The ways in which mobile advertising is purchased is also changing radically. A new study from the IAB shows that programmatic mobile ad sales are surging, a trend that is likely to continue.

Over the past year, nearly half (45%) of the £2.1 billion spent on digital display ads in the UK (both internet and mobile) were traded programmatically. This is up sharply from 28% the year before.

Direct sales of display ads between buyers and publishers has remained roughly stable at about 50%. However the bigger loser is ad sales through networks, which have dropped sharply from 22% in 2013 to down to only 6% in 2014.

And the numbers are even striking for mobile. Given the more fragmented state of the mobile ad market, programmatic has an even stronger effect. In 2014, nearly 2/3 of all mobile ads were traded though programmatic. This was essentially double the 37% seen in 2013.

One other interesting trend is the growth of programmatic selling of video ads.

Many people originally felt that programmatic would be primarily a tool for direct response advertising. However, video advertising – which is often more of a branding exercise – is also increasingly being sold through programmatic. In 2014, almost one fifth (18%) of video ads were traded programmatically.

These two trends – mobile ad spend and video – are likely to continue to propel the growth of programmatic.

Tim Elkington, Chief Strategy Officer at the UK’s Internet Advertising Bureau sums it up: “due to the rise in mobile and video ad spend, we estimate around 70-80% of all digital spend will be programmatic by 2018.”

(see Mobiad article Programmatic Advertising: What is it and Where is it going?)

Here are 5 key factors that you should consider carefully when deciding which mobile ad network to use.

Writing in Developer Economics, author George Makkoulis provides a good overview of the key dimensions that publishers and game developers should evaluate before implementing a mobile ad network.

He identifies the following as the top 5 factors to consider:

For the full article, visit Developer Economics.

Called Facebook Audience Network, this new service has the potential to increase ad revenues for publishers, while increasing ad effectiveness for brands.

However, all of that ad revenue was based upon ads that were actually shown on Facebook, and recently there have been many comments that the increasing level of ads on Facebook has become bothersome to Facebook users. This new ad network will be important as it gives Facebook a way to generate additional revenues without displaying additional ads on their site.

Simply put, Facebook Audience Network will act like most ad networks, connecting brands that wish to advertiser with publishers who have available ad inventory. The difference is that over the years Facebook has collected a huge amount of information about their one billion users. Facebook Audience Network intends to use this information to improve ad targeting, and therefore the profitability of the ads they serve.

And advertisers have been anxious to get more ad inventory on Facebook, as their targeting has proven to be very effective, especially for driving mobile app downloads.

Here’s how it works:

In addition to IAB standard banner ads, the network also support IAB standard interstitial ads. And Facebook is prepared to work with publishers to develop custom “native ad” units to match the site or app.

This represents a big shift for Facebook, from strictly monetizing engagement on their own properties to directly generating revenue over many properties utilizing their targeting capabilities. On their blog post announcing the new network, Facebook summarized the benefits to app publishers as follows:

But a recent study shows that in fact these in-app ads consume a lot of energy, and can be a serious drain on the already limited battery life of a mobile device.


Looking at the top 15 free Windows Phone apps, researchers found that the energy consumed by in-app advertising was very nearly one quarter of the total energy used by the app – an amazingly high percentage!

Prashanth Mohan is a graduate student at University of California at Berkeley. Working together with Suman Nath and Oriana Riva of Microsoft Research, they have published a research paper titled: “Prefetching mobile ads: Can advertising systems afford it?”.
[see download link below]

This paper looks at the actual energy that is used up by today’s standard in-app mobile advertising, and discusses an approach to cut down this battery drain.

The reason that it takes so much energy to download a few quite small files has to do with the fundamental way a phone is designed. Basically, most of the time when the app wants to download an ad, it must first “wake up” the radio communications part of the phone. And as the communications remains on for some time, it requires quite a bit of energy.

