“MLG is one of the most recognized brands in e-Sports and one of the fastest growing digital networks worldwide,” the formal announcement reads.

MLG has extensive reach, connecting with 20 million committed fans via web, mobile, connected TVs, gaming consoles, and social media channels.

MLG is billed as “the definitive property for advertisers to reach young men.”

“Under the terms of the exclusive agreement, MLG will leverage OpenX’s full stack platform to optimize its digital advertising inventory,” added the announcement. “OpenX’s integrated solution will manage MLG’s ad serving and programmatic monetization, which includes directly sold inventory, Real-Time-Bidding (RTB), and ad networks in one overarching auction.”

“OpenX is the most thoughtful and collaborative partner we’ve found in the industry,” said Don Reilley, Executive President of Global Sales at MLG. “That quality of listening, partnered with their industry leading technology and monetization solutions, made OpenX the best choice for us. As we have grown our business, OpenX has provided ways for us to continually scale up and increase revenue.”

The post OpenX Gets the Tap: Major League Gaming Selects Company for Its Digital Advertising Platform appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

That begins Yi’s essay, recently posted at Adotas, on the changing fortunes of Real Time Bidding (RTB).

Yi believes “RTB has still not fully shaken off its dubious reputation of being murky and opaque.”

What should ad buyers expect from RTB campaigns?

“To keep up with the trend of vastly more targeted advertising,” Yi contends.

Here are three key areas Yi thinks advertisers need to see addressed by RTB platforms “in order to see their bids live up to their full potential”:

1. Granular data-driven targeting: knowing every bid inside and out

“Programmatic markets add much more value for buyer and seller when high degrees of first party, third party and proprietary data are involved. “

2. High intent customers: taking first party data to the next level

“High intent customers are the ultimate lead generation opportunity – if advertisers can correctly identify them and be relevant to them at the right time.”

3. Data-driven transparency: illuminating the shadowy reaches of every ad impression

“Transparency is one of the ad tech world’s biggest buzz words. Ad buyers find that there is still an obstacle between them and a true understanding of the value of every impression – and it comes down to transparency.”

Yi notes that ad buyers have groused about RTB inventory not being “as premium” as other forms of programmatic, and claims costs are still too high for buyers to see pronounced value.

“But increasingly, mainstream programmatic trends are seriously shaking up the RTB space and ushering in a data-driven Age of Enlightenment, when the value of RTB is being reassessed and reinvented,” concludes Yi. “In this new era of hyper-impactful RTB, the value of every bid and the true meaning of every impression can be data-verified and help ad buyers not only get greater bang, but more qualified leads, for their buck.”

There’s much more to read in Yi’s essay. See for yourself here.

The post Has ‘Age of Enlightenment’ Arrived for RTB? appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

At Smaato, for example, spending for RTB “exploded” between the first quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of 2014 on their mobile dedicated RTB-enabled ad exchange. They report growth of 459% and have already predicted that 2014 would experience some of the strongest increases in RTB spending ever seen.

While practically all industry sectors are seeing a good amount of increased spending, it’s the entertainment industry that’s definitely seeing the biggest rise in ad spending with mobile RTB with over a 3^rd of all RTB spending at 37%.

The next biggest sector was technology and telecom at 24% of the market, while 11% was grabbed by business and finance.  Advertising, at 8%, was quite left far behind and at the bottom were fashion and retail, travel, social and dating, all of which were at 5% or less.

With mobile RTB ad volume that grew by over 46% between the last quarter of 2013 in the first of 2014, entertainment was also dominant in many content categories and watched its percentage share of mobile ad impressions jump from 26% to 38%, which is impressive on its own.

Of course this jump meant that, as far as their share of traffic volume was concerned, all other categories, including music, communications, social media, technology and games, lost ground.

The post RTB Spend to Increase Markedly by 2018 appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

SiteScout, a self-serve platform for programmatic ad buying, regularly sees 30 billion ad impressions each day. But it now accesses an additional 1.5 billion daily video impressions through integrations with top video SSPs and exchanges including LiveRail and SpotXchange.

We’re told that SiteScout can run in-stream video campaigns with pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll placements. Encompassing desktop, mobile and now video.

