Bridging the gap between web and mobile users is critical for advertisers, but reaching the same user across different screens continues to be a challenge. Mobile ad network Jumptap is tackling the problem with its new Unified Audience Exchange. In an exclusive interview, Jumptap CEO George Bell tells AdExchanger about the Exchange and its partnership with AppNexus.
AdExchanger: How does the Unified Audience Exchange work?
GEORGE BELL: The impetus to do this was driven by the observation that consumers are hopping from screen to screen with increasing frequency. The desire among marketers to follow consumers across screens has become more urgent, and to do so in a programmatic environment is also rising in importance.
What’s happening is for the first time, the programmatic buyers of display — the trading desks, ad agencies, resellers, search marketers, etc. — will be able to not only programmatically buy the same segments in PC, but also the same segments in mobile. Now they can match the targeted segments they’ve customarily bought in a programmatic environment for PC, as well as mobile.
The middleman in this is AppNexus. The Unified Audience Exchange will first be available to clients who are already using the AppNexus API and who do some of their media buying through the AppNexus Console. What we’re doing is allowing programmatic trading desks and resellers who already have AppNexus to do segment matching from PC to mobile, and we’re also permitting them to do profile matching right down to the individual device or anonymized user ID from PC to mobile.
What quantifiers are you using?
It starts with the marketer who has identified the audiences they want to go after based on email, IP address, whatever methodology the marketer uses. The marketer will anonymize that data and, if we have that profile in our inventory, we have a match. If that match is made, the marketer will deliver their creative against that profile on whatever screen we happen to find them on.
We’ve taken a leadership position in building privacy into our products. We believe in a doublehash for bringing a profile in. We do most of our hashing with BlueKai or Exelate, and this is no different to how we’ve handled privacy concerns in the past.
How will the Unified Audience Exchange fit in with your other products?
Going back to my first point, we see a desire among marketers to find consumers regardless of screen. We have a couple ways of doing that. One is through our native network, where our SDK is embedded in a number of mobile apps and aggregators, and much of that inventory is proprietary to Jumptap.
The second is that we built our own bidder, we’ve been developing our algorithms and we’ve entered the business of programmatic mobile exchange buying and bidding. We’ve partnered up with five or six different exchanges at this point: MoPub, Nexage, Burstly to name a few and a couple others to come. We’re having a lot of success with that, but we recognize that what marketers really want is to be able to apply the same algorithmic or programmatic approach to media buying and bidding in a way that bridges mobile and PC.
You could say we’re acting like a DSP [demand-side platform] in the sense that we’re going to marketers and saying if you want to deploy display dollars programmatically into mobile, and enjoy the same level of targeting you enjoy on the PC, we can help you do that. You can also say we’re acting like a DMP [data-management platform], because the second part of this is if you, as a marketer, wanted to deploy dollars programmatically, and wanted to deploy your own profiles to reach unique customer sets across screens, we can also do that in mobile.
How close is programmatic buying for mobile to surpassing traditional programmatic buying?
Mobile is still a little bit behind. Probably 20% of media dollars in pc display this year will pass programmatic bidding and buying. In mobile we think it’s less than 20%. The technology is harder. Mobile doesn’t have a browser cookie so understanding audiences is harder. The rise of programmatic of bidding and buying is a little slower since mobile is younger than PC and it has more technical complexities.
What is the pricing breakdown for the Unified Audience Exchange?
Let’s say you’re a partner of ours and you place your first programmatic mobile buy with us through the AppNexus Console. AppNexus takes maybe 10 cents on the dollar because it’s their console and the 90 cents flows into Jumptap and we share that 90 cents with the publisher or the app whose inventory we use to put the ad into.
Looking ahead, what trends are you focusing on?
First of all, we know that consumers have changed. This idea of bouncing between multiple screens isn’t going to change and so we’ve made investments so we can deal with these cross-screens. We’ve changed the focus of the company to think more about data profiling and the scale you can achieve with programmatic bidding and buying in mobile.
Second is there will be more consolidation because our customers want it. Too many of us [vendors] are trying to call on marketers in a limited number of hours. I think people are leaning towards solutions that provide a cross-screen identity anchored in data. I think those companies have the best chance of surviving consolidation or being a protagonist in consolidation.
Finally, our goal is to help marketers understand their audience not just by clicks. Who are the people who are downloading your games, your retail apps? What are their common characteristics? Do they live in the same types of homes? Do they live in affluent zip codes? Are they on unlimited data plans? We think the focus on understanding audiences, which has been hard to do as opposed to clicks, is where the future value is going to lie for advertisers.
