#mobiletargeting

How many apps do you have on your smartphone? How many do you actually use everyday? Chances are, it’s not many. As of 2014 the average user only had about 25 apps on their phone and only regularly used about seven. And with over 1.2 million iOS apps available, to say supply is outpacing demand is a bit of an understatement.

For consumers, sifting through the App Store for the perfect app is like looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack. While the search bar can be a big help if you know what you’re looking for, organic discovery is nearly impossible due to too many choices and little organization. Partnerships such as Apple/Pinterest deal have recently cropped up to cut through App Store chaos and address discovery challenges. While this is certainly a step in the right direction for consumers, app discovery still has a long way to go, and it’s top of mind for advertisers.

For advertisers, overabundance means lots of nearly-identical apps within one category, creating a major splintering problem. Consumers have too many choices. This excess of options and lack of organization divides consumers with the same interests across several apps rather than consolidating them. With this in mind, advertisers need to rely on a diversified app strategy in order to succeed on mobile. There is no must-have app in any category – rather than putting all their eggs in one basket, marketers should think less about which apps to place messages on and more about how to find their audience in an app-agnostic way.

Related articles:

“Are You Listening to your Ad Campaigns?

Mobile Commerce Outlook 2015

Behaviorally targeting consumers based on demographic, online behavior or historical product purchases is a very common practice in today’s desktop digital marketing landscape. The ecosystem consists of a wide marketplace of data providers, which often specialize in different targeting capabilities, methodologies and even specific vertical strengths (B2B, Automotive, CPG, Retail, etc.). However, demographic targeting is perhaps the most important as advertisers are most concerned about reaching their target audience at scale. In no environment is this truer than in mobile. 

Currently, the biggest challenge in mobile is scale. Even the largest aggregated Behavioral Data exchanges have limited Mobile Device ID targeting data which only represents a fraction of the active smartphone and tablet devices in the marketplace. This poses a problem for mobile marketers looking to justify buying mobile display and video media while still being efficient and accurately hitting the target audience. Fortunately RUN is able to use two different methods to solve for this - Nielsen Mobile Online Campaign Ratings and Verizon Precision ID Demographics.

Mobile OCR is Nielsen’s migration of their desktop demographic campaign ratings system, which scores every impression delivered to a user. Utilizing Nielsen’s API with Facebook, desktop cookies are scored with corresponding Age and Gender designations. The output is Reach, Frequency and GRP levels achieved against the Adult 13+ Audience, as well as GRP levels achieved in each demo segment.

Mobile OCR takes this approach to the mobile ecosystem and allows a media buyer to buy impressions against only the target demographic segment they intended to reach, with confidence that the audience data was validated against Facebook data.

The second approach of accurate demographic audience targeting comes from another newly available deterministically derived dataset – the Verizon Precision ID. This straightforward approach leverages Verizon subscriber data, a proprietary carrier ID parameter, allowing a media buy to accurately target Age, Gender, Income and Language Preference segments. 

Not to be confused with the popular car service app, UberMedia recently made a splash in the marketplace by introducing its latest mobile ad platform, UberAds.  UberMedia is a mobile app developer and ad solutions company.  Mostly known for their Twitter Apps such as Echofon, UberSocial and Plume, the company also creates non-Twitter apps including Pink Pad, BabyBump and Kidfolio.  In the past, the company’s main offering is to take users’ social interests  (who they follow on Twitter, for example) and target mobile ads to these users through its owned and operated apps. 

The recent news of the UberAds platform doesn’t mean a complete shift in focus for the company, but rather a way to target users even more intelligently.  The new platform will allow UberMedia to layer on geo-targeting and deeper intent targeting, by taking publicly available social media data into its targeting and auto-optimization platform.  Click the link below to read more about UberMedia and UberAds.