“Online video RTB is inaccessible for small and mid-sized marketers,” the company says, explaining that many ad networks and ad buying platforms for video ask for thousands of dollars in minimum campaign spend and do not provide insight on their technology.

Additionally, many firms that do offer self-serve technology for video don’t support other tactics like desktop or mobile RTB.

“Marketers have to log into multiple systems to run multi-channel campaigns, making it difficult to manage and optimize ad spend,” SiteScout adds, explaining that they have found a way to mitigate these challenges.

“Video can draw a visceral response from consumers in a way that a desktop banner or mobile ad may not. SiteScout wants to make online video advertising as easy as advertising on desktop and mobile,” said Matt Sauls, the company’s vice president of operations. “SiteScout makes it easy to combine the power of video with standard display tactics to create synergy across all major digital channels.”

The post Video Comes to Leading Self-Serve RTB Platform appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following post is a guest contribution from Eric Mugnier, U.S. senior vice president at M&C Saatchi Mobile in New York. Mugnier discusses whether Delivery Side Platforms (DSPs) can transform mobile advertising in the same way that they revolutionized traditional “fixed” online advertising and also answer mobile advertising’s critics over targeting audience segments and measuring the effective performance of a mobile campaign.

Excitement continues to grow around DSP technology and its influence on mobile advertising – in particular, as a catalyst for better targeting of ads to consumers via the mobile channel, and also as an enabler for Real-Time Bidding (RTB) for inventory. DSPs give advertisers better “real time” insights into mobile audiences, allowing them to serve more accurate and targeted adverts to consumers according to precise criteria such as end-user demographics and behavioral data. This in turn leads to more efficient and cost-effective use of mobile ad inventory by advertisers and brands.

Real-time ad serving has been used in the fixed online space for the last decade, but is still relatively new in mobile. And there are important differences in how it is used in mobile compared to fixed. Unlike in the fixed space, an advertiser or agency cannot track a user’s online behavior and activity using cookie files in the mobile space. To overcome this, the advertiser uses a DSP to identify and learn traffic models that lead to certain types of end-user activity, such as an app download, viewing a video or any LTV event.

This type of predictive analysis of end-user mobile traffic, plus the ability to access mobile ad inventory in real-time with extra layers of targeting, requires processing and modeling of vast amounts of data in real-time, which can only be provided by DSPs.

In addition, the rise of mobile ad exchanges – virtual marketplaces in which publishers, developers and ad-networks trade ad inventory between one another in real time – is yet another reason why advertisers and agencies will increasingly invest in DSPs in 2013.

More importantly, DSPs provide to the brand or advertiser far greater transparency into what inventory they are purchasing, on which sites and in which apps their ad has been displayed, and when. Having this type of in-depth information readily to hand lets advertisers understand and measure how successful a campaign and its related media purchase strategy is in reaching the intended target audience or audiences.

From a campaign management perspective as well, by consolidating and presenting this potentially bewildering amount of data into a single interface, a DSP makes it easier for a media buyer to manage a campaign, without having to rely on a variety of reporting systems from numerous ad networks.

The growth of DSPs, together with the rise of real-time bidding for ad inventory, may spell the beginning of the end for mobile ad networks in their existing format. In their current state, ad networks are “blind” – in that they don’t provide any visibility or insight for the advertisers around where their mobile ads are appearing, when they are appearing, and who they are appearing to.

In contrast, thanks to DSPs and RTB, mobile ad networks can now become smarter, with more built-in intelligence. The more precise “real-time” targeting of audiences, plus the improved reporting and analysis enabled by DSPs, is changing how brands, advertisers and agencies purchase mobile inventory. The result is that they now have greater control over the purchasing process, and can reach specific consumers more accurately with relevant ads.

The advantages and benefits of DSPs to mobile advertising are therefore clear. However, it’s too early to celebrate DSPs for their role in forever changing mobile advertising for the better. Not all the necessary components are in place for this to happen. The main challenge to address is scalability: there simply isn’t enough RTB ad inventory available on the market right now for DSPs to dominate the mobile ad eco-system in the way that we expect.

A DSP’s sophisticated algorithms for modeling and analysis can only achieve so much when there is a limited amount of mobile ad space to work with. This is almost certainly set to change, however.

