At a town hall meeting, industry leaders discussed the need for innovation in data, creative and measurement in the growing mobile programmatic platform.
The town hall, held March 16 at the offices of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in New York, was prompted by a familiar trend/dilemma in the world of ad tech: the emergence of a new and rapidly growing market before the industry has had a chance to sufficiently adapt. In the case of programmatic mobile, the industry has been working diligently on how best to collect, measure and analyze data to help realize the platform’s great potential.
The meeting was born of the recent work of the IAB’s Mobile Programmatic Buying Working Group, which was co-chaired by Rob Kramer, GM Mobile at Open X, and Brian Murphy, Senior Director of Publisher Relations at Yahoo! It took place on the eve of the release of the IAB’s Mobile Programmatic Playbook, which is designed to delineate the differences between programmatic buying in desktop and mobile.
Other participants in the meeting included Kirk McDonald, President of PubMatic; Matevz Klanjsek, co-founder and Chief Product Officer for Celtra; and Richy Glasberg, COO of Medialets. The moderator was Carl Kalapesi, the IAB’s VP, Industry Initiatives.
The attendees noted that one of the challenges of programmatic mobile has been the ability to leverage data in mobile, across both auction and non-auction platforms—an issue that poses a major challenge that exists in relation to desktop. Where on desktop browsers cookies have been a universal source of relevancy and accountability data when marketers are planning campaigns, enabling advertisers to target in an efficient and successful way, mobile is a different animal. And while many different ways exist to bring data into the fold and make it more efficient, an industry-leading data-management product has yet to emerge.
Another challenge unique to mobile, as cited by some of the meeting’s participants, is the struggle among app developers have to natively integrate ad-related software development kits (SDKs) – specialized code that enables apps to call, run, and count advertising. The added code can affect app performance, and updates to the SDK require the app developer to arrange an update with Apple’s App Store or Google Play.
Data discussion
All agreed that the absence of tracking cookies on mobile makes it difficult to collect, interpret and report on data in a timely and efficient manner. Further complicating matters is the need to differentiate between the mobile web and mobile apps. However, everyone also agreed that mobile offers a great opportunity for the industry, especially mobile apps. Recent statistics from comScore show that apps account for 88 percent of time spent on smartphones and 82 percent on tablets. Apps can offer very valuable data about individual users who have intimate connections with their devices. As such, mobile app inventory is currently monetized 30 to 50 percent higher than mobile web inventory.
Of the five key mobile data attributes, location data and device ID were found by PubMatic to produce the richest, most powerful lift. As of September 2014, publishers on the PubMatic platform experienced an average eCPM increase of 124% with the addition of location data and 275% with the addition of both location and device ID data.
Programmatic creative
Also discussed was the importance of incorporating a wide variety of targeted creative into the programmatic process. One of the attendees showed a mobile ad he was served for an airline at an airport. The relevance of the ad was clear, he said, but the creative consisted of a small, horizontal banner featuring nothing more than the airline’s logo. When he clicked on it, he said, he was directed to a desktop site that wasn’t at all user-friendly.
This led to talk about the need to programmatically automate the serving of a variety of customized or tailored ads that take into account not only audience data and location, but other contextual data such as time of day and weather conditions. For example, a Dunkin Donuts campaign with programmatic creative could serve ads featuring breakfast items in the morning and lunch items in the afternoon, or hot drinks on a cold day and iced drinks on a hot day. This showed how important mobile ad targeting technology could be in leveraging multiple streams of data to enable the right message to be delivered to the right user at the right time and place.
Measurement morass
Another attendee pointed out that mobile ad spending has lagged behind other channels that because accurate measurement has been a problem in the mobile space. The lack of tracking cookies and the inability to use Adobe Flash make true measurement on mobile very difficult—or at least very different from what digital marketers have grown accustomed to on desktop.
The sheer variety of operating system varieties and devices also creates challenges. In the first six months of 2014, Medialets saw over 116,000 unique device/OS combinations. This massive fragmentation makes creating, delivering, and counting ads much more challenging than the relatively homogeneous desktop environment.
But speakers predicted that as measurement technology improves over the next three years, the industry could expect to see mobile ad spend to increase. And while 28% of mobile ad impressions came via programmatic in 2014, that number can be expected rise to more than 50% in the next couple of years.
