With mobile display building a head of steam, Marc Theermann, VP Mobile AdMeld, discusses the opportunity around RTB in mobile - and how real-time buys will be executed in the channel.

Is there a lot of hype surrounding Mobile RTB? What are you seeing in this emerging market?

There’s always a lot of hype in this space, but the reality for our publishers is that mobile RTB is an increasingly important part of their revenue strategy. The primary reason for this growth is that media buyers and trading desks have been eager to extend the programmatic buying process, of which RTB is a subset, into mobile. In addition, over a dozen mobile Demand Side Platforms (DSP) are pushing into the market with new ad dollars.

On a panel at the Yieldex conference in New York, Josh Jacobs, President of Accuen said it best: ‘Mobile will be a huge part of what we do going forward, and every publisher needs to develop a monetization strategy around it.’

Is it difficult to execute real-time buys across dynamic mobile inventory?

Making programmatic buying decisions on mobile is not trivial from a technical standpoint. The lack of persistent and unique identifiers (i.e. cookies), particularly on iOS handsets, presents challenges that are unique to mobile.

In a way, it reminds me of a movie called 50 First Dates in which a woman with memory loss falls in love with the same “stranger” each time she sees him. Robbed of any past knowledge about him, she uses only the information at hand. Given the current state of technology, the same could be said for mobile RTB buyers and their evaluation of each impression.

Because of this, certain campaigns work better than others in mobile RTB. Retargeting, for instance, is something that does not work very well today, but there are three other campaign types that do, and they are prevalent when we analyze bid density on our platform.

- Performance campaigns
- Branding campaigns
- Geo-targeted campaigns

Unlike retargeting (which typically requires the use of a cookie) success in the above campaigns can be achieved by passing audience data to buyers in the bid request.

How can the marketer get enough information without data?

The trick is to empower publishers to pass each buyer the right information in the bid request so they can make informed buying decisions. This information is often audience data that originates from publisher registrations, not third party providers. Assuming the appropriate consumer opt-ins and consent, here are some of the data types that can be passed:

- First party registration data from the publisher (age, gender, home zip)
- Information that can be inferred from the header (operating system, screen size, carrier, IP)
- An encrypted hardware ID that can be used for performance tracking, frequency capping, and re-targeting
- Location
- Application category, user ratings, number of reviews

What is next for mobile buying?

In 2012, location-based advertising will begin to play a very important role in the ecosystem. Our buyers continue 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. We encourage all our publishers to start collecting opt-in location based data so they can capture these spends.

What is the biggest benefit to the publisher?

There are really three main publisher benefits from programmatic buying on mobile. First, upward price pressure from exposing their inventory to more demand and competition. Second, a deeper understanding of the value of their inventory through transparency into buyer and advertiser behaviors. And third, reduced channel conflict due to better controls. All of the publishers we work with who are employing these tools, including mobile RTB, are extremely excited about these benefits, and we’re looking forward to bringing this to more publishers in the future.