One possible way to reduce the amount of energy required for in-app advertising would be to “pre-fetch” ads. In other words, an app could download several ads at the same time. This way the app could display a series of ads over a period of time without having to wake up the radio communications part of the mobile.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t fit very well with the real-time nature of today’s mobile ad networks. Usually, each time a client wants to display an ad there is a real-time auction of the ad space. This is shown in the diagram below which is from the paper.

Pre-fetching ads can cause problems in this system. For example, the ads may be fetched and charged for, but not be actually shown to the client. On the other hand, the ad may be seen by the client, but not at the appropriate time. Or in fact the total number of times an ad is shown may go over the advertiser’s budgeted amount.

The full paper goes into a more detailed view of this, and concludes that pre-fetching could in fact save half the energy while causing very few real problems.

]]> http://www.mobiadnews.com/?p=5956 Thu, 20 Sep 2012 18:36:01 +0000 http://www.mobiadnews.com/?p=5956 Smaato, one of the worlds leading mobile ad networks, has released its latest mobile advertising pricing guide, designed to improve the monetisation of mobile by app developers and advertisers.

The results showed a wide range of prices around the world, with the US being much cheaper than Europe!

The figures for the first quarter of 2012 use the Enhanced Cost Per Click (eCPC) average as a percentage per country, with the USA setting the baseline of 100.

The results showed the power of the western European market, with both Italy and Germany in the region of 150 percent.

Ragnar Kruse, CEO of Smaato, said: “The Smaato Index indicates that app developers can now make more money in Western Europe than in the U.S. While for advertisers, the U.S. is now an incredible bargain as they can reach 30% of the U.S. market through smartphones at 30% lower cost than in Western Europe.”

Smaato also notes that the marketplace in Oceania is growing significantly, while India and China combined now have as many smartphones as the USA, hinting at the future compelling, untapped areas.

Kruse concluded with a startling suggestion: “Rapid smartphone adoption in the U.S. means advertisers will be able to reach 50% of the US population at Christmas 2012 through mobile advertising.”

]]> http://www.mobiadnews.com/?p=5824 Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:03:01 +0000 http://www.mobiadnews.com/?p=5824 Based on documents filed by the Europeans Commission for Consultation, three of the UK’s largest mobile networks have cast aside their differences to form a mobile advertising network.

O2, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere (created in 2010 by the merge of Orange UK and T-Mobile) will create a joint venture to offer brands the ability to capitalize on the demographic targeting information that they possess, in order to place more highly targeted ads onto mobile devices.

This news comes seems to be the latest attempt by operators to increase their advertising revenues. UK ad spend reached a record £203 million in 2011, while the global mobile payments market is looking set to hit $500 billion within the next two years.

These targeting capabilities could be a real threat to the offering of the current independent ad networks. One of the key benefits of mobile advertising is the ‘one-to-one’ nature of the media – the ability to know certain things about a consumer and deliver a relevant, targeted, sometimes personalized message directly to them. Any ad network that can offer improved targeting will have a strong advantage in the market.

The joint venture aims to offer the following to advertisers and agencies:

• Push SMS : Brands can contact the joint venture partners to send out SMS messages to customers opted-in for marketing messages across the three networks.
• Coupons and vouchers: Brands can place offers, coupons and loyalty cards within the JV’s mobile wallet and related apps, and have the ability to track redemption.
• Display advertising (own assets): The JV will provide a portfolio of ad space across its assets, which include the joint-branded mobile wallet, mobile internet portals and apps.
• Display advertising (third party assets): The JV will also be able to sell advertising across third party publishers’ mobile websites.

This figure represents nearly half the US$29 billion Google generated from online ad sales last year and shows that the mobile platform is closing the gap on web based platforms.

This report is in line with the prediction that mobile will eventually draw level with online platforms before overtaking them due to changing consumer behaviour.

According to the report Google already brings in 2.5 billion from Mobile Ads with much of this coming from search and display ads that Google serves on Apple devices. But their dominance will only increase thanks to all the new products that they are releasing and as the consumer uptake for these services continues to grow.

Google currently represents some 90% of mobile search, but much of their expected growth will be based on new products that have recently been released:

• Social media service Google+ is expected to generate huge amount of mobile inventory as social media users typically do a lot of browsing
• Google Wallet, the new mobile payments scheme
• Offers, the daily deals service will also be very mobile focused and a good platform for mobile advertising.

