EMEA > Mobile Ad Exchange

For the many pundits who anxiously forecasted the ‘Year of Mobile’, 2012 has provided some relief. Figures released by the IAB in October, showing a 132% increase in ad spend on mobile, suggested that advertisers are shifting from experimenting with mobile to making it an integral part of their media spend; but what are the key trends and developments that will affect mobile advertising in the year ahead? Here are five suggestions:

1. I expect to see further strong growth in mobile advertising. Figures from First Partner support this view, suggesting that mobile ad spend in the UK will reach £831.3m in 2013, up 63% on this year, with search and display continuing to dominate. This growth in revenue will come not only from advertisers investing more in mobile, but also from increasingly switching their ad budgets away from online and more traditional media budgets. According to the most recent IAB/PwC digital ad spend study, digital ad spend (online, mobile and tablet) now accounts for 30% of the total ad market, and while mobile alone still accounts for around 2% of total ad spend, this will start to change rapidly. As a result, the chasm between mobile usage and ad spend will narrow considerably.

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Originally reported by Adzine

Sixteen and a half million Germans play online games, according to the Federal Association of Interactive Entertainment Software (BIU), so it’s no surprise the industry’s biggest trade fair, gamescom, is in Cologne this year. (It started on Wednesday and is continuing through the weekend.) After double-digit growth rates in recent years, rates continue to escalate for free online games, which have now become established, financially strong and hungry for new users. This growth as given rise to three new companies: NEODAU, Traffic Captain and HitFox.

The market is still highly dynamic, even if the initial social games euphoria has subsided somewhat. According to the Facebook, social games reach 235 million people every month. The number of Daily Active Users (DAU) has reached 167 million (Source: AppStats), of which 51 million are on the market leader Zynga, followed by King.com, with 10.6 million players. Wooga from Berlin is currently at 7.2 million DAU.

€ 2.50 Per Registered Player

The operators of browser- or client-games, such as Gameforge, InnoGames, Bigpoint, upjers, Travian or Frogster also managed an impressive sum for fresh players. The annual budgets for major publishers are moving in the millions, and following an upward trend. “In the free-to-play segment there have been extremely high growth rates over the past three to four years. At the same time the increase in prices for new users have now approximately doubled in Germany, Austria and Switzerland,” said Stefan Hinz, Managing Director of gaming network NEODAU. Where a new user was previously 80 cents, today it can cost up to €2.50 to lure a player in desirable markets like Germany.

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In 2011, mobile saw spend reach $3.9 billion globally and 2012 is expected to hit $6.2 billion. “This is the year of mobile,” most will say. It is here – and I think everyone may have felt a little underwhelmed by it.

There hasn’t been a massive parade, no free USB sticks shaped like an iPhone, and certainly no trophy taking the shape of a gold encrusted Motorola Dynatac 8000x (made famous by Gordon Gekko) engraved with “we did it”. Furthermore, mobile spend didn’t overtake TV spend.

However we have seen HTML5 become more important and we have seen businesses built around mobile, ad networks open up mobile inventory, DSP’s for mobile specifically come into existence, such as Strike Ad, and VC investors say, “I need a mobile start-up – stat!” CB Insights confirmed that it has reported on 102 mobile VC deals in 2011, and within those, any company with a photo or video-focus saw up to 30% of those deals.

It’s been a pretty exciting few months. Technology continues to develop and proliferate, with the likes of NFC (Near Field Communication) and 5G testing. Adfonic’s second quarter AdMetrics report shows that iOS saw its market SOV decrease from 45% in Q1 to 34% in Q2, whilst Android’s share increased from 38% to 46% over the same period. UDID’s are no more on iOS, and it looks as though Apple will roll out their own tracking tool. Cookies probably won’t come to mobile in the way we imagine for Android, or other devices for that matter. Fingerprinting scares me, as there still seems to be no regulatory authority behind it and no one seems to want to step up to the plate. There have been a number of articles highlighting both the benefits and the concerns around device fingerprinting. If you’re not familiar with fingerprinting, it’s a process in which a user’s device settings are collated and then assigned a unique ID – much like a cookie – to use for tracking purposes. These settings can range from brightness settings to browser settings, time zone and fonts. It requires many more data points and therefore is not as easy for the consumer to opt out of. Until we see a regulatory company behind device fingerprinting I don’t believe it will get the seal of approval from the wider industry.

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It’s the biggest data-driven advertising event in Europe. It’s the event that even has its own acronym. ATS London is now in its third year, and the line-up of speakers and content is the best yet. Often copied – A LOT! – but never equalled, ATS London brings together the best in the global online ad industry to discuss the latest trends and developments in the space. And this year is no exception.

