding Publicis Groupe’s agencies, VivaKi became a standalone unit late last year. Adelphic recently appointed former WPP mobile exec Michael Collins to be its new CEO.

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