Please join us for the Making Sense of Mobile Advertising webinar on Wednesday, February 22, at 11:00am – 12:00pm EDT. The webinar will feature a panel of industry experts from Celtra, Fiksu and Mojiva, who will speak to different aspects of the subject, such as media buying, creative, rich media, premium networks and tracking. To register click here.
Each panellist will offer a short introduction to the subject, highlighting trends, relevant statistics and recent developments. The webinar will then move on to a Q&A session, in which participants will have an opportunity to ask questions about the subject to the panellists. The webinar will be chaired by Mobile Marketing editor, David Murphy.
We hope you can join us! Don’t forget to register to reserve your spot!
Celtra recently participated in a panel event at New York’s Bowery Hotel that addressed exchange traded rich media. In the discussion, leading industry placers from Dataxu, MoPub, Collider Media and Mindshare discussed mobile trends, including advertiser perceptions toward media buying and privacy issues. They also discussed the viability of rich media and its impact on how consumers interact with mobile, the reasons why 2012 will be a pinnacle year in mobile advertising history, and how publishers can develop mobile monetization strategies that maximize their revenue without compromising user experience.
Celtra along with executives from Collider Media, DataXu, Fuor Digital, Groupon Mobile, Mindshare, and MoPub will examine the benefits and challenges of mobile advertising in a series of panel events. The panelists will discuss the newest mobile trends including the benefits of running a scalable mobile rich media campaign through a buy side platform, a look at private premium inventory, the latest in customer data and tips to stay ahead of the curve.
Details on upcoming events:
New York City
When: Wednesday, February 1
Panelists include:
Miha Mikek, CEO, Celtra
Jim Payne, CEO, MoPub
Philip Miano, VP Sales & Marketing, Collider Media
Brian Decker, Managing Director, Mindshare
Lara Mehanna, GM Mobile, DataXu
San Francisco
When: Tuesday, February 7
Panelists include:
Rob Kramer, EVP Sales, Celtra
Jim Payne, CEO, MoPub
Brent Gaskamp, President, Collider Media
Iryna Newman, Mobile Marketing Manager, Groupon Mobile
Lara Mehanna, GM Mobile, DataXu
Chicago
When: Thursday, February 9
Panelists include:
Grant Stratemeyer, VP of Business Development, Celtra
Jim Payne, CEO, MoPub
Philip Miano, VP Sales and Marketing, Collider Media
Lara Mehanna, GM Mobile, DataXu
Josh Dreller, VP, Media Technology & Analytics, Fuor Digital
For more information or to request a personal invitation to a panel event, please email marketing@celtra.com. Have mobile insights you’d like to share? Join the discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #MobileLove.
When Adobe abandoned its mobile Flash product last month, the general emotional reaction was rather predictable, yet strangely irrelevant: Steve Jobs was right. He indeed was, but truth be told, Flash was never going to be a serious contender in the mobile arena and Jobs was always going to be right. The abandonment of mobile Flash is an important milestone for the mobile industry, not only for video or games, but also for mobile display advertising, where it carries more of a symbolic value versus practical implications
Although the mobile advertising industry never really considered accepting Flash as its technological platform, it is constantly looking at the online world for ideas and concepts, and is largely emulating the approaches of online display advertising, which has been continuously dominated by Flash.
With its ubiquitous Flash player, Flash mainly stands out as a symbol of standardization in online display. But despite the advent of HTML5 enabled mobile devices, that symbol is still casting a shadow over mobile. HTML5 is largely seen as a Flash replacement — a technology that will do for mobile display what Flash did for online — uniform ad products that can be built by anyone and can be published anywhere.
Standardization of online display advertising has evolved organically. Online display advertising originating on web portals (later joined by blogs), were so incredibly fragmented that standardization was a necessity. Flash technology made things easy — it served not only as a creation tool but, more importantly, as a distribution platform. Flash ads could run on any website and could be tracked consistently.
Mobile is significantly different on both fronts.
First, the media landscape has changed dramatically. Early adopters were social, entertainment, and other services, versus portals, which command a huge majority of the mobile audience. In addition, these varying properties appeared more or less at once, causing two key effects:
The media landscape is less fragmented, and a much smaller number of properties are needed to achieve the desired reach and demography. Ad products standardization across them would help, but it’s no longer necessary.
Display advertising, which in the online world is inherent to the “portals”, is considered a relevant ad product for all mobile services. Standardized ad products simply don’t work anymore, thanks to the variation in both content and user experience that.
Second, ad creation and distribution are equally different. While authoring tools outputting HTML5 based ads are quickly improving and will soon solve the creation problem, distribution will be too difficult to standardize. At the moment, the market is flooded with various SDK solutions. Even MRAID, which is the most supported standardization initiative, is unlikely to garner the same authority Flash has in the online world. It will take a lot of time, effort and resources to produce a default starting point for online display advertising.