According to Gartner, the number of smartphones purchased worldwide will rise from 675 million in 2012 to one billion this year. The global tablet phenomenon shows no sign of slowing down either, with Gartner predicting an increase of almost 70 per cent in worldwide tablet shipments, from 116 million units in 2012 to 197 million units in 2013.

In contrast, PC shipments continue to slide: Gartner forecasts a 7.6 per cent drop in PC shipments from 341 million worldwide in 2012 to 315 million in 2013 – the result of consumers shifting away from desktop PCs to mobile devices as their principal computing device.

We can therefore expect a rise in mobile ad inventory to accompany this trend. And as more mobile ad space becomes available, so too will the role of DSPs and RTB grow and evolve. For the time being, however, DSPs only represent a small percentage of total campaign spend.

The post The Mobile DSP: ‘We’re Nearly There’ appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The largest update is the platform’s updated targeting capabilities, along with its detailed reporting features.  Advertisers can target based on location, carrier, time of day and much more.  The company’s proprietary granular targeting abilities and detailed reporting capabilities allow users to optimize their campaigns by setting precise parameters around mobile campaigns to reach a particular audience based on very specific criteria to make each campaign as effective as possible.

“Our intuitive, self-serve mobile ad platform gives advertisers full control over how much they want to spend and where they want to spend their ad dollars,” said Giancarlo Maniaci, CEO of TapIt!. “Furthermore, companies now do not have to rely on a 3^rd party to create an effective and targeted mobile ad campaign.  We provide them with all the tools to setup, run and monitor a campaign on their own.”

Using either CPC or CPM models to launch campaigns, companies can quickly start and stop campaigns and add funds through PayPal to keep things running smoothly.  “We were getting frustrated working with mobile networks that didn’t give us the tools we needed to succeed. Working with TapIt! we were able to access traffic at a new scale and transparency never before seen,” said Alex Tsatkin, CEO of MobAff Mobile Performance Network. “This allowed us to drive massive traffic while keeping our ROI goals for our many advertisers both in the US and internationally. The intuitive and robust TapIt! platform has been our secret weapon in the war against blind click fraud ridden mobile networks. By having access to real time statistics, we have the ability to pause and adjust on-going campaigns and improve the quality of future campaigns.”

According to a company press release, some features of the new platform include the following . . .

• Real Time Bidding
• Advanced reporting analytics
• Conversion tracking providing transparency to advertisers
• Customizable reporting tools with a variety of filters
• Testing capabilities – TapIt!’s self-serve platform include the ability to implement a rotation of landing pages to help advertisers A-B test and compare key metrics
• Banner creation tools allowing advertisers to make ads without fancy software
• Bevy of Macros to help advertisers pass third party data
• Call to action capabilities such as click-to-call, click-to-app store, click-to-URL, etc.

The post TapIt! Launches New Self-Serve Mobile Advertising Portal appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The new platform provides unique media-buying algorithms and allows RTB-enabled ad sources access to mobile inventory according to their individual business needs.  Put simply, it’s an auction-style bidding platform that optimizes publisher and developer revenue by exposing individual impressions to multiple ad sources at once, creating a competitive environment for each impression and driving up eCPMs.  At the same time, the platform allows RTB-enabled ad sources to access mobile web and application inventory at scale, enabling them to expand their media portfolio with targetable, rich media-ready mobile inventory.

“We were very interested in making our inventory available on an RTB-enabled platform,” said Jonathan Gamble, EVP, Commercial & Sales at Goal.com. “We know that there are a lot of dollars flowing into real-time bidding, and Nexage RTB Exchange was the right solution for us to get access to those dollars because it supports both our mobile web and app inventory and because it seamlessly integrates with the other Nexage products we use to manage our mobile ad business.”

As mobile ad inventory increases, real-time bidding methods are becoming much more popular.  Nexage says its current infrastructure can scale to support 1000s of bidders and 10s of billions of mobile web and application impressions.  It’s hosted on Nexage’s core platform, which the company said recently passed the one-year/100% up-time milestone, and is “specifically architected for scalability and reliability.”

The post Nexage Launches Real-Time Bidding Exchange For Mobile Web & App Advertising Inventory appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.