Brand marketers might not be diving into mobile video advertising, yet, but they’re certainly wading in. That caution is well-founded since measurement and buy and sell side connections are still nascent.
But analysts anticipate growth: BI Intelligence, for instance, predicts compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 73% for mobile video ad revenue between 2013-2018, compared to 15% CAGR for desktop video ad revenue.
As a result, mobile demand-side platforms (DSPs) like Adelphic Mobile predict surges in demand in the coming quarters. Although Adelphic works with a number of trading desks, it partnered with HAVAS trading desk Affiperf on a retail campaign that first went live in August.
Everyone is talking about measuring cross-screen audiences at scale, but capitalizing on the benefits of advanced targeting remains challenging, said Jenna Gino, VP and GM of Affiperf.
“There’s still a lot of compartmentalization of budget and strategy by channel,” Gino said. “With one retail client of ours, the goal was, ‘We need some level of true omnipresence’ where we had to make sure mobile was not siloed as a second screen.”
Easier said than done. Affiperf’s retail client operates brick and mortar stores and has an ecommerce presence. Mobile creates an additional customer touch point and raises questions around device type and at what frequency messages should be sent.
“The biggest inhibitor to date has been a lack of and inconsistency of tracking, which is no secret, but you’re also hitting people on the go now, which is not always the easiest thing for the measurability of mobile,” Gino added. “In many cases, you’re connecting links which are broken or are not yet built.”
Gino was underwhelmed by earlier collaborations with mobile ad networks, which weren’t scalable and weren’t trackable due to lack of persistent identifiers. Thus, the company turned to Adelphic for the offline-to-mobile campaign. Adelphic has a number of video supply-side inventory sources, ranging from LiveRail and BrightRoll to MoPub and Vdopia and utilizes a statistical identifier to connect various data points.
“What we find is in video inventory, in particular, is that the bid requests we get are less data rich,” said Emily Del Greco, VP of sales for Adelphic.
For example, it’s more difficult to execute a geofenced campaign around a very small radius because “there’s simply not as much programmatic video inventory that carries [latitude and longitude coordinate data] with it.” While this is a specific example, Del Greco said, it’s emblematic of a larger challenge around mobile video: finding the right data to send the right impressions to the right people.
In preparing its video strategy, Affiperf isolated key audiences that were important for the retailer to engage: Hispanics, current retail customers and shoppers of competitive retailers. This particular retail client’s first-party, CRM data set was the secret sauce in the campaign.
Affiperf melded several offline and online data components, using Adobe AudienceManager as the data-management platform to onboard the client’s CRM data. In order to reach shoppers who frequented competitive retailers, Affiperf worked with Neustar to isolate those users with select behavioral history.
Affiperf used Adelphic’s Web and mobile app integrations to engage US devices whose device language setting defaulted to “Spanish” and to send mobile pre-roll ads to customers within a store’s geofence.
“Often, we see advertisers port data from offline to cookies and expect to see scale in mobile, which never happens,” Gino noted. “Adobe does the offline-to-device ID matching in-house and passes Adelphic a segment of mobile-ready IDs vs. the standard cookie.”
While unable to share match rate details at this time, Gino said Affiperf’s delivery, reach and scale against its target audience increased five fold. “And, all the while, our performance against the KPI (user engagement on ad units) on which we were being measured, increased by 50%.”
A key contributor to that improvement was working with a partner who was successfully able to onboard data directly from offline to a device ID in mobile, she noted. Affiperf is now considering an extension of the campaign to determine the impact of those mobile ad units on driving in-store traffic through Adelphic partners NinthDecimal and Placed.
“Programmatic, mobile and video are coming together, but we’re now setting up DMP integrations to get CRM data into the mobile universe for targeting with video assets,” Del Greco said, actions that are still relatively uncharted. “We do work with pretty much all of the major trading desks, but Affiperf kind of stands out in [how they’re actioning off of, not just collecting data at] scale in these early programmatic mobile video” instances.
