Mobile marketing company Velti is expanding its advertising platform with the launch of Velti Media, a buyer-focused mobile ad network.
The company currently focuses mostly on mobile marketing, including SMS, performance marketing with carriers, and loyalty programs, with about 30% of its revenue coming from advertising, said Velti’s CMO, Krishna Subramanian.
“From an advertising perspective, up until the launch of Velti Media, Mobclix was the only advertising play Velti had, an acquisition that Velti made in 2010,” said Subramanian, who was a co-founder of Mobclix, a platform that helps publishers make money with their mobile apps.
Velti Media, on the other hand, will be a buy-side solution, providing in-app and tablet advertising opportunities, and banner and rich media mobile ads, among other advertising options, to brands and agencies.
Some of the unique capabilities of Velti Media, Subramanian said, include its ability to combine marketing and advertising data with performance data and predictive analytics and provide multichannel targeting capabilities, which allows customers to retarget from desktop to mobile web, mobile app, and mobile messaging.
“Everyone has multiple devices, whether it’s phones or tablets or desktops and, from an advertiser perspective, you don’t want to always look at a specific user on a specific platform as completely new,” he explained. “If you know how a user is going to respond before you run an ad to them, based on how they’ve interacted with the campaign on another platform, that’s extremely valuable and that’s what multichannel targeting brings to brands and advertisers across Velti.”
Michael Hess, who joined Velti as SVP of advertising sales in 2012, will lead advertising sales for Velti Media. Hess was previously SVP of global sales at Say Media.
