On the way back from CTIA this year, I read a great blog post on MobileStance called Mobile Publishers Dance with the Ad Networks, which inherently summed up the complexities in the mobile advertising space. The beginning of any new market is exciting and even as fans of mobile advertising we can all agree there is some confusion and much waiting.

Crisp has always served the premium brand publisher to create an attractive and robust mobile presence that scales and easily integrates into an ad network of the publisher’s choice to help monetize. Pretty simple business proposition, right? If only. The industry as a whole lacks standards and I’m not just talking about banner sizes. For example, it would be great if everyone could synchronize the bot filter lists on a monthly basis so that we’re all working off the same page. But, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Market Complexities

I recently counted and found sixteen established, as well as newly funded ad networks, and I hear the song “Lost in the SuperMarket” by The Clash play in my head every time when I think about the abundance of choices. If I were a publisher, I assume I would like to sell some of my own inventory if I could, in which case I need only a basic ad server solution and then give the rest to an ad network to sell on my behalf. To a certain degree my choices are limited if I want to ad serve on-deck. Verizon and Sprint (and I’m sure AT&T will follow suit) require enablements with their selected partners. So, my choices then become about whether or not I want an ad network which will focus on premium placement or will serve the remnant market. In either case, no one company can do a great job of selling the inventory and who can blame them? Just like the MobileStance article suggests, it is truly almost impossible to get an easy and comprehensive view to enable a media buyer to buy effectively.

Technical and Other Complexities

Crisp has long been involved in ad network integrations and has integrated with most major ad serving players in this mobile space. People can dumb down the integration to dropping in a snippet of code or urls into our pages and while we had hoped integration could be that easy that isn’t always the case. [Caveat: we have great ad network partnerships but I would like to point out general problems that we see for the better of the whole market.] What are some of the potential snags?

As I mentioned above, discrepancy in page views is not only due to different filter, but latency also causes errors and throws off reporting. For our publishers, we call the servers of the ad networks to retrieve an ad but if the ad doesn’t come up within, let’s say, a second, we have to go away without the ad in order to uphold SLA standards for our clients. Other challenges include ad-servers which only serving jpegs when some phones out there don’t support the content type. We’ve found that an xHTML based ad server can mess up WML sites (WML support is required by some carriers). Device and carrier detection is critical and can be difficult and more elegant solutions can dynamically handle this, while some can’t. Mobile is a complex world and everyone knows that it’s an ecosystem composed of links among partner (sometimes even competitor) companies to make things work. This also means though that any given time, something could break down somewhere along the mobile advertising chain and neither we, our ad network, and least of all, the publisher, likes to be left holding the bag in front of the consumer.

Since Crisp serves the publisher, I will put myself in the publisher’s shoes for a moment and pretend I have to choose an ad network. What would I do? I would:

1) give myself the flexibility to work with multiple ad-networks especially because unless I have the clout, on-deck placement on all the carriers may necessitate this;

2) work with the ad server technology that is able to pass along as much information as possible so that I can make informed decisions – first step being as comprehensive a view as I can in regards to carrier on-deck/off-deck; device information, etc.;

3) gather as much information as possible so that I can one day sell at least a part of my own inventory at as high a CPM as possible (we’re talking about getting more complex data here e.g. behavioral); and

4) work with the ad network(s) that gives me the best fill rates (that’s a genius statement, isn’t it?).

While everything I listed above is just basic common sense, the inherent fragmentation in mobile doesn’t make it easy. The desktop online experience creates expectations of the mobile web which are not quite possible yet. Let’s be real. Mobile advertising is still on its way. Meanwhile, we need to work out the kinks and ultimately, we believe our publishers will take a holistic approach which will only come about by trial and error.

Mary Park | RSS 2.0 | Comment it , or trackback this post.