Family-safety app Life360 has been quietly building an ad tech stack.
Last year, it made two acquisitions: Fantix’s advertising unit in February, then publisher-focused ad platform Nativo in November for $120 million.
Fantix, an AI platform for privacy-safe targeting and measurement, helped Life360 take its first steps into advertising. Life360 is applying the tech to understand how people interact with it in their day-to-day lives. In June, the app rolled out location-based ad targeting that reflects real-world family routines.
Nativo represents the next phase of that strategy.
Founded by Justin “JC” Choi in 2013, the company runs a native ad exchange and licenses a white-label ad server that publishers use for sponsored content and other native formats. It has relationships with more than 20,000 apps and sites.
Fantix informs which users Life360 can reach and when, and Nativo handles how the ads get delivered.
“We have the buy-side tools and we have the sell-side tools,” Choi said. “The ambition is to build a full-funnel and family-safe advertising platform.”
During Life360’s Q4 earnings call in early March, the company told investors that Nativo generated $63 million in revenue last year. Executives shared the information to underscore how much the acquisition could accelerate Life360’s overall revenue going forward. (The deal closed in January, so that revenue isn’t yet reflected in Life360’s results.)
Life360 also noted that the acquisition expands its potential advertising reach from roughly 16% of “US ad-eligible adults” (a fancy way of saying it doesn’t target kids) to more than 95%.
AdExchanger caught up with Choi, now president of Life360 Ads, to discuss how the integration is going, how Life360 approaches privacy and what’s next for the nascent ads business.
AdExchanger: Nativo was independent for well over a decade. Why sell now?
JUSTIN “JC” CHOI: A lot of it had to do with how good a fit this is. Nativo had three main pillars: an ad exchange with our own sales team, an ad server and a growing business licensing our platform to commerce media companies.
These companies, like Life360, aren’t primarily advertising businesses. They rely on other models – subscriptions, for example. But they want to launch their own ads business. So pairing Life360 and its first first-party data with our platform, exchange and go-to-market team just made sense.
How would you describe Life360’s ad tech strategy in a nutshell?
Life360 reaches an important constituent: the family. You could say it’s the most important social network in our lives.
The vision is to create an ad offering that supports the free product – the majority of Life360 users are using the free version – by combining contextual family insights with our publisher reach. That lets us create in-app and off-app opportunities to connect brands and businesses with families through ads that, ideally, help improve their lives.
People love to talk about ads as a utility. What does that look like in practice?
We know where our members go, so we have a full view into their real-world activities, like where they get coffee, when they’re taking a flight – things like that.
For example, we have a partnership with Uber, so when you land, the Life360 app says, “Hey, would you like to order an Uber?” and then you can do it with one click.
Retail is another example. Say you’re a frequent shopper at a certain grocery chain, and the store has a promotion going on. We could surface that in an ad experience when you go to the store.
That’s the kind of real-world relevance we’re trying to provide by reaching families during their real routines and within real moments.
How do you manage privacy protections since Life360 by definition has a large number of underage users?
We understand that there’s scrutiny of this category and we’re building the ads business in a way that protects the member experience.
It’s happening in two ways. One is with this acquisition, because having the technology and the data in one place is a way to keep the data in house and protected. The other piece is the ad experience itself. Delivering an experience that’s engaging and not interruptive really matters to Life360. That will keep on being our North Star.
We also never target ads to members we know are under 18. We focus on parents and we exclude data from sensitive places, like schools and health care facilities, etc.
How’s the integration going?
It’s been pretty seamless, compared with most transactions, for a few reasons.
First, Nativo’s ad platform was designed for white-label use, so it was built to be easily integrated into apps and websites. Second, Life360 is very early in its ad journey, so we brought over the entire Nativo team to essentially be the ads business unit. There’s also a lot of cultural alignment between the companies.
So, what’s next?
Not everyone realizes just how heavily used Life360 is. We have 91.6 million users globally and 50 million monthly actives in the US. When you look at daily active users, it’s actually ranked as the seventh largest social networking app, even though we think of ourselves as a family app.
What’s next is really just us building on that, taking this app that so many families already rely on every day and turning the ads business into something meaningful that’s still aligned with why people use Life360 in the first place.
Answers have been lightly edited and condensed.