Thus, online might not be the best model for classic display advertising but could offer some useful insight into the direction that mobile is moving to. Recently, there are two trends dominating the online world: the rise of ad exchanges, and a shift towards social ads. The unprecedented growth of Facebook’s advertising business is a proven illustration of the undergoing changes.
Here’s a simple exercise to understand what is happening and why. Think of any online display ad that’s not Flash — or, even better, any online display ad at all. Banner blindness is at least as much the consequence of ad standardization as it is of trashy creatives. Just look at Facebook and try to imagine 728x90px and 300x250px standard size Flash ads stuck somewhere in the header and in the right sidebar. Would you click that? Would you still be using Facebook? Facebook advertising is growing more than 100 percent a year because it has developed fantastic ad products that don’t hinder the content and leverage the unique social capabilities of the network. These ad products can only live on Facebook, making them specific, unique, and special.
This does not mean that there won’t be standardization in mobile advertising. Standardization still makes a lot of sense for long tail inventory that will be increasingly sold through ad exchanges. Premium publishers, on the other hand, will probably try to develop custom, more intelligent, engaging and sensitive ad products to monetize their valuable audience more effectively.
Mobile advertising is, much like its online sibling, an industry where technology meets the art of persuasion. Today, much of the effort in this young industry is concentrated around infrastructure — automation and ease of use — and rightly so. Enabling ads to run efficiently and helping advertisers easily launch campaigns is absolutely essential. But it must never be forgotten that, at the end of the day, advertising is completely consumer-driven. Standardized products, supported by intelligent machines, create efficiencies for the industry at large. That said, humans are not robots. Ad products have to be targeted at the consumer — their behavior, needs and desires must be the impetus driving the innovation behind everything. They have to appeal to the consumer. And only when they do, they will suck less.
Mobile Marketer recently connected with Matevz Klanjsek, co-founder and chief product officer at Celtra, to identify the five best practices for rich media mobile advertising.
1) Develop clear goals for the campaign. If the goal is brand building, customer acquisition or brand loyalty, a different number of pages, features and actions should be used. For brand building and brand loyalty, funnel ads or ads with multiple pages are ideal for driving consumer interaction and extending the time users spend with the brand. A simple rich media ad with a strong call-to-action is typically most effective in helping to drive customer acquisition
2) Determine which formats and features will drive the desired results. Consumers want to purchase, research, discuss and interact with brands and their products. Through expandable ads with video, companies can provide extra information so users can satisfy their research goals. Sharing via social media allows brands to extend their brand message and make their campaign viral while enabling a brand dialog. Gaming encourages users to spend quality time with brands while playing users are focused and engaged with the brand. Ads based on dynamic content such as location or weather, help to provide a personalized, relevant experience with the brand. Capabilities like tapping, swiping, tilting, shaking and painting provide a human touch.
3)Brands and marketers need to design a consistent experience across multiple platforms. There is no reason why experiences should be different across any of the platforms. Create one campaign that can be delivered across multiple platforms –including mobile Web, apps and tablets. HTML5 promises a consistent and rich user experience across multiple platforms.
4) Build your ad with a rich media platform to save time and cost. There is a better way of creating your next mobile advertising campaign than custom coding. A rich media ad creation platform enables rapid development of advanced rich media mobile ads without any software coding skills. When selecting a platform, make sure it optimizes elements for various OS platforms and device differences. The advantage is that you can create one ad and serve it across different platforms and distribution networks. The result – ads work flawlessly on all targeted devices without a lot of testing and optimization.
5) Track your campaign across multiple properties and devices with universal reporting. Effective rich media advertising metrics track users across platforms, enabling brands and agencies to track interaction and conversion throughout the campaign. Reports should also include detailed insight into user engagement so you can measure ROI and brand interaction across the entire campaign.
As we reflect on the past year of innovation and growth that brought rich media mobile advertising to where it is today, we are grateful for our clients who have pushed the industry forward by creating amazing ads. We are excited by the adoption of AdCreator by major Ad Networks, Publishers and Interactive Agencies around the globe and we are thrilled to recognize the best uses of mobile rich media.
We’ve reviewed thousands of ads and have selected executions that exhibit innovative campaign objectives, amazing creative design, inventive use of functionality and outstanding metrics.
Congratulations to all of our partners. We’ve enjoyed working with you, and we look forward to seeing what you come up with in 2012!
Browse the list of our favorite ads below and click on the link to watch the video.
Like most of you, we’ve been busy over the last several weeks planning for the year ahead. With the rapid change all of us experienced in the mobile advertising industry in 2011, we focused on some of our key milestones from the past year, as well as within the industry, to help provide guidance on how best to support and accelerate our growth in the coming year.
