InMobi, the world’s largest independent mobile advertising platform, has announced the acquisition of AerServ for $90 million in cash and stock to create the industry’s first mediation platform with a unified programmatic auction for mobile in-app publishers.

“This acquisition will enhance monetization for publishers globally and further enhance the InMobi Exchange, a premium mobile programmatic platform,” a provided statement reads.

Globally, mobile premium publishers seek greater control over advertising revenue and deeper transparency into both the buyer landscape and pricing than what supply-side platforms offer today. These publishers are looking to further scale their advertising revenue using a best-in-class programmatic exchange, which will bring header bidding into mobile in-app for the first time. Together, InMobi and AerServ’s technology will deliver a next-generation platform that goes beyond traditional ad mediation and provides high-quality brand demand, marking the industry’s first platform to deliver this combination to publishers worldwide.

“This acquisition fits in perfectly with our global strategy to bring best-in-class technology for premium publishers and driving mobile programmatic video revenues to them. Our combined entities will double our headcount in the U.S. while establishing a product and tech hub for InMobi in Los Angeles, a hotspot of innovation for media and video content,” said Abhay Singhal, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer at InMobi. “We are two profitable companies combining forces in North America and this will further cement our leadership position in video advertising, enabling us to continue investing heavily.”

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As the first mobile mediation platform to launch such an offering, AerServ now grants publishers the power to create and execute their own private marketplace (PMP) deals for mobile ad inventory via this new self-serve tool.

We’re told that self-service features will allow app developers on the AerServ platform to curate inventory for advertisers, seamlessly execute private marketplace deals, and efficiently manage them among the rest of their ad stack. Publishers can even tap into AerServ’s unique Cost Per Completed View PMP capabilities, enabling them to execute PMPs for high-value rewarded video inventory.

“An increasing amount of advertising is being transacted programmatically, and more and more of this spend is going to private marketplaces,” said Josh Speyer, AerServ’s CEO. “This is for good reason, as PMPs provide an avenue for buyers to transact with more intimacy and less friction than the open exchanges, and can provide greater visibility and quality control for both advertisers and publishers alike.”

According to a company statement email to MMW, the level of transparency provided by Private Marketplaces for Mobile Publishers is expected to generate higher CPMs for mobile publishers than on open exchanges, while simultaneously attracting advertisers who might have previously been wary of programmatic in the mobile space.

Private marketplaces are invitation-only real-time auctions that enable brands to control the sites and mobile apps on which their ads appear. They also provide publishers with a simpler way to package their premium inventory and execute agreements with brand partners.

To learn more, check out AerServ here.

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The following is a guest contributed post from David DiAngelo, VP of Marketplace Development at AerServ.

Mobile video ad spending is projected to grow a whopping 49 percent to $18 billion next year, as video consumption on non-mobile devices such as laptops and computers declines for the first time. Dig deeper, and you’ll see rewarded video emerging onto the scene as a major player—40 percent of mobile app users deemed rewarded video the most acceptable ad format, head and shoulders above banner ads (20 percent) and interstitial display formats (12 percent). Another study found that 78 percent of game players are open to engaging with rewarded video ads. No wonder why 75 percent of publishers report that rewarded video provides the most effective means of mobile monetization.

These are sharp but much welcome contrasts to the 30 percent rise in ad blocking worldwide.

What gives?

Rewarded video is finally providing consumers the opportunity to choose their own destiny with brands in a way that’s non-invasive and organic. Most probably associate rewarded video with gaming (e.g., watch this quick video for more coins or energy), but there are other natural use cases as well. For example, a news app could offer access to another editorial article after viewing a video. Across all the various uses cases, a clear value exchange is created between the brand and consumer. The consumer receives more of the experience they want (e.g., gaming entertainment, in-depth news) by agreeing to engage with a brand’s content, and the brand—over time—drives positive reinforcement as the source for positive experiences.

While there is no set formula for creating successful rewarded video experiences, here are three elements for brands and publishers to keep in consideration as users continue to embrace the emerging format.

End Cards Drive Action with Engaged Consumers

When a user has finished watching a video, end cards allow brands creative ways to interact with the user. A retailer can offer local coupons to download, a travel brand can promote a list of potential holiday destinations, or a CPG advertiser can share a carousel of discounted products. For example, when 20th Century Fox released the movie “War of the Planet of the Apes,” it utilized an End Card at the end of the trailer. When swiped, it showed images and descriptions of the movie’s two main characters Caesar and The Colonel as well as a Fandango link to buy movie tickets.

