In the last blog post, we talked about a panel put together to provide brands and marketers with some insight into how to capitalize on the fast-growing mobile market.
To provide some context about the mobile market and the panel, I talked with Jennifer Lum, a Canadian, who started Adelphic Mobile, a marketing platform that has attracted 250 million unique visitors and more than six billion pageviews since its launched a year ago.
Can you provide some more info about Adelphia?
We are working on mobile advertising model that we believe will unlock value in the mobile advertising market. What is probably known is that consumption rates of mobile media are growing but the mobile ad spend is not growing at the same rate. There is something blocking it. Mobile media isn’t currently target-able in a way that marketers are accustomed to buying through other digital channels. Right now, a lot of mobile inventory is described by devices, carriers and networks. Marketers are not thinking I will buy an iPhone 4s on Rogers or an Android device on Telus. They are thinking “I am Coke, and for this campaign, I want to target males of this demo.” If you have an iPhone4, that’s nice but they are naturally thinking of ads along those lines. We are bringing audience based advertising to mobile which we think will pair buyers and sellers.
Have brands and advertisers got their head around mobile yet?
I think the mature brands and agencies have moved past the point of testing. They have been planning and budgeting for a couple years in mobile but there are so many more players and budgets in the market that aren’t yet truly engaged in mobile. We want to help make it easier to make it easier for brand to connect with people in mobile. There is no lack of inventory or interest on behalf of brands, we have to raise confidence for advertisers and deliver good ROI and a lot of insightful data.
What are mobile ad formats?
There are a number of companies doing a good job pushing mobile rich media into the market, and some are full-page interstitial and some are banners that expand. The adoption rate for those kinds of campaigns is starting to pick up but less than 15% of the media being delivered is rich media.
What about Facebook and its mobile challenges?
It is really interesting to see the small twist in their mobile monetization strategy. Some of the complexity comes into play with them because they are unwilling to support the standard display unit in mobile. They are heavily focused on helping to drive mobile app installs. They are considering some of the data plays but they can’t tap into the massive audience they have and monetize traditional display. What is the right ad unit to help them start monetizing that data?
