Editorial Articles

Julia Smith of Jemm Group explains why 2012 will be the year of mobile RTB

Real time bidding (RTB) is growing rapidly in the online space and mobile is now likely to follow the same path. Mobile RTB activity has grown significantly over the last six months and, although volumes are still smaller than traditional RTB, mobile is growing at a much faster rate.

In October 2010, there were 37 billion smartphone ad impressions in October 2010. One year on, this number has grown to just under 250 billion ad impressions and a vast number of these impressions are now being traded through mobile RTB.

The development of RTB has been adopted by most publishers as it enables them to earn more from the audiences they work so hard to attract for their content. As mobile has become such an integral part of consumer lives, adding mobile RTB makes ad networks more effective for publishers.

However much mobile RTB continues to grow, its adoption will not be without its challenges. Marketers are continually questioning how easy it is to execute real-time buying across mobile inventory. Most notably, the mobile web is cookie-less but there are many other opportunities available through mobile, such as campaigns like geo-targeting that work incredibly well on mobile.

Geo-targeting is something we see as a major trend going in to 2012. Location-based advertising will begin to play a very important role in the ecosystem. We are continuing to see very strong engagement for these types of ads, and as a result we think very large budgets will be flowing into location targeting.

Re-targeting is still relatively difficult to achieve on RTB mobile, but there are three successful areas of programmatic trading that work when passing audience data to buyers in the bid request. These are performance, branding and geo-targeted campaigns.

As with display RTB, the more data that can be passed, the higher the potential eCPM is achieved. Types of data currently being passed include first party data from the publisher, frequency capping, operating systems and location.

It is all about the transparency in advertising behaviour to better utilise inventory and this can be done effectively through mobile.

The challenges of mobile RTB are few compared to its benefits; combining traditional RTB and mobile RTB will lead to better results and greater profits for advertisers. What’s more, it can help brands offer customers a much more relevant experience.

It can also help increase eCPM for publishers and raise demand by exposing their inventory to more buyers. Mobile publishers can also have a better understanding of the value of their inventory. There needs to be large scale of inventory being made available on mobile RTB platforms to allow for competitive bidding. Transparency and controls on pricing will also need to be used to open up new sources of supply and demand.

The increased demand in mobile RTB has led to the launch of OpenRTB Mobile, a sub-committee within OpenRTB. Their mission is to create common rules on block lists, taxonomies and functionality. They are also looking into specific issues such as data overlays and web vs application nuances.

It is expected that OpenRTB Mobile will be publishing a full RTB API specifications and this initiative is being led by the following members: Nexage, Pubmatic, Smaato, DataXu, Fluent Mobile, Jumptap and [x +1].

2012 is expected to be the year of mobile RTB. To ensure that this growth is successful for both the supply and demand side, the platforms need to ensure that the technology works across all mobile applications, improve geo-targeting for roaming mobile users and deliver on the promises that RTB can deliver real performance for brands and increased revenue for the publishers.