It is clear that our industry is moving beyond the mess of the LumaScape to a platform-centric world, and this certainly is one of the key areas being explored by ATS London this year. The full-day programme will be organised into three core themes: brand, application and big data. All of these are effectively shaping the data-driven ad space, and speakers and participants on the day will explore these issues in more depth.

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Adfonic released last week their Q2 Global AdMetrics report, the second in a quarterly series, announcing, among other things, Android has beaten iOS for the first time as the most popular platform for mobile advertisers. The report further breaks down metrics by region, device, demographic and vertical.

Paul Childs, CMO of Adfonic, comments: “The growing dominance of Android across Adfonic’s global advertising marketplace reflects wider industry trends that we are seeing from other sources, and highlights widespread consumer adoption of the increasing number of Android-powered devices. Together, Android and iOS devices now account for 80% of Adfonic’s global ad inventory. This is largely because their smartphones and tablets have the most compelling user interfaces, comprising touchscreens, geolocation features and attractive displays. They are fulfilling their tremendous advertising potential to show engaging ad formats, such as rich media.”

Gareth Davies, Commercial Operations Director, Somo Global, adds: “Adfonic’s commitment to offering robust and insightful performance metrics, in the form of their Q2 2012 Global AdMetrics Report, is a boon for mobile marketers and benchmarks important demographic and consumer trends in mobile. The significant CTR uplift from gender, geo and channel targeting highlight the significant value buyers achieve with targeted media buys, a real focus for Somo as we plan and optimise against a wide range of KPIs for our broad range of forward thinking, global brands. Given the need for more transparency in mobile media, and the value of data driven insights, Adfonic’s recent report is most welcome.”

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We’ve all heard the pitch. Mobile is going gangbusters. Smartphones and tablets are creating a paradigm shift in the way we communicate, access content, engage with products, services and ultimately the world around us.

According to Mary Meeker, the app economy is worth $10bn and is growing 100% year-on-year. Angry Birds alone has seen more than 600 million downloads and mobile visitors to Twitter now account for 55% of the site’s total traffic.

Set this against a backdrop of declining PC shipments, as well as cannibalised desktop traffic as consumers vote with their fingers, and it’s easy to see why internet juggernauts like Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are all investing heavily in a bid to rule supreme over the holy trinity of hardware, software and services that make up our mobile world.

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Shane Shevlin is Director of Business Development EMEA at IPONWEB. Here Shevlin discusses the IPONWEB solution in Europe, how the company works with ad tech vendors, and the critical role its technology plays in the real-time advertising eco-system.

For those unaware of the IPONWEB solution in Europe, can you give an overview of your current offering?

IPONWEB is essentially the tech provider behind many of the leading Ad tech platforms in the RTB space. We build and operate customised media trading systems that enable our clients to take advantage of RTB, Audience & Programmatic buying on both the buy-side and the sell-side of the equation, all of which can operate across display, mobile and video channels.

Our solutions leverage u-Platform™, our rapid development ecosystem that packages up the very complex component technologies required to operate in this space – Ad-serving at scale, real-time decisioning, machine learning, big data management, processing and analytics, all void of business logic. We then tailor the solution to specifically solve the business challenges that drive our clients to innovate and deliver the best results for their customers. So on top of this core u-Platform™ base, we then custom develop the algorithms & ad decisioning logic, together with any other unique feature-set requirements. We do this for each and every client.

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Wes Biggs is the Co-Founder and CTO at Adfonic. Here he discusses the big opportunity for brands around mobile rich media formats in 2012.

Imagine enabling your brand to interact with consumers in a visually gripping, cinematically inspiring and fully interactive experience, on devices that are already in the hands of the majority of Europeans and North Americans. That’s the promise of rich media on mobile, where an ecosystem is rapidly emerging around the tools, technology and services to create, traffic and measure highly effective interactive campaigns in the mass-market smartphone display advertising channel via ad networks and exchanges.

Mobile rich media encompasses a variety of campaign features, and while the definition (like that of “smartphone”) is not set in stone, the term describes display advertising that moves beyond the traditional static banners and looping animations that have been prevalent in mobile advertising for several years, exploiting the rich features of HTML5 and deep integration in mobile app environments to allow for advertising that is more visually arresting (custom animations or in-banner video), more interactive (banners that expand on-screen when a user taps), and more story-driven. Advertisers and agencies are creating mobile rich media campaigns that not only tie into above-the-line TV and billboard campaigns, but go beyond those by providing brand-building in-ad mini-games, extensive discoverable video and audio content, or direct calls to action including on-device purchase options. Because of this, and because of the mobile medium’s unique targeting capability and consumer dynamics, rich media enables premium performance for advertisers and can provide premium monetization for savvy publishers and app developers.

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