New data management technology holds the key to tomorrow's ad campaigns, says Alex Rahaman
If you are one of the remaining ad agency staffers who don’t believe in the power of mobile advertising, look away now, as one of the biggest barriers to mobile advertising becoming a significant part of most client campaigns has just been removed.
This ‘barrier’ is the frightening level of complexity that, to most people, is the single worst aspect of trying to create and execute advertising campaigns on mobile. Compared to broadcast and digital, where there are simple standards and tried and trusted ways of measuring engagement, the mobile advertising industry still looks to most like the wild west with every man and woman for themselves. Recent agency polling by mobile analysts MobileSquared found that the lack of streamlined ad serving on mobile, coupled with effective and clear tracking and reporting, were the biggest hurdles to agency staff trying to add more mobile elements to their campaigns.
While it’s true mobile as a still-evolving advertising platform has injected new levels of creativity for brands to communicate with consumers, mobile also brings significant overheads in the shape of complexity and fragmentation that media buyers and planners simply aren’t used to. The multitude of different mobile ad networks, ad formats and mobile handsets means that mobile is a constantly shifting channel. That’s enough to prevent all except a few big agencies to invest heavily in mobile - most agencies will typically have a single ‘mobile expert’ who is expected to cover all bases, which means that decisions about mobile too often fall to people who don’t have the passion, know-how or time.
Supply and demand
In the online world, the fact that the planning and buying process is centrally managed by a Demand Side Platform - effectively, a way to automate much of the detail of the buying and tracking of online advertising inventory - is nothing new.
These platforms assimilate all of the available web data to construct and deliver an online campaign from start to finish with the minimum of fuss. But in the mobile world, DSPs that could do the same thing with mobile inventory simply didn’t exist until very recently, meaning that the planning, buying and evaluation of a campaign would take several days to piece together. That was a deal-breaker for all but the most dedicated agencies, and that’s why StrikeAd set out to build the first mobile-specific DSP. Without it, mobile advertising would continue to be a dark art understood only by the few, and ignored by the many. So with the arrival of mobile DSPs like StrikeAd Fusion, the inclusion of automated planning, inventory buying and management, campaign optimisation and transparent, real-time measurement allows the execution of national and international campaigns within minutes and hours and not days as before.
The introduction of a Mobile Demand Side Platform delivers a single console through which agencies can plan, execute and evaluate hundreds of mobile campaigns, minute-by-minute, on a national or global basis. It means agencies can build a campaign once and deploy automatically across multiple networks, publish to the target network, and even set a spending cap as well as viewing cap. It also means that there is a huge increase in the efficiency of a mobile campaign, as it’s possible to optimise every part of the process. DSPs also mean that location-based advertising becomes an option for any campaign; StrikeAd has partnered with location specialists Rippll to seamlessly integrate its technology into StrikeAd Fusion. So not only does a mobile DSP make mobile advertising quick and easy, it also acts as a gateway to some really exciting capabilities which are unique to mobile.
New tools
Recent research from the Internet Advertising Bureau showed that agencies expect mobile to make up 11% of their total spend on digital in 2011, almost a 300% increase in the 4% it accounted for in 2010. It also found that this year the amount of client campaigns that include some kind of mobile component is set to double, from 95 to 19%. So clearly, there is more than enough interest in greater use of mobile, from both brands and agencies. The fact that with platforms like StrikeAd Fusion mobile advertising has reached a degree of parity with online can’t be underestimated. By giving media planners and buyers tools which they are familiar with means that they can better understand the role that mobile can play as part of wider campaigns. Effectively, the fault line that existed between online and mobile has been removed, opening up the possibility for all campaigns to include a mobile element. That matches the brand-led demand that organisations like the IAB and others have clearly identified.
The arrival of simple and effective planning tools for mobile has finally brought it within reach of any brand, creative or agency that wants to leverage this brilliant medium. The ability to plan and execute a mobile campaign efficiently and to buy with the aid of a Demand Side Platform means that even the most risk-averse brand can experiment, knowing that they can control and measure the ROI of their campaign in real time. The biggest winners in all this will be the brands themselves, because DSPs will deliver better results for them at the same cost - a case of getting the same budget to work a lot harder and smarter. Media planners and buyers will also be able to drastically cut the time it takes to build campaigns - even more so if they make use of the managed service model that StrikeAd can offer. The ability to build campaigns faster and deliver much better ROI means that, finally, the campaigns we can create to target mobile devices are accessible as the devices themselves have become.
Alex Rahaman, CEO, StrikeAd
www.strikead.com