Just over three years ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was interviewed on CNBC, and he stated that eventually Google can make more money from mobile than it does on the desktop.

“We can make more money in mobile than we do in the desktop eventually… and the reason is the mobile computer is more targeted. Think about it: you carry your phone, and your phone knows all about you… we can do a very, very targeted ad. Over time we will make more money from mobile advertising… not now, but over time.”

SmartPay is intended to help mobile app developers and content providers to expand their business and monetize their users across multiple international markets.

Initially, the SmartPay solution will offer direct to carrier billing as a payment method. However, InMobi has plans to expand by the end of the year to include other forms of mobile payments including Credit Cards, PayPal and local mobile wallets.

Some of the key advantages offered by SmartPay include:

• Analytics tools that offer transaction performance insights that help clients maximize conversion in every country
• One time, one place integration for easy monetization
• Integration with the InMobi ad network providing post click performance optimization from ad impression to purchase

The service is currently available to over a billion consumers in the US, UK, Germany, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Malaysia and will be available in a further 23 by the end of the year.

“Our mission is to connect businesses and developers to consumers around the world with innovative, best of breed mobile technology and services. InMobi SmartPay will help us with that journey and our evolution as a company to be a key technology enabler within the global mobile ecosystem, especially for the developer community” Said Naveen Tewari, CEO of InMobi.

Most mobile phones are now capable of playing video – this study provides information on the effectiveness of using mobile video for advertising, and offers some “best practice” guidelines.

Rhythm NewMedia was one of the early pioneers in mobile video advertising, originally putting together ad-funded mobile video content channels for operators. More recently they have evolved into a more pure play mobile video ad network, serving billions of video ads across a wide variety of publisher sites including CBS, ABC, NBC Universal, Fox, Warner Bros., Discovery, and Viacom.

(For more on Rhythm NewMedia, read this MobiAD interview with Ujjal Kohli, CEO of Rhythm New Media).

Rhythm recently authored a white paper Best Practices in Mobile Video Advertising which we found quite interesting.

Not limited to mobile video watchers

One popular misconception is that mobile video advertising is limited to those consumers who are already watching video on their mobile. Actually, almost all consumers can be reached, with advertisers able to deliver a video experience when a consumer launches an application or beats a level of a game, when tapping a banner or, traditionally, in-stream, when watching a video.

Multiple video ad units

There are also several different ways to package the video and to place it into the user experience. This white paper looks at several different video ad units, and details the completion rates (% of consumers that watch the complete video) and click-through rates (% of consumers that click on the video for further interaction). There are also general guidelines on the best use of each ad unit.

To find out more about mobile video advertising, including Rhythm’s suggested Best Practices, download the full white paper below.

]]> http://www.mobiadnews.com/?p=4857 Sat, 11 Sep 2010 19:54:16 +0000 http://www.mobiadnews.com/?p=4857 Quite a few people have wondered if the income stream from mobile advertising could be sufficient to run a business, as it is usually very difficult to get actual data about the revenues from publishers.

Now mobile application and games developer MobilityWare has announced that it earned $300,000 during June 2010 from ads in its various titles on Greystripe’s advertising network.

MobilityWare has released internal information previously – in July 2009, they announced that they were earning a monthly average of just over $10,000 in income from its highest grossing app, Word Warp.

In this recent announcement, MobilityWare has announced that they earned $298,309 during the month of June from their catalogue 17 titles, clearly answering the question if ad funded applications and games can provide a substantial source of income.

Erica Chriss, VP of strategy and business development for Greystripe said “MobilityWare’s success shows the strength of the free ad-supported business model for app developers, especially in the current competitive climate in which they are competing with hundreds of thousands of other apps for user attention..”

“We’ve tried many ad networks and Greystripe has delivered the best overall eCPM. They also have a great team. Their responsiveness makes it easy to work with them,” Dave Yonamine, VP of marketing for MobilityWare said.