The Unique Value of an Integrated Mobile Advertising Platform

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1 The Unique Value of an Integrated Mobile Advertising Platform

2 Where Are The Integrated Mobile Advertising Platforms? The advertising technology boom of 5-10 years ago gave birth to a host of innovative companies and business models, yet also gave rise to an industry that is leaden with confusing acronyms, poor reporting data and a host of features that too often masquerade as fully formed products. It s certainly not difficult to mislead and confuse within our industry, and ad tech vendors are notoriously excellent at doing so particularly once ad servers stopped being sexy, and started feeling more like commodities. Those vendors who focused on building truly integrated platforms, on the other hand, and not simply a motley bunch of unexciting features stitched together, are the ones who ve positioned themselves to lead the ongoing transformation of mobile advertising and monetization. Those who did so with mobile in mind from day one are also uniquely on the vanguard of where the users are, and where they re headed, from this point forward. It wasn t necessarily an easy call for Smaato to make a mobile-first, fully integrated advertising platform. Ad tech companies who started in desktop, rather than mobile, continued to make so much money from traditional desktop digital advertising that they lacked the incentives to turn their attention to mobile and to mobile apps. Reliant on cookies, and the unique desktop-based targeting and retargeting that comes from said reliance, many vendors therefore shied away from mobile, or dipped a tentative toe into mobile web advertising while safely ignoring app developers and their unique monetization needs. Smaato s stubborn insistence on being mobile-first and mobile-only has paid off. We have now arrived at widely dispersed supply and demand on mobile. A kid who develops a mobile game in his garage in Kansas, then releases it into the various app stores of the world, will have downloads from Portugal to the Philippines by the end of the night and those new customers will want to see highly-targeted ads that are relevant to them, and not merely to the app developer in Kansas. Why We Created SPX It wasn t always this way, but the signs were all there. When we set out to rebuild our platform in 2014, we wanted to try to build a more perfect ad selection process than what we d been seeing. As advertising budgets moved to more programmatic buying, we felt the need to make that a primary way for ads to be delivered inside the ad server, while giving the publisher every control over the RTB ad exchange like they would their own direct line items. 1.

3 Enter the Smaato Publisher Platform, or SPX. Our platform is a free, full-featured, self-serve publisher ad server built from the ground up for a mobile-first world. SPX enables app developers and digital publishers to immediately monetize their properties by delivering target consumers to advertisers in real time. The Unique Value of Dynamic Demand Much of this idea is embedded in the concept we call Dynamic Demand, which is Smaato s way of allowing every type of demand to compete for every single impression request. In the early days of ad exchanges, almost every company split their RTB (real-time bidding) and mediation layers. If the auction didn t clear at a certain price, it was pushed down to the ad networks. Yet this model was inefficient when dealing with ad networks that were not guaranteed to fill yet might have ephemeral demand that matched a specific ad request. The diagram you see here describes a way of viewing ecpm, or TrueCPM. Most ad exchanges work in this way, in which a high bid is sometimes ignored in favor of an uncommitted ad network. SSPs are very concerned with this waterfall scenario with ad networks, as it increases the chance for latency-induced discrepancy. It is often assumed you will lose 3% to 6% of your ad requests while traversing a chain like this, per network tried. 2.