Looking back, 2011 was unprecedented in the mobile advertising industry in terms of technology advancements, industry standards, and investment by brands across industry verticals. Several new mobile ad technology providers emerged over the past year as viable businesses in a very complex eco-system while a few became irrelevant. One of the most important advancements was the adoption of MRAID as an emerging standard supported by the IAB, relevant technology providers, and major publishers. MRAID is the industry’s most promising effort to move beyond the single biggest albatross in mobile advertising, the dreaded proprietary SDK. Another major industry event occurred in November, when Adobe announced they would discontinue Flash development on mobile devices and focus on HTML5. Yes, Steve Jobs, you won that battle and all of us at Celtra are grateful to you for many reasons.
The past year was also unprecedented for all of us here at Celtra; even with our compass from the prior year, we couldn’t have imagined the success we had in 2011. The adoption of AdCreator by major Ad Networks, Publishers, and Interactive Agencies around the globe was tremendous. Equally exciting were the engaging and creative ad campaigns that were launched by our partners and for the brands we work with directly. Our most rewarding times are when our partners push the industry forward by creating the most innovative, engaging, and effective ads on the platform we built and take pride in innovating every day.
While the compass from 2011 may not lay an exact course, two things are crystal clear for the year ahead. First, the mobile advertising industry will again have an unprecedented year of advancement and growth, which is exciting for all of us. And second, thanks to our team, customers, and partners around the globe, 2012 will be a great year for Celtra and we look forward to working with all of you.
Celtra’s Rob Kramer explains how Celtra’s AdCreator platform makes it easy for advertisers and their agencies to buy and build rich media mobile ads at APPNATION in San Francisco. Celtra had the privilege of exhibiting with our partner, Smaato, and speaking on a panel about mobile advertising.
That’s a heady title—the top ten moments of anything are typically the most important, funniest, are game changers or so deeply affect the audience that they become some type of cornerstone or tipping point.
Mobile advertising is certainly at a tipping point. Standards have come into existence, more people are carrying devices that allow for a fully realized advertising experience, and the industry is getting away from banners and other distractions which make the mobile experience clunky, disjointed and obtrusive. Mobile ads are (or should be) experiences in branding, or better—part of the brand themselves. The distinction between the two should be fading. Celtra’s been creating beautiful, engaging and brand-worthy mobile ads for just a couple of years, so it’s extremely gratifying to be featured in this particular Top Ten Advertising Age article via our work for Westin Hotels’ iPad ad running in the new Weather Channel app.
The key here is to match the app’s content and experience-with relevant and specific ad content to extend the app experience, rather than disrupt it, as do clickable banners. From the AdAge article: “The Westin Ad that arrived with the relaunch of the Weather Channel app in September actually exploits the fact that you interact with the content by swiping. If your weather forecast says snow, the screen becomes covered in snow that you can wipe away to reveal a warm getaway destination. Bring on more iPad ads that fit the content and involve some kind of aesthetics.”
We agree, and hope to see our work with Westin become the catalyst to something new, bigger and better in mobile advertising. What other types of mobile ads have caught your eye? Any that you feel are the “future” of the medium?
We are excited to announce that Gefen Lamdan, Celtra’s VP of Product, has been honored by Mobile Marketer in the Mobile Women to Watch 2012 List.
Mobile Marketer’s Mobile Women to Watch 2012 list celebrates the smart women who are expected to make a difference in mobile advertising, marketing, media and commerce in 2012. Women who made the cut shared the same qualities: dedication to craft, ambition, leadership potential, educator and role model.
We’re very proud and fortunate to have her on our team. Congratulations Gefen for an honor that is well deserved.
Gefen Lamdan, Celtra VP of Product
From Mobile Marketer’s Mobile Women to Watch 2012
“Many women are not aware of the wide spectrum of skills needed for this robust industry”
What do you most like about your job?
For me, the people I work with is my No. 1 priority. At Celtra, I get to work with a fantastic mix of them – an extraordinary team of people who come from different cultures and backgrounds.
We have a lot of fun creating new and innovative products together.
What is the biggest challenge in your job?
Trying to maintain the highest quality of products in this ever-changing ocean of possibilities is not easy. I get to challenge my extensive years of digital experience every day to continuously improve our offering.
What is your work priority for 2012?
To help my company reach the next level of maturity. It will be important to apply work flows and add structure to support the critical mass to come, but it is also important to never trade off creativity.
What will it take to attract more women to mobile marketing?
In my view, the entire digital industry is led by men, and mobile is no different. I think it will take awareness to attract more women to the field. Many women are not aware of the wide spectrum of skills needed for this robust industry. They tend to lump it all under “technology” and avoid exploring it.
Your proudest achievement in mobile?
I think it is that moment when I get to feel the tangible effect I have on the progress of things. I enjoy introducing cutting-edge new products, ad formats and creative solutions.
