Kevin Winston, founder and CEO of Digital LA, moderated a panel about the future of mobile marketing, particularly in the area of ad buying on mobile. He was joined by panelists including Robert Brill, executive director [ion] and programmatic media for Ayzenberg; Ross McCray, CEO of VideoAmp; Christian Galvin, VP of sales for Fiksu; and Gladys Kong, president and CTO of UberMedia.
Winston asked the panelists what sort of placements they had available for their respective platforms. “We have a large inventory, as well as programmatic buying,” Kong said. “It’s mostly in-app, video pre-rolls and interstitials.” Fiksu provides a wide range of possibilities. “We buy through all the display channels, we buy programmatically, we have our own RTV and buy across Facebook and Twitter, as well as some of the incentivized players,” Galvin said, referring to Fiksu’s capabilities.
VideoAmp, is, as the name suggests, focused on video. “You can buy on the YouTube mobile app, and can focus on any video or channel,” McCray said. “You can buy on a mobile app, and the focus is with video exchange. Or you can buy mobile web, through the general exchanges.” The nature of the ad buy is different with [ion], as Brill pointed out. “We connect advertisers to influencers,” Brill said. “We are the strategy and the activation part of that business. We sell the content that the users chooses to watch, across mobile and desktop platforms.”
Winston asked the panelists about the nature of advances in targeting. “Let’s talk about targeting,” Winston said. “We’ve come a long way in the past year in our ability to target on mobile. What do you see is popular ”
“We’re at the very top of the funnel; most of what we do is content creation,” Brill noted in reply. “Advertisers come to us to reach influencers. We work to contextually connect the brand with the influencer.” The situation is different with UberMedia. “We specialize in social and location targeting,” Kong pointed out, providing an example. “If BMW comes to us and wants to reach people likely to buy BMWs, we geofence and look for people who have used a particular app and their locations. We have over a thousand data points about 5 million users.”
“There’s no question targeting is important, and it’s come a long way,” Galving agreed. “The big question is scale. Clients want good targeting, but they want scale to go along with it.”
