Alex Rahaman Talks About The Recent Investment In StrikeAd, Mobile RTB, And The Mobile Display Market
AR: We are very pleased to raise investment from eValue, led by Thomas Falk, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the digital advertising space in Europe. The investment will accelerate and complete the build out of our StrikeAd Fusion Mobile Demand Side Platform. The investment will allow us to enhance some of the automated optimisation, tracking and analysis features as well as further develop the reporting and analysis tools.
We are headquartered in London, but our platform allows for mobile ad planning and buying in multiple markets. As such, the new investment will facilitate our expansion through 2011 into Continental Europe and USA. Our Chief Operating Officer and co-founder, Simon Wajcenberg, is leading all our International activities. He previously successfully scaled Clash Media into several markets internationally.
Are agencies looking to put serious budgets through the mobile channel in 2011? Is tracking campaigns still an issue in the space? I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that discrepancies between agencies and some ad nets can often be as high as 60%. Surely that’s a real concern for media buyers.
AR: Agencies are absolutely focusing on mobile in 2011. They are committing people and resources to address the challenge of finding and tracking audiences within a new medium. Like any new medium, there will be issues to face and tracking is one of them on mobile. Agency adservers have not been widely adopted so the execution, tracking and reporting of campaigns are manual and laborious, with discrepancies likely in that scenario.
However, the industry is starting to address these challenges, with the IAB actively focusing on agency adserving. Of course, our DSP solution is very transparent and straightforward to use, and we are finding agencies very receptive to our solutions.
Now that DSPs, like DataXu and X+1, are venturing into the mobile automated space, do you think convergence between mobile and online display will squeeze your business model?
AR: There are many differences between the mobile internet and ‘fixed’ internet. Apart from the technical areas, like multiple handsets, screen sizes and cookie adoption etc, the most fundamental area is that advertisers have different ways of making money on mobile. With the growth in Mcommerce, vouchers/coupons, location based sites and functionality will come increased mobile media spend – but also different success metrics and tracking criteria to web, which we specialise in.
In addition, web DSPs are operating in a far more mature market where certain aspects of planning and reporting are already in place. This is not the case in mobile, so our tool extends into some of those areas to assist in the education and growth of this new channel.
Is your focus purely European for the minute?
AR: We have a German investment partner who has a successful track record in scaling his own and his investee businesses across Continental Europe. So we will have strong European ambitions for StrikeAd. However, we recognise that the USA is leading the world in exchange trading on web and is a very important market for us, especially as there is no dedicated mobile DSP there today.
How many buying platforms are you currently integrated with?
AR: We are currently integrated with four platforms, three are USA base and one a large European Supply Side Platform.
Mobile RTB is being heralded as the next big innovation in display, but I don’t see how it will be possible without the cookie? Will location be key to its growth? What other data will be used as a means to value the mobile impression in real-time?
AR: It is currently a challenge on mobile not to have a definitive and well established tracking mechanism like cookie tracking on web. However, some supply partners are starting to offer Unique identifiers which can be used with our platform to facilitate tracking and targeting. Location based targeting is very important within RTB, allowing advertisers to bid on the right person or profile as they enter their areas of interest.
In addition to unique and location identifiers, other data which will add value premium to the bid are high end device and the more traditional socio-economic and demographic attributes.
Is StrikeAd looking at developing its own RTB solution?
AR: We are developing our own RTB solution for mobile. Our London based CTO has employed developers in Ukraine and a team in Moscow to give us an enterprise class, highly scalable solution for mobile RTB.
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