“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Steve Roach, head of mobile app sales at Index Exchange.
On average, consumers are spending 4.8 hours per day on their smartphones, using up to 80 apps.
Despite massive consumption, however, brand marketers are still hesitant to lean into a mobile-first approach, particularly in programmatic.
But with the mobile app economy predicted to grow to $156 billion by 2023, why the uncertainty?
Today, the digital advertising industry has the opportunity to transform the mobile app channel by acknowledging, understanding and tackling marketers’ concerns.
The app supply chain needs more transparency
Many existing issues come down to a misunderstanding of the app supply chain – an area where the programmatic industry can help.
The app supply chain looks much like a waterfall with a series of chained SDKs that all have different preferential access to media. Within this structure, brands and agencies buying app inventory programmatically don’t have insight into where in the waterfall they’re buying.
If the paradigm within the app space doesn’t reflect an environment where brands get priority and access to the best of the bunch, there’s an understandable level of caution. The silver lining is that our industry is making progress, specifically with the launch of Prebid Mobile 2.0, an independent SDK that enables mobile header bidding and end-to-end ad rendering.
It’s also important brands understand the fees taken during the ad delivery process and who is taking them. Before they can be confident in their app strategy, brands will need a higher level of traceability within transaction data, fees and costs across the supply chain.
SDK standardization is needed
SDKs are used to facilitate many useful activities for app developers. Everything from open measurement to addressability to creative rendering can be facilitated by an SDK. While this has led to innovation and produced novel creative units, it’s also created inefficiencies.
It’s common for an app to deploy as many as a dozen SDKs. If each SDK requires different assets to render a unique style of creative, the ability for a brand to scale across the app ecosystem becomes limited.
We are at this point in the app ecosystem where commonalities are emerging, which makes it possible to create standards. Codifying requirements into future versions of openRTB protocols could lead us to a path where opportunities like creative rendering move out of proprietary SDKs and into shared SDKs.
Control of the ad experience is required
It’s very common for mobile marketers to advertise their own apps in similar apps. This is not nearly as common in any other media channel – you don’t see ads for Netflix in Hulu. Brands need the ability to maintain control over their ad experience as it moves through the supply chain to a consumer’s mobile device.
If brands have little understanding and control over the ad experience, they’re unable to ensure positive brand reputation and risk negative association with their content. It will take time to ease out of this paradigm, but carving out premium slots reserved just for brands is a step in the right direction.
In order for brands to buy confidently in-app, ad tech platforms and app developers alike must prioritize marketer needs and address the gaps that persist. As an industry, we have the tools available to transcend the roadblocks and bring transparency to the supply chain, demystify complexity and earn a greater share of marketers’ increasingly scrutinized media budgets.
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