What do you see as the biggest challenges to mobile advertising achieving its potential? How does Nexage attack these challenges?
There are challenges, but more important, they are against a backdrop of strong tailwinds based on the broad recognition – by buyers and sellers – of the unique and strategic value of mobile advertising.
I think there are three main challenges:
- to drive efficiencies to the market so buyers, advertisers and publishers work less hard to drive their business forward;
- to combine the enormous power of automation with transparency and controls; and
- to ensure we can continue to produce the value drivers (rich media, location-enabled impressions, RTB, etc.) so that we build a vibrant and fully liquid market.
These are the industry challenges we are tackling, and solving, with our integrated RTB/mediation platform, the most complete technology to simplify and fuel the buying and selling of mobile ads.
Nexage recently announced a partnership with Backflip Studios, and has been partnered with Rovio for a few months now. What impact has Nexage’s RTB platform had on advertising in mobile gaming?
The first part of the equation is the increased dependency game developers, who are continually innovating and increasing the number of freemium mobile games, have on mobile advertising. Game developers are looking at avid fan bases that grow demand (and inventory) and now need to consider how to monetize a critical and rapidly scaling business.
The second part of the equation is how do they do it to maximize revenue and successfully scale with that increasing demand? This is where we impact mobile gaming: by enabling the rapid revenue growth of global, innovative game developers, we ensure they have the monetary resources to continue to innovate, add titles and grow their fan base.
By connecting game developers to more than 125 demand sources, enabling them to exploit the premium performance delivered through our RTB exchange, and providing them an extremely innovative integrated RTB/mediation yield optimization capability, we give game developers the ability to maximize today’s revenue and scale their business as their games grow.
Why is real-time bidding so successful for publishers, agencies and advertisers alike?
The important backdrop to the answer is that RTB is creating real value to both buyers and sellers, which is what is fueling its meteoric growth. Sellers are tapping into a vibrant DSP buyer market and, because they are able to sell their inventory in the most valuable manner (in real-time, on an impression-level basis), are realizing both significant eCPM premiums (that show the value the buyer ascribes to the impression) and dramatic month-over-month growth (that shows the extraordinary demand to buy on RTB).
As mobile explodes and demand increases, how does Nexage enable scaling?
This is such an important question. It goes to the very heart of the fact that mobile ad tech is a technology market, and there is a direct and vivid relationship between the completeness and strength of technology with business results.
Right now, Nexage is managing 12 billion impressions per month, but we designed it to manage three times that. This is intentional and the genius of our CTO and engineering team—to use software design and architecture best practices to ensure that our platform has substantial capacity upside while driving software-based scaling that enables us to easily and gracefully grow.
The reason this is so vital is that others may bypass best practice design if they are trying to catch up in the market, such that speed to market destroys one’s ability to scale.