GigaOM » Pontiflex

Pontiflex launches automated social email tool for merchants

Ryan Kim — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:01:19 +0000

When Pontiflex in March opened up AdLeads, a self-service program for small businesses to run their own mobile sign-up ads, it was a hit with many merchants. But the problem for many business owners was that they didn’t have the time or the sophistication to make the most of the email addresses users were handing over.

Now Pontiflex is working to solve that with the roll out of Social FollowUp, a free tool that enables merchants to automatically send out emails that are algorithmically built from their social media updates and content. Social FollowUp takes what a business is pushing out on Facebook or Twitter and reformats it into an email that can highlight deals, announce new products or promote upcoming events at a business.

AdLeads allows businesses to run geo-targeted sign-up campaigns on iOS and Android (goog) apps. With sign-up ads, businesses only pay when a user signs up to see their ad and agrees to get emails from an advertiser. AdLeads previously connected to Constant Contact and other email providers to help businesses manage their email campaigns. But many businesses just didn’t have the bandwidth or savvy to make full use of emails, said Pontiflex CEO and co-founder Zepherin Lasker.

He said Social FollowUp allows businesses to re-use the work they’re doing on social media and meld their social and email channels together. And it can help drive users to follow a business on Facebook or Twitter if they’re not already doing it.

Social FollowUp uses an algorithm to harvest Facebook and Twitter content. It cuts down on repetitive stuff, looks for fresh news and limits how many times users see certain types of content. Merchants can also use hashtags to select specific content to highlight or send specific emails around events, deals or coupons.

AdLeads has been adding about 2,000 businesses a month now and is up to well over 7,500 businesses on the platform. The service is available in 27 countries.

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Pontiflex launches HTML5 API for sign-up ads

Ryan Kim — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:00:45 +0000

Pontiflex, a mobile sign-up ad platform that allows consumers to pick what kind of ads and offers they want to see, has been bringing in big money for mobile publishers. After establishing the case for its business model, New York City-based Pontiflex has been busy expanding the reach of the system. Late last year, it released an international SDK and last month, it opened up a self-serve platform for smaller advertisers to get on to the service. And now, it’s making an even bigger play, introducing an HTML5 API that will enable mobile ad networks and publishers of mobile websites to offer signup ads without having to install an SDK.

Pontiflex’s HTML5 API means that ad networks will be able to offer its sign-up ads along with their other inventory, allowing publishers to easily take advantage of Pontiflex’s ads. MoPub, a real-time bidding marketplace for mobile publishers, is one of the first networks to support Pontiflex’s new API. Mobile websites will also be able to offer sign-up ads for the first time; previously, Pontiflex only supported native apps. The API lets publishers get around installing yet another SDK, which can be chore for some and can expand the size of an app.

Pontiflex, which recently passed 1 billion impressions per month, said that while many publishers are seeing mobile CPMs or cost per 1,000 impressions of 50 cents to $2, Pontiflex is generating CPMs in the $10 to $25 range. That comes from Pontiflex’s take on mobile advertising. Pontiflex lets developers embed an ad that asks users to sign up to hear more from relevant advertisers. Consumers can choose to hand over their name, email address and ZIP code to a brand right from the ad without having to leave the application. Advertisers only pay when a user signs up. Almost 30 million have signed up for ads on Pontiflex’s platform, which has more than 600 enterprise customers on it.

Zephrin Lasker, Pontiflex’s CEO and co-founder, said the HTML5 API was the next logical step for the Pontiflex platform and allows it to reach many more publishers and developers, giving them an easy way to monetize their apps. And that should continue Pontiflex’s growth by letting publishers access sign-up ads through existing ad networks.

“Just as self-serve for advertisers cracks open the small and medium business market, this opens the other side of mirror. It’s huge for us. We believe it will open the market for sign-up ads on a much more liquid level,” Lasker said.

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Pontiflex/Harris Survey: Incentive And Video Ads Turn Off Mobile Users

Ingrid Lunden — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:00:13 +0000

Mobile ads today make up less than one percent of all money spent on media advertising, and a poll just out from Harris Interactive, commissioned by Pontiflex, could go some way to explain why at least some mobile formats are not inspiring much confidence among those buying ads.

According to the poll, incentive-based ads — those that offer users in-game credits or other rewards when they download the app or another piece of content being advertised in the ad — are giving little in the way of consumer use or loyalty.

Among those interacting with incentive apps, only three percent of those who have downloaded apps via the ads use those apps often. Some 37 percent said they uninstalled the apps after getting incentive, and 25 percent who kept the apps never used them again.

Equally problematic were the prospects for video ads. The survey found that among smartphone users, only seven percent of respondents said they liked video takeover ads — those that occupy your screen and require you to watch a video to continue in an app. Among tablet owners the number was a bit higher: 15 percent said they liked video takeovers.