The flexible format of end cards allows brands to develop more rich interactions following a rewarded video experience.

Align Video Lengths With Shorter Attention Spans

The Internet and social media have brought down a human’s attention span below a goldfish’s.

Author Morley Winograd interestingly pointed out that, “Millennials are using packet-switching technology rather than hard-wired circuit switching to absorb information,” he responded. “They take a quick glance at it and sort it and/or tag it for future reference if it might be of interest.”

Which is why the length of rewarded videos matter as much as the value that they’re delivering to consumers. For example, a recent study on Facebook video ads showed that 16- to 20-second videos had the highest conversion rates in both the gaming and ecommerce verticals. In contrast, videos lasting more than 36 seconds performed among the worst.

Assume You’re on Mute

When’s the last time audio on your mobile device was turned on when you read news articles during your morning commute or played a mobile game on your way home? Facebook knows the answer—not only did they find that most videos are watched without sound, they found that when video ads started playing loudly without expecting the noise, 80 percent react negatively toward both the advertiser as well as Facebook. As a result, Facebook rolled out tools operating under the mantra that the best audio for video ads on their platform is silence, admitting that without sound, 41 percent of their video ads were meaningless.

Let this be a lesson to advertisers and publisher partners who are increasingly focusing on rewarded video programs. On the silent screen, pictures are still worth a thousand words. Just ask Martin Agency, who produced a silent version of its sand castle Geico commercial without audio and text narrations to make the understandable to people viewing it on Facebook without sound.

Heading into 2018, expect to see more rewarded video initiatives take flight as a critical vehicle for value exchange with more creative, relevant interactions. By utilizing dynamic and entertaining ends cards, keeping the video lengths short and sweet, and painting vivid stories without the reliance on audio, brands stand to gain significant lift in engagement and loyalty in the long term.

The post Rewarded Video Is Creating A New Currency of Value Exchange appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Mobile consumers engage more frequently with native ads – digital ad placements that reflect the look and style of a publisher’s site or app. Aware of this reality and focused squarely on taking opportunities to the next level, AerServ — the leading inventory and audience management technology for mobile publishers and advertisers — has just announced the launch of AerNative (a new native ad platform for in-app mobile video and banner ads).

So how does it work?

Publishers and app developers can use AerServ’s new mobile native platform to customize and serve mobile native advertisements in their mobile app or website. Those advertisements (text, display, video) can easily be formatted by the publisher to mimic the style and format of the app or mobile site. In addition, the ads can be contextually targeted based on the content of the app.

The company says that consumers looked at native ads 53% more frequently than regular display ads, and native ads registered 18% higher lift in purchase intent, according to Sharethrough/IPG Media labs. Ad blindness – digital media savvy consumers mentally tuning out and ignoring standard display ad units and formats – helps explain the success of native ads.

“Multiple studies and reports have shown that consumers engage more with native ads within apps. With the AerServ’s platform we are able to provide native at scale without having to put a burden on programmers to integrate the ads into each new environment. We’re excited to launch AerNative,” said said Josh Speyer, AerServ’s CEO. “Native mobile ads – video and display – delivered via AerNative – will be integrated seamlessly into mobile apps and mobile websites.”

To learn more and keep closer tabs on the always cutting edge team at AerServ, click here.

The post First Look: AerServ Launches Native Advertising for In-App Mobile Video and Banner Ads appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is an exclusive guest contributed post by David DiAngelo, VP of Marketplace Development at AerServ

What does it mean to run a marketing campaign on “premium publishers” in a mobile world? How are you defining what it means to be premium?

Industry veterans now fervently agree that activating a mobile strategy solely on marquee—desktop-based—publishers such as The Wall Street Journal or CNN no longer matter as much. While they may have sizeable followership, higher CPMs driven by impression scarcity make them less accessible to advertisers focused on more cost effective scale.

