GigaOM » mobile ad network

Google Ventures leads $10M investment in firm that measures mobile ads

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 12:00:21 +0000

As more consumers use smartphones to help them shop, advertisers are growing worried about how they will reach those customers. Unlike web sites, which allow brands to target specific users, mobile phones are a relative black hole when it comes to gathering consumer data.

This situation has led a start-up named Adelphic to offers tools that let marketers identify people, not just devices. Founded by two veterans of a mobile ad network used by Apple, Adelphic claims to use 30 different “signals” to recognize patterns and information about a given smartphone user.

On Tuesday, the company got a big boost with the announcement of a new $10 million investment led by Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of the search giant. The funding appears to reflect the widespread desire for an solution to the mobile ad conundrum.

“It’s hard for brands to find people,” said co-founder Jennifer Lum, explaining the issue in a phone interview. “It’s hard to describe and package up the mobile industry to sell to audiences.”

Adelphic’s “30 signal” solution sounds intriguing, but does it work? On regular websites, advertisers can easily gather signals through cookies that record information about a user. This task is much harder on smartphones, which collect far fewer cookies.

Lum offered few details but did say that Adelphic uses “inference algorithms” to blend a variety of data that let advertisers know if a smartphone customer had responded to previous offers. The “30 signals” are mostly a mystery, but a good guess is that they represent some combination of browsing history, log-ins, location data and more.

In any case, the $10 million could indicate that Adelphic is on to something. Lum says the company has provided analytics for 20 billion mobile ads since October.

For the mobile ad industry, the success of Adelphic’s tools could introduce more liquidity to the market as a result of advertisers gaining more confidence in the ability to reach given customer segments. The technology also lets marketers have a better chance to optimize their campaigns on the fly — using the analytics to tell if an ad campaign is working and change it if it is not.

Tuesday’s announcement will also lead to Rich Miner of Google Ventures joining Adelphic’s board. Original investors Matrix Partners, who helped put in $2 million in March, also participated in the $10 million investment.

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Jumptap weeds out fantasy shopping with new approach to mobile ad targeting

Ki Mae Heussner — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 21:33:39 +0000

The last time you pulled out your smartphone to look up Rolex watches or Rolls-Royce cars (or any other ultra high-end product), was it because you really planned to buy one or because you were just indulging another Mega Millions fantasy?

In the past, it hasn’t made much of a difference in how advertisers interested in your mobile behavior used that information to target ads at you. But George Bell, CEO of mobile ad network Jumptap believes advertisers need to be smarter about separating so-called “impulse” behavior from “intent” behavior, and said his company has a new way to help them do it.

By partnering with thousands of publishers, third-party data providers like Datalogix and Acxiom, as well as data companies that focus on vertical-specific offline data (such as Polk for automotive data), Bell said the company is linking consumer behavior on mobile and the web with offline data to give advertisers a more global picture of their activity.

Distinguishing impulse from intent behavior

“Because of the nature of the device –- it’s always on and always on your person –- people use [mobile devices] to express impulse… people tend to fantasy shop,” he said, adding that other impulse actions include clicking on ads or content by mistake or out of curiosity. “If you don’t have a way to see consumer behavior across screens you’re not going to get a full enough picture of the consumer’s intent.”

From its publisher partners, he said, Jumptap is given hashed (or anonymized) profile information about mobile users–including email addresses–which is then forwarded to the third-party data providers. Those companies query their databases to match mobile information about users to information they might have about their online or offline behavior. The vertically-focused data companies supply additional information to further flesh out consumer profiles.

That’s a lot of consumer data to piece together, especially for privacy-minded smartphone and Web users who may not want their personal information shared with outside companies. But Jumptap said it doesn’t handle user information until it’s anonymized and that it gives mobile consumers tools to learn about the process and opt out. Last month, the company announced that it has partnered with Evidon, the ad tech firm powering the AdChoices icons that lead to privacy notifications, to bring those icons to mobile web and app ads.

Tracking consumers across multiple devices

Historically, mobile ad targeting has used indicators related to the devices themselves (including the device type, usage, data plan and zip code) and consumer interaction with content and advertising on the device. Bell said Jumptap’s new “consumer-level” approach to targeting gives advertisers the ability to distinguish between a consumer searching for a Rolex who is actually a luxury shopper and a consumer who is really a student with little income, who happens to be in an affluent zip code, clicking on ads (maybe even by mistake) for high-end goods.

But the company isn’t the only one coming up with ways of tracking and targeting consumers across multiple devices to get more complete pictures of their behavior. Through device recognition (or “device fingerprinting”), which involves the collection of potentially hundreds of data points flowing off of a mobile or desktop device to identify it, advertisers could start to link behavior across iPhones, tablets and laptops.

As my colleague Ryan Kim has reported, a team of ex-AdMob and Google scientists launched Drawbridge to target advertising across platforms using consumer behavior data from online and mobile ad requests.

Jumptap said it doesn’t yet have data showing the effectiveness of its approach but said a handful of advertising clients are currently using it in beta. As the company looks ahead to an IPO within a year, the ability to target mobile consumers with more granularity will help keep it competitive in an increasingly active marketplace.

For more on mobile monetization, check out GigaOM’s upcoming Moblize conference in San Francisco.

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IPO-bound mobile ad network Jumptap picks up two new execs

Ki Mae Heussner — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:10:09 +0000

En route to an IPO, mobile ad network Jumptap Tuesday named a chief operating officer and a new board member.

The announcement comes about three weeks after the company said it had closed a $27.5 million funding round and was eyeing an IPO.

Jumptap named former Criteo and Yahoo executive Frank Weishaupt to the newly-created role of chief operating officer and John Hadl, a longtime mobile advertising executive, to the company’s board.

After 10 years at Yahoo, most recently as vice president of advertising marketplaces, Weishaupt left in 2011 to join Paris-based retargeting firm Criteo. He comes to Jumptap directly from Criteo, where he was SVP of sales and publisher marketplace.

Founder of BrandinHand, a mobile media agency with clients including P&G, Amex and General Mills, Hadl is well-respected voice in mobile advertising. He is currently a venture partner at US Venture Partners and, according to his bio, was an early advisor to now-public Jumptap competitor Millennial Media, AdMob, which was acquired by Google, and Quattro Wireless, which was acquired by Apple.

When I spoke with Jumptap CEO George Bell earlier this month, he said the mobile advertising company could go public within a year.

Jumptap’s latest financing round — which included existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Summerhill Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and WPP, as well as new investors Keating Capital and a large institutional investor — brought the company’s total amount raised since launching in 2004 to $121.5 million.

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