Video ads also seem to raise other issues: some 35 percent of smartphone users and 34 percent of tablet users worried that mobile video ads were eating into their data service plans too much (regardless of whether that was actually the case). This might come as worrying news or companies like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and others which have turned attention to rich media ads in the wake of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) virtually dominating the area of mobile search ads.

However, despite these knocks, mobile ads continue to be a key revenue driver for publishers who want to offer their apps for free — especially since paid content is not proving to be popular with a majority of users: only 12 percent of smartphone owners and 24 percent of tablet owners say they would pay for apps if it meant no ads, the survey found.

For incentive ads, this is not the first bit of bad news this year: Apps that contained incentive-based ads were earlier this year banned by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) when it emerged that such formats artificially boosted the popularity rankings of apps offered as in-ad downloads. In App Stores like Apple’s, which contain hundreds and thousands of apps, rankings really count for visibility.

Tapjoy, one of the bigger companies in the incentive ad space, is reportedly looking to sell itself to a social games player like Zynga, DeNA or Gree, according to the blog Inside Social Games. If true that could be a sign of some of the consolidation in that space.

But while the findings of the survey shed some light on what the user experience is like for some forms of mobile ads, it is slightly frustrating that Pontiflex, which commissioned the survey, did not directly ask the survey respondents about how they felt about the ad format Pontiflex sells itself.

AppLeads, as the format is called, keeps users on the app but asks them to sign up to receive further information from advertisers. It’s a format that is offered on iOS and Android platforms — CEO Zephrin Lasker says Android is “by far” the company’s biggest platform at the moment — and will likely come to Windows Phones next year.

Like incentive apps and rich-media formats like video takeovers, Pontiflex’s “cost per lead” format is also an interactive format, and if you’re going to poll user response to ads, you should ask about all the formats, not just the ones that compete with your own.

The one area that Harris polled that did touch on Pontiflex’s own business is the question of whether users prefer ads that keep them in apps or take them to websites. But in that case opinion seemed evenly split: half of tablet users chose to say in apps, while the other half like websites; 57 percent of smartphone users preferred to stay in apps.

The Harris/Pontiflex survey polled 2,800 adults in the U.S. in the month of November.

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Pontiflex takes its sign-up mobile ads international

Ryan Kim — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:07:28 +0000

Pontiflex, a New York start-up with a mobile sign-up ad platform, allows consumers to pick what kind of ads and offers they want to see. The model, as we wrote about before, is pulling in big money for app developers and publishers, but it was limited to consumers in the U.S. Now, Pontiflex is releasing an international SDK that allows U.S. developers to place country-specific ads in local languages and take advantage of the increasing number of international app users.

The AppLeads International SDK allows developers to initially target Asia, Western Europe, Latin America and Canada, where consumers have already made 1 million requests for localized Pontiflex sign-up ads. Prior to the SDK, Pontiflex wasn’t able to monetize international users for developers because it didn’t have local advertisers and country-specific ads to show them. Now, Pontiflex is turning to its existing 500 advertisers and lining up new international ones to reach those users.

Pontiflex works by letting developers embed an ad in their mobile apps that asks users to sign up to hear more from relevant advertisers. Consumers can choose to hand over their name, email address and zip code to a trusted brand right from the ad without having to leave the application. This simple formula allows consumers to get offers only from brands they like and advertisers are able to start a more meaningful relationship with interested consumers, which translates into higher revenue for publishers who run these ads. Pontiflex ads can run alongside ads from other providers.

Zephrin Lasker, Pontiflex’s CEO and co-founder said apps are increasingly cross-border and are being used by people all around the world. There’s a big opportunity, he said, for developers and companies like Pontiflex that can help them tap the international market for mobile advertising, which is expected to be worth $3.3 billion this year. Pontiflex is now working to figure out how to match international users to the right brands and advertisers.

I think this highlights the broader international play for U.S. developers. There’s a lot of opportunity in turning the whole world into a market for apps. And it makes sense to not only sell and distribute apps around the world, but also serve up ads that are relevant to local users. Developers who localize their apps and take advantage of these advertising opportunities stand to make some good money.

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Monetization on mobile can’t be like the web

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:08:23 +0000

GigaOM's Ryan Kim, Zephrin Lasker of Pontiflex, Brian Wong of Kiip, Keren Zemer of Appsfire , and William Hsu of AT&T at Mobilize 2011

Mobile advertising is a different beast than any advertising that came before, and the opportunities to measure engagement and even conversion may also influence advertising elsewhere. This may be a somewhat obvious conclusion, but in a panel on going beyond the CPM at the Mobilize 2011 conference in San Francisco participants got into details about how mobile will change advertising by becoming less like the web model and through better understanding of how mobile ads change and drive consumer behavior.

For example, William Hsu, SVP and Chief Product Officer at AT&T Interactive, indicated that the operators was looking at how to move beyond the YellowPages model of advertising to something more valuable and contextual such as television advertising. For him and for some other members of the panel, the opportunity presented by mobility was in being able to understand and track exactly how an ad on a phone might influence the end customers.