Instead, reaching the right audiences—agnostic to the sites and apps they engage—has become the new north star. This is due in large part to the fact that consumers’ media habits and buying preferences have dramatically changed and diversified across platforms. As a result, consumer loyalty to top brands has taken a nose dive—90% of leading household goods brands’ loss in market share is just one of the litany of signals. “Premium” then, is about data and audiences on clean, transparent, brand safe publishers.

So it behooves mobile marketers to learn from this trend and rely less on traditionally defined “premium” publishers to support their objectives. Sure, they will continue to carry the weight of their legacies in the digital media mix. But it’s time to upend creatively-starved, old school mobile strategies for more data-driven media programs that reach audiences at scale where they really are. Not where we contextually assumed they are.

As an example, which apps do you think have the highest concentration of millennial (18-34 year old) users?

comScore’s latest ranking of the Top 50 Digital Media Properties may lead you to think that CBS, ESPN, The Weather Channel and other premium digital networks have high millennial contingencies. But would you have guessed that apps such as Yik Yak, Venmo and Wattpad have the highest concentration of millennial users, with one reporting up to 99% concentration? In addition, we all know, mobile games continue to thrive and remain one of the most engaging, and safe environments in which to reach consumers across a wide swath of demographics.

The notion of premium has changed, so let’s completely reimagine what ‘premium’ should look like in mobile for modern marketers and blaze the required trails to help them scale and realize the vision.

Command Value Exchange As The Gold Standard for Premium Formats

Steve Jobs’ App Store launch in 2008 awakened consumers to entirely new ways of experiencing the world and interacting with each other on their mobile phone. Nearly 10 years later, consumers now spend more than five hours a day on their phones—texting, emailing, gaming, Snapchatting, shopping, watching videos and more.

In parallel, mobile display ads emerged in the form of 320×50 units at the top or bottom of your 4”-6” screens—as another opportunity for brands to engage consumers’ on their new most favorite device and for publishers to achieve new revenue opportunities . But while banner ads continue to serve these purposes, it’s clear that today’s consumer clamors for higher engagement standards.

Looking to the future, mobile video has begun to step up as the most compelling vehicle to lead advertisers to the premium oasis. For example, IAB’s New Ad Portfolio mentioned that short form videos in the 6-8 second range are already showing promising results in mobile.

Keep in mind that receptivity to video ads can swing both ways, as Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends report pointed out. On the one hand, 80% of survey participants disliked pre-roll ads, while 68% reported a positive attitude towards mobile app reward ads—ads where advertisers incent consumers with stuff like new tools, coins or coupon rebates to sit through the video ad.

What does this tell us?

That consumers will engage as long as there’s something in it for them. Therefore, any mobile inventory considered as premium in the future should have a clear, value-driven proposition to consumers.

Validate Premium With Engagement-Based Proof Points

Establishing legitimacy for premium inventory in mobile, especially for emerging formats such as mobile video, requires hard data-driven work. To generate accountability, marketers and agencies must answer questions such as:

• How deeply did consumers engage with the mobile video?
• Which creatives and messages resonated best with our different target audiences?
• How does performance vary across different regions/DMAs in the US?
• How did this campaign impact brand KPIs such as favorability, purchase intent and sales?

Today’s mobile metrics are still relatively rudimentary and direct response focused, such as Cost Per Install (CPI) or Cost Per Action (CPA). But premium in mobile should be evaluated by much deeper metrics that surface the consumers’ engagement with the brand and the brand’s influence on consumers further up the funnel. Completed views is just one measurement that should become firmly implanted in marketers’ mobile dashboards.

If last year finally became the year of mobile based on reported spend, then why are marketers and agencies still stuck in a desktop mindset? Let’s build upon this momentous milestone and keep the dollars flowing by pushing the boundaries on what really constitutes premium in mobile. The foundational infrastructure and programmatic pipes are already here and constantly evolving to help advertisers find audiences at scale, and deliver remarkable consumer experiences.

Done right, the most audacious and creative brands will find revenue opportunities bursting at the seams as a result of the industry’s unyielding pledge to preserving the reimagined vision of premium in mobile.

The post Reimagining Premium Inventory in Mobile appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

“DataServ will give mobile publishers the ability to generate revenue beyond the ad impressions on their mobile sites and applications by safely and anonymously delivering data that advertising, research, behavioral, analytics, and marketing companies can use to identify new and existing audiences across devices,” reads the official word provided to MMW.

