Adfonic Launches Self-Service Mobile Ad Marketplace In Europe. Mobile Ad Exchange On The Way?

Adfonic launched a self-service mobile ad marketplace this week. The platform allows advertisers to build, execute, monitor and control campaigns. Publishers have access to tools and real-time reporting and analytics to maximise their earning potential from mobile advertising. Advertisers can bid on the mobile ad inventory, and price is dictated by supply and demand. Mobile sites won’t be able to set a floor price on their ad inventory, but it is something Adfonic are keen to introduce.
The company is aiming to develop an open exchange with real-time bidding capabilities for mobile. Victor Malachard, Adfonic, Co-Founder and CEO, spoke to FarneyMedia this week to explain how the service will benefit publishers and advertisers – and how the company would like to emulate the exchange model for mobile advertising.
How does the new Adfonic service work?

The Adfonic site connects publishers of mobile sites and applications to advertisers who wish to reach their target audience via display advertising (banners and text links on mobile screens). The platform combines advanced targeting and matching with lessons learned from real-world campaign management. This consists of defining your campaign parameters, specifying targeting options, putting together your different creatives, setting budgets and notifications, and then monitoring performance and managing spend via real-time reporting and analytics. On the flipside, publishers define their app or site parameters, give us a profile of their audience’s interests and demographics, and integrate the code snippets generated automatically by the platform into their mobile properties. Once live, they can then track and optimise their earnings in realtime. It’s a win-win situation: advertisers reach their target audience more accurately, publishers benefit from the higher engagement, and end users ultimately find more contextually and personally relevant offers.

The platform is a fully self-service model?

Adfonic is completely self-service. Our philosophy is to provide our users with all the tools they need to drive successful campaigns. It’s low cost, easy to use, and puts them fully in control — and it facilitates our ability to scale globally.

Can you explain how the biding functionality works?

We operate both CPC and CPM advertising models. The prices are set by supply and demand; placement is driven by performance — based on bid, yield, relevancy, targeting constraints and best practices (e.g. frequency capping). Bids can be changed in real-time, generating a dynamic and transparent marketplace.

The media buy on Adfonic is blind. Are there plans to make it more transparent?

Blind networks prevail in the mobile advertising space at the moment, and our view is that that needs to change and align with the transparency one finds in the online exchanges. We’ve launched with feature parity with the other mobile self-serve networks but have designed the system to support the market’s evolution to a much more transparent approach.

Is the service aimed at long-tail or premium publishers?

Both. Long-tail publishers benefit from Adfonic’s intuitive and straightforward approach, but big publishers reap the same rewards of enhanced monetization and control. We’re also developing our vision of private branded networks, where premium publishers can demand top dollar for their inventory.

What kind of targeting do you offer agencies and advertisers?

The campaign management experience is designed around giving advertisers the tools to reach their target audience. To help them accomplish this, we divide our targeting into multiple layers corresponding to the current buying patterns in the market. These layers consist of location, time (day-parting), mobile operator, demographics, and target devices. On top of these, we give advertisers a Web 2.0 style approach to matching up with relevant publisher inventory by using tags: user-generated keywords that provide much more precise contextual hints than a pigeonholed channel/category approach.

Have you plans to introduce real-time bidding on ad inventory the platform?

Yes, this is a fundamental principle of the Adfonic marketplace.

What are your plans for the platform? Is it to aggregate mobile ad inventory on an open exchange?

Adfonic is all about making connections. Our philosophy of openness, transparency and innovation goes beyond connecting buyers and sellers, and drives our vision for richer ad formats, deeper campaign tools, and broader platform reach. We see the ultimate power of mobile advertising being the seamless integration of the unique aspects of a personal, location-based device with the traditional world of demographics, technographics and psychographics, in order to get the right message to the right person at the right time.

Marketers and agencies are increasingly looking for open exchange platforms to access highly-targeted audiences. Adfonic looks set to fill that need in the mobile ad market. Their new service is available to use at the Adfonic site.