A mobile ad network is often thought of as a conduit between advertisers and publishers, but in reality it's more like a secure expressway with millions of units of data traversing each second.
With every new mobile device added, the expressway bifurcates and starts carrying more data back and forth. I often sit back and think about how a hundred million of these billion consumers (which is perhaps like the entire population of the Philippines), interact with our network at least six times daily. That is the complexity and scale of this business.
Most mobile apps and properties have a focused approach to acquire and retain consumers on their individual properties. However, scaling a user base across 30,000-plus apps in 200-plus countries and different demographics, has meant building a mobile advertising platform powered by engineering systems, products and data sciences that can parse such a vast universe and yet bring back targeted, privacy-safe information on individual consumers within the span of a second.
Here’s how it works.
Our founding team showed remarkable foresight in several aspects, a good example of which is the skipping of the PC advertising business and choosing to build a mobile-first business. We grew our business from the East to the West and conquered the large mobile-first, developing markets. (Ignore our minor deflections into SMS-based search! That’s a story for another time.)
We gained success in countries like China, Korea, Japan and India early on and that held us in good state when we entered the Western markets. We started aspiring to be a global company since we detected the "globalism" of mobile advertising early on.
Our products are built for app developers, advertising agencies and brands anywhere in the world. In fact, most publishers and advertisers have global aspirations and so our most successful differentiator today is our ever-growing scale.
As the smartphone and tablet revolution has grown, we have reaped rich dividends. I believe this is the time for senior marketing executives to make themselves fully conversant with mobile advertising and its capabilities.
With the growth of 4G technologies and low cost smartphones flooding markets, the volume of potential consumers available via mobile will increase significantly. When advertisers want to reach people in the "moment of maximum opportunity", as we call it, we must think beyond traditional advertising and reach people at the exact point in time when they are most conducive to making a purchase.
For example, big data could help identify a lifestyle enthusiast who is interested in buying the latest wearable gadget; cognitive sciences will help determine the products that are most likely to appeal to her; and creative ad formats will help deliver these choices in a manner that is most likely to yield results.
It's going to be a great year for mobile: global mobile adspend has grown at a pace of 60% year over year, and last year we saw a huge shift in brand dollars to mobile. We’re expecting it to only grow this year by 85%. Mobile programmatic will also become a key enabler of growth here.
At InMobi, we deal with technology that is changing - almost by the minute. Tectonic shifts occur every six to nine months. The only way for companies to survive is to have massive geographic scale and disruptive product diversification. We have emerged a strong leader on these counts. Other players have either faded away or been acquired since they are unable to adapt to this pulsating ecosystem.
It helps that we don't think of ourselves as being just another mobile advertising company. We are a technology company at heart. We are reimagining advertising at its core and are committed to creating a rich and unique mobile ecosystem. With over one billion devices on our network, we are well positioned to deliver on that promise.
Naveen Tewari is founder and chief executive of InMobi