It’s a timely development. Researchers at eMarketer have noted that mobile is more common than TV now that mobile devices are used by 95 percent of the U.S. population.

“As publishers and marketers continue to hone their mobile advertising and marketing strategies, the biggest challenge is understanding the connection between offline and online, in particular mobile, and DataServ solves this in a privacy friendly way,” notes DJ.

DataServ looks to be the latest step in delivering targeted ads to audiences across devices, in a way that helps marketers identify and reach intended audiences in app environments.

“Mobile publishers are now in a unique position,” explained Josh Speyer, AerServ’s CEO. “Beyond creating great mobile content, they’re building valuable mobile audiences which marketers and even companies outside of advertising are eager to reach.”

According to AerServ, the upload and matching of records will be custom for each publisher and will tie a digital user to an email address or some other non-mobile identifiable user data point so that advertisers can direct media spend towards those users on specific devices.

“Today, most publishers are only being compensated for the actual ad placement, not the valuable user data,” Speyer added. “We’ve worked hard to develop DataServ to enable that additional revenue stream for publishers with data that already exists in many cases.”

The post AerServ’s DataServ Offers New Revenue Stream for Publishers appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

What exactly are Ad Pods? They give publishers the ability to display multiple video ad units that play back-to-back within a single in-app ad placement — similar to commercial breaks seen on TV.

Using IAB standards, this advanced video advertising format allows publishers to maximize their monetization within a single ad session, decreasing the need for interruptions in the user experience.

Reports have shown that viewers are more engaged by TV-like video ads, resulting in higher engagement, CTR and completion rates.

Ad placements can be customized by setting the desired number of ads, max duration for the ad pod, and skippability within the AerServ platform.

“As digital spend begins to outpace traditional TV spend, publishers and video advertisers are looking for ways to extend their audience in a safe and familiar way,” said Josh Speyer, CEO AerServ. “Ad buyers want a more TV like buying and planning experience across channels and platforms. And for publishers, Ad Pods increase ad load which provides new monetization and pricing opportunities without having to find new users.”

The post Pods on Parade: AerServ Launches Latest Mobile Advertising Innovation appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The report further notes that OpenAuction even lets buyers “deliver dynamic pricing at the impression level.”

“Header bidding is technology that enables publishers to make their inventory available to multiple buyers simultaneously who can then submit bids, or dynamic prices for the impression,” the official AerServ announcement reads. “Header bidding enables publishers to capture higher CPMs from buyers, increase fill rate, and improve the competitiveness of their auctions.”

All told, AerServ’s OpenAuction technology gives both publishers and demand partners the tools to maximize the value of each ad impression.

To learn more about the offering and opportunities at hand, click here.

The post AerServ Unveils New Tech for Mobile App Makers appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Gameloft Advertising Solutions selected AerServ as a mobile monetization partner due in part to the company’s shared vision and alignment around bringing high quality brand advertising into games, the statement notes.

We’re told that AerServ ads have been integrated via API into Gameloft games for rewarded video, and mobile display ad units.

“Gameloft is a tremendous brand, and we’re thrilled to be working with them to help the company achieve its monetization goals,” said Josh Speyer, CEO of AerServ. “They are ahead of the curve with their monetization strategy, a testament to their innovative nature as a company.”

To learn more about AerServ, click here.
https://www.aerserv.com/

The post Advertising Partners: It’s Game On for Gameloft and AerServ Partnership appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The company recently selected AerServ to serve as the mobile mediation platform and SSP for their mobile games.

“In addition, the partners are pleased to share initial results with fill rates increasing 32.29% since launch, a large increase since switching from their in-house solution to AerServ,” a provided statement reads.

According to a study by eMarketer, “By 2020, 77.0% of mobile phone users and nearly 64% of the U.S. population will play games on their phone at least once per month.”

This partnership equips WildTangent with AerServ’s unique monetization tools while also exposing their inventory to thousands of brand advertising campaigns, allowing marketers to execute their ad campaigns on premium, brand-safe, viewability- and fraud-free inventory.

“We couldn’t be more excited to partner with WildTangent in an effort to monetize their mobile audience. At AerServ, we view our customers as partners, not just numbers. We work extremely hard to ensure their needs and monetization goals are met,” said Josh Speyer, CEO of AerServ.

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