4 Smaato s goals with Dynamic Demand 1. Create real-time competition between the three sales channels (Direct, Exchange, Networks) for every single impression 2. Always choose the highest value demand source (while fulfilling direct campaigns) 3. Maximum publisher revenue and fill Results 82% 68% Fill-Rate ecpm Integrated platform = powerful controls for publishers Let s not forget whom we re serving here. Marketers are often perceived as running the world. They are certainly a vital part of the equation. They generate the advertising that pays the bills. But the reality is that without content, without publishers, there is no world. Without quality, engaging content there are no users, which is what marketers are paying for. Enabling publishers, who create the lifeblood of the industry, to be economically healthy is what keeps the entire ecosystem healthy. This industry needs platforms and systems that empower the publisher to take control of his or her business, and take control of it in a manner that is both intuitive and powerful. They need integrated systems that provide an understanding of their audience that had previously only been available to the buy-side. Moreover, they need monetization systems built expressly for mobile, yet extensible to any environment and any screen. With SPX, we ve given publishers the ability to control how the ad exchange can compete with their ad-serving stack. They can run it as traditional remnant fill, or make it compete with their direct sold campaigns. Giving control back to publishers allows for greater transparency in how and at what prices the ad exchange is able to compete for inventory. Managing every form of demand from a single, integrated platform SPX puts full monetization controls directly in the hands of the publisher, and connects them to Smaato s RTB ad exchange (SMX) and complete ad network mediation stack. Through SPX, Smaato connects publishers to over 240 Demand Side Platforms and over 150 directly integrated ad networks and counting. 3.

5 SPX also allows publishers to easily integrate their own ad network relationships and then manage these external networks from within the same interface. SPX will auto-optimize these networks based on performance, enable network reporting and automatically include them in the Dynamic Demand ad selection logic, further maximizing publisher yield. Ease of use for maximum monetization SPX features advanced targeting options, easy-to-use reporting, and a flexible, easy to understand user interface. It also offers publishers full pricing controls, a very simple three-step setup process, and built-in optimization automation. All while charging no ad serving or technology fees. With the combination of Dynamic Demand, full publisher controls, and management of any type of buying model, SPX delivers a complete mobile monetization solution to app developers and mobile web publishers of any size. 4.

6 How an integrated platform scales to the new world of demand Let s talk about what scale means in this world of local supply and global demand. In terms of mobile monetization, scale is not about how many devices are out there. Nor is it about the number of apps or users. The critical need with respect to scale for mobile publishers has to do with being able to reach the exploding number of devices and users around the world. A fairly obvious statement, yet how does one actually achieve it? By targeting inventory to run through integrated, independent systems. The walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and others will no doubt stand and continue their vertical dominance. However, one only needs to pull out a smartphone and take a look at the home screen: we ve just described two little icons. Most users may have somewhere between ten and fifty or more to choose from. The mobile world, and especially the app ecosystem, completely democratizes this universe. Remember Flappy Birds? It was actually taken down because the attention was too great. This would be an almost unfathomable move for any desktop publisher, ever. Conclusion: mobile monetization starts here It s clear that we re now starting to see real money spent specifically mobile-first. Advertising budgets are beginning to consider mobile as a, and sometimes the, primary channel. The next Flappy Birds is continuously around the corner. The only way to keep up with the rising tide is with global, independent, mobile-first integrated platforms that easily connect these publishers to the seemingly endless budgets trying to find them. Mobile monetization for today and tomorrow starts with a platform like Smaato s powerful integrated combination of ad server + RTB exchange + mature network mediation. SPX may not be the only game in town, but the game is changing at the speed of mobile, and that truly makes this an exciting time. 5.

7 About Smaato Smaato is the global real-time advertising platform for mobile publishers and app developers. Smaato runs the world s largest independent mobile ad exchange and has been pioneering innovative, mobile-first solutions for publishers since Smaato s SPX is a global, intelligent, and free to use self-service platform built to solve the mobile monetization challenge for its over 80,000 mobile app developers and publishers. The company s worldwide reach and extensive network of demand partners provides a massive inventory of advertisers with one single integration. Smaato manages up to 6 billion ads every day around the world, across over 500 million mobile users each month. Smaato Inc. HEADQUARTERS 240 Stockton St, 10th Floor San Francisco, CA T: +1 (650) americas@smaato.com Empire State Building 350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 4210 New York, NY T: +1 (646) americas@smaato.com EMEA Valentinskamp 70, Emporio 19th Floor Hamburg, Germany T: +49 (40) emea@smaato.com APAC 333 North Bridge Rd. #05-00 Singapore T: apac@smaato.com