Earlier this year, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the UK opened a much-coveted speaking slot at its Mobile Engage conference to the vote. We submitted our pitch, and two weeks later, the slot was ours.
For our pitch, we thought about where we see the most confusion among digital marketers and agencies. This really does seem to be about the differences between online and mobile Demand-side Platforms (DSPs) – that is, the means by which we place more levers in the hands of big brands and agencies to get more transparency and control over where they’re placing their ads.
So we thought we’d educate the top-tier audience at the event. Here’s a summary of what we went through, and while you read the rest of this piece you might also like to view the slideset on Slideshare.
Hands up
We knocked down the mobile v desktop domino straight away, by asking the audience whether they used mobile web most of the time, or mobile apps. Many more hands went up for mobile apps. This proved the first point we wanted to make: that tech designed for mobile quite simply works better on mobile.
This reminded me of a session at the IAB in late 2012, in which there was a debate around whether mobile apps or the mobile web would win our affections. Even then, the overwhelming majority voted for apps.
The crucial point was that, while the mobile web is more directly analogous to desktop, it simply does not work as well as an app developed specifically for mobile. In other words, what works for desktop does not necessarily work for mobile. And this is especially true of mobile advertising.
Lacking the tracking
As I said in my first column here on Fourth Source four months ago, there are many reasons why you can’t do mobile advertising like desktop, and chief among these is the cookie issue.
Desktop advertising is massively reliant on third-party tracking cookies, in which a publisher places a cookie on your computer detailing what you browsed on the site, and other advertisers read that cookie when you visit other sites. If you’ve ever noticed adverts following you around the web, then you know about tracking cookies.
Mobile doesn’t have a standard tracking cookie, so we cannot rely on cookies for mobile tracking. In fact, Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, doesn’t even allow third-party cookies by default. To put this in perspective, in our slideset we showed the share of mobile operating systems from our latest Global AdMetrics Report for Q4 2012 – and then removed iOS. In one stroke, we demonstrated, you lose almost half the total global mobile inventory.
Cracking the tracking
The solution to tracking is very much the domain of the pureplay mobile DSP. The best-of-breed solution tracks and analyses individual users by maintaining a real-time mobile unique identifier database. Instead of treating every device as a separate user, the database correlates platform-specific device identifiers (iOS and Android), exchange-level data, and device recognition techniques, as shown below.
It is through this combination of smart algorithms and big data that we’re approaching the ability to identify who has clicked which ads. And this brings three important benefits:
- Positive and negative retargeting. Positive retargeting means showing adverts specifically to people who have expressed interest in a product or service, while negative retargeting means withholding adverts from people who have recently seen them. It is a much smarter, more sophisticated way of giving the right people the right ads at the right time, rather than simply getting in the way of the user experience.
- Buying audiences rather than inventory. When buying inventory rather than audiences, you’re making rough matches between websites and the type of audiences they may – or may not – attract. DSPs hook into Real-time Bidding (RTB) exchanges, which enable bids for individual ad slots based on what the advertiser, publisher and third-party data tells us about audiences. It’s a much more efficient and effective way to realise value from programmatic buying, for publishers and advertisers alike.
- Optimisation. Make no mistake: data is key to effective advertising, and as advertisers start seeing the data come in, they’ll also begin to recognise differences between mobile and desktop, such as the times of access, geolocation, app v web behaviour, and so on. As advertisers compare the log-level data from mobile with that of desktop, they’ll be able to have cross-device campaigns that make the most of desktop and mobile together.
So…
… do you need a mobile DSP?
Mobile is different from desktop. It’s different today, and we’re just starting. It will be different tomorrow, not just because of the smaller size but the variation in how audiences behave with mobile, the number of operating systems and devices available, and how personal mobile is to people.
In a complex and incredibly fast-moving environment, mobile demands mobile, and always will, from app to DSP and beyond.
