App Marketing Networks 2014

Mobile Native Ads GuideThere are a number of companies offering streamlined mobile native solutions to app advertising while maintaining monetization. Here is a list of the best.

2015 Edition

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Mobile Native Ads Guide

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Mobile Native Ads Guide

Balancing between adverts and an uninterrupted user experience is a fine act. Too few ads and the application won’t bring in enough money, but too many and the app might not bring any money at all, with users deciding to uninstall it when annoyed by the deluge of unprompted adverts. “Subtle” has been a marketing strategy since marketing began, always finding ways to keep up with modern technology; see product placements in movies and music, “editorials” in newspapers which closely mimic that papers’ style and my personal favourite: lining the aisle supermarket customers queue in with “quick buy” items, generally chocolate and sweets. In the case of mobile, marketing strategy has continued the trend and once again found its subtlety.

Welcome to Native Advertising.

Native ads fit into the context of the website or the application they are being displayed in. These can range from the blank space at the top of your screen when you pull down a content feed, to loading screens between game levels. The classic examples, as offered by Appsfire and Avocarrot, are to “inject” an advert within an app wall or a content feed itself, much as Facebook and Twitter have been doing with sponsored tweets and posts. This is the key to native advertising – they are sponsored, but they are tweets and posts nonetheless, they do not wrench the user out of the experience of scrolling through his wall, and unless clicked, do not remove the other content from the screen.

A solution offered by inMobi is a transition, as aptly demonstrated on their website, from one app to an advert – while this is more intrusive, the smoothness of the transition ren-ders the advert more palatable and while it does break UX, it does not do so in a jarring way. inMobi also offers “frames”, fully customisable “wrappers” around an ad, Applift uses a Tinder-like swipe mechanic for app adverts, while Pubnative also has high levels of cus-tomisation with its 2o “building blocks”. Rich media and full screen interactive interstitials are Loopme‘s and Yeahmobi‘s specialties (with the former focussing on HD video), while NativeX offers very smart solutions for integration of native ads within games. Lastly, Yahoo

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has entered the market with extremely well defined rules for advert sizes, which can then be displayed all across its network.

According to this article by Sharethrough, there are reasons beyond not frustrating your us-ers to go with Native adverts – they are seen by 25% more consumers, 97% of media buyers reported native ads were effective in achieving their goals, and they registered an 18% lift in purchase intent than your normal advert. There are a number of reasons for this, and some of them are actually rooted in neuroscience, but a main one is common sense: An in-con-text native advert will simply be less annoying and visually jarring than a non-native one. If anything, one of the ways they increase click-through rates is simply because they don’t put users off as much other formats.

Indeed, gauging users moods and demographics is key to the business: by choosing which adverts to display and when to display them, you can match the expected mood of a user (say, after losing or winning a level in a game) to display a fitting advert before moving to the next phase in your app flow. Numerous companies, such as moPub and Yahoo, also offer geo-tar-geting options in adverts, and algorithms which change the adverts displayed depending on which modeled “persona” each user most resembles.

In the drive towards an ever-smoother user experience while maintaining monetization (also witnessed in the scramble to achieve true deep linking on mobile platforms), there are a number of companies offering streamlined native solutions to advertising.

Pubnative

Pubnative‘s solution to native advertising is API-based, meaning it does not require an SDK to integrate it with your application. Its approach to native advertising is to have 20 “building blocks” to create adverts: in-feed, in-game, product reccomendations and sponsored search results. Its platform is not limited to mobile adverts either and can create custom adverts for the web. It features very smart integration for games, making use of in-game space and assets as determined by you, as well as adding a sponsored link to custom keyboards within applications.

Key feature: 20 building blocks to create custom ads Tagline: Genuinely Native Mobile Ads

Mobile Native Ads Guide

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Yeahmobi

Yeahmobi boasts a “programmatic marketing platform”, running sophisticated algorithms to understand which adverts will give the best yields within your application, using both models and live data. Integrated with 500+ direct advertisers, Yeahmobi has international coverage with over 160 billion ad impressions a month and over 30 million downloads.

Its native advertising products include HTML5 rich media interstitials, interactive adverts which can be customised to fit the style of your app, videos during natural pauses (chosen by you) and load screens, as well as the classic scrolling app walls and icons, all with location based services included.

Key feature: HTML5 rich media interstitials Tagline: The leading mobile performance marketing platform

A Yeahmobi interstitial and an ad wall

Source: Yeahmobi.com

Mobile Native Ads Guide

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Avocarrot

Avocarrot is an advertising solution and mainly aimed at indy app developers, but don’t let this fool you into thinking it lacks in any power or customisation. With an average 15 minute integration time, it offers native adverts integrating in content feeds, lists, the natural pauses of games and tile walls, for example inserting an advert within a photo gallery. It’s premium eCPMs go from two to eight dollars, and most importantly it offers Paypal as a payment op-tion and comes highly recommended by Google.