Brian Wong, the CEO of Kiip, explained that a campaign his company did for a “major national consumer electronics retailer with a yellow label,” resulted in 15 percent of people who won a coupon actually going into the store and buying something. Being able to track those results and offer that to advertisers can be confusing for ad firms but is attractive to the product company that hired the ad firm.

However, today, we’re still in a web-dominated world in part because ad firms and their clients understand that model. The result is developers who are trying to game the system and place ads next to areas on-screen where a consumer might click– even if it is an accidental click. Zephrin Lasker, CEO and co-founder of Pontiflex, noted that 50 percent of clicks are accidental.

This obviously upsets consumers, who don’t want to interrupt their gameplay with an accidental click, but it’s also elevating the click-through rate to levels it may not deserve. Hsu reminded the panel that click-throughs are really a proxy for how an ad might help the advertisers’ business grow. He predicted that in a year we will be able to track how an ad converts to traffic in a store and within 24 months we will be able to track it all the way through to purchase and the size of the purchase.

The rest of the panel was dominated by the idea that mobile can lead to the creation of an entirely new type of advertisement. While Wong called it “voodoo technology,” it’s clear that the combination of location, the deeply personal nature of a mobile device and better data tracking can create an entirely new and more effective way to get people to buy things. Unfortunately, no one on the panel discussed how users might react to all this high-tech effort to part them from their cash.

Watch live streaming video from mobilize2011 at livestream.com

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Pontiflex shows how to make money with mobile ads

Ryan Kim — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:00:57 +0000

While the mobile app boom has created a lot of success stories, many mobile developers still struggle with extracting money out of their apps and getting more downloads. Pontiflex, a New York City–based mobile advertising company, is helping crack the code with its ad platform by asking users to sign up for the kinds of ads they want to see.

Pontiflex’s AppLeads platform allows developers to embed a full-page ad at different points in their app that allows users to sign up to hear more about ads from relevant advertisers. Consumers can choose to hand over their name, email address and zip code to a trusted brand right from the ad without having to leave the application. This simple transaction has produced big results, with cost-per-thousand impressions hitting $101.76 on Android apps and $47 on iPhone apps. And AppLeads is coming to the iPad today, giving developers more tools to monetize their apps.

AppLeads on iPad will follow the same formula but will be optimized for the larger screen, with users getting a choice of six brands to interact with rather than three on mobile phones. The expectation is that the platform, which a developer can easily install with an SDK, will continue to be a moneymaker for developers. A test on the Color Effects iPad app has yielded CPMs of $67 through AppLeads.

It’s an interesting take on mobile advertising and shows that there are still a lot of creative ways to make ads work on smartphones and tablets. Instead of opting for persistent banner ads, which are often mistakenly clicked, Pontiflex gives users a simple proposition: choose to engage with a brand that it thinks a user will find useful or skip it and move on.

Six million consumers have signed on with Pontiflex’s 300 brand partners, handing over their email addresses. Pontiflex estimates that 15 percent of all smartphone users have signed up on an AppLeads ad, which have been installed in 150 million application downloads. Now half of Pontiflex’s business comes from mobile, even though it just rolled out late last year, following a launch online. The key is that Pontiflex works hard behind the scenes to present the best brands for a user, based on more than two dozens signals and what ads are having success. That tuning can help turn an unwanted ad into a welcome invitation for consumers.

For advertisers, it gives them a way to connect to users with a trusted tool: email. Even with the rise of group buying services like Groupon and LivingSocial, which rely on email addresses, Pontiflex said it hasn’t encountered email fatigue. The company says sign-ups have actually gone up five times since it began.

“We think we’ve cracked the code on mobile advertising. If you make the right offer at the right time, people will opt-in,” said Zephrin Lasker, co-founder and CEO of Pontiflex. “The appetite for email is way bigger than we thought.”

The platform is not just good for advertisers; it has also proven helpful for developers. Developers can use the tool to engage with their users to alert them about updates or to encourage them to buy upcoming apps from them. If developers already collect email addresses, Pontiflex can manage the database for them and show them how to reach out to their users. This might not work for developers looking to score quick downloads, but as the name of the game shifts to longer-term engagement, it makes sense for developers to spark a lasting relationship with users.

Pontiflex is growing quickly, with 57 employees, and it has taken $8.75 million to date from RRE Ventures, Greenhill SAVP and New Atlantic Ventures, including a $6.25 million Series B round in 2009.

I like what Pontiflex is doing, and it seems like a fresh way to get at mobile users. Developers may not want to beat their users over the heads with these ads, but used strategically, they can be a win for developers, advertisers and users. The money in mobile apps seems to be running toward in-app purchases. But with creative ideas still popping up, there are ways for mobile advertising to come of age and become a big contributor to the bottom line of app publishers.

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