Key feature: Highly flexible ad formats Tagline: App monetization with native ads

A native ad integrated within a tile wall

Source: avocarrot.com

Avazu

Avazu is China based but has global coverage with its 5000+ offers reaching over 135 coun-tries. It is extremely specific in its categorisation of apps and thus which ads are native; its categories include file managers, boosters and clean up apps as well as “normal” browsers, keyboards and social networks. This precision allows a greater integration of native ads, in-cluding search injections, app launchers and walls, in to a wider variety of UX designs. It also has a strong policy of data transparency with all its advertisers and publishers.

Key feature: Native ads for a wider number of app and UX types

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Tagline: Private exchange for performance

An example of a native ad for the “Cleaner” app type

Source: avazutracking.net

Appsfire

Appsfire is based in Paris with HQ in Tel Aviv, and recently acquired by the Mobile Network Group, one of France’s main mobile advertising networks, Appsfire offers a number of Jap-anese-food-inspired native advertising solutions. For example “Uramaki” is an animation trig-gered by an event of your choice, which can display a skippable preview of a promoted app. Matching the expected mood of your users at the time of the event to what ad you display is key here. Other solutions include a content “inject” into a feed, displaying an ad in the blank space when you refresh a feed and interstitials.

Key feature: Trigger ads according to predetermined events in your app Tagline: Better ads for better mobile apps

Yahoo

Yahoo‘s Native ad platform, available via its Gemini marketplace, has the upside of displaying adverts all across Yahoo’s content network, a proposition attractive enough for Netflix to have already signed up to it. As you would expect from one of the larger internet companies, it also has very strict parameters for native adverts: images and text only, or videos, with ex-tensive documentation on the size and memory of each. They can be displayed in stream and in-article (between one paragarph and the next as well mobile photo albums, and Yahoo has just introduced “persona targeting”, using 40 modeled “identities” to match ads to users.

Mobile Native Ads Guide

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Key feature: Persona targeting tracks user behaviour over 650,000 apps Tagline: Engage people with impactful native ads

Various examples of native ad integration by Yahoo

Source: Yahoo.com

NativeX

NativeX is counted among the top 10 App Monetization providers by VentureBeat, and with good reason. With no SDK update required on your behalf and a focus on mobile gaming, it offers proprietary video technology designed to load HD video quickly and with a drop off rate of less than one percent. Another feature is the “triad”, effectively 3 icons, each with a related video, which a user can choose from to watch the advert he prefers, adding an impor-tant choice to how users are exposed to adverts (the concept being that if one has to watch an advert, it would be best to allow them to pick a game they are potentially interested in). The classic app walls and interstitials are of course also present, both in rewarded and non-rewarded forms.

Key feature: “Triad” introduces an element of choice in which ads users see Tagline: The leading ad technology for mobile games

inMobi

inMobi is the largest independent mobile ad network, and is trusted by massive brands like Ford and Levis. It’s SDK is free for Android and iOS, and it guarantees a minimum eCPM of $25 for the first 500,000 impressions and $15 eCPM beyond that. It offers a seriously wide

Mobile Native Ads Guide

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variety of native ad formats, chief among which are its frames, customisable wrappers which go around an advert in order to contextualise it within your application. After that there are number of “inject” methods, inserting content in news feeds (favoured by premium-brand advertisers), content streams (ideal for social networking apps) and chat lists.

Key feature: Offers 20 pre-made ad “frames” as well as allowing you to make your own Tagline: The only mobile-first advertising platform with 1 billion mobile uniques

Loopme

Loopme set itself the aim of offering socially engaging and less intrusive advertising, and has created a self-serve cloud based platform to go along with its vision.

Its strongest suit is high quality, high definition full-screen videos and HTML5 rich-media in-terstitials, all integrated with a range social media. The strategy has paid off for both Sky and Selfridges, which have trusted Loopme’s technology and delivery of quality for its marketing campaigns. It is also powered by advanced predictive algorithms for highly precise targeting of audiences.

Key feature: Very high quality full-screen interstitials in a variety of media Tagline: Full screen mobile advertising at scale

Two examples of full-screen-video, with social media integration

Source: Loopme.com

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Mopub

Mopub, as well as claiming to be the world’s largets mobile ad server, is a hosted native ad-vertising solution with an opensource SDK that takes a single assett and turns it into various formats (for example, different sizes of ad depending on whether it is inserted in a newsfeed or a chat screen). The platform allows you to mediate with native ad SDKs, accounts for cross promotion and offers links with native ads from direct and indirect advertisers with 100+ demand partners. In all cases, the platform also allows for geo and keyword targeting of the adverts.

Key feature: opensource SDK and geotargeting features Tagline: World’s largest mobile ad server

Applift

Applift offers a number of classic native ad formats all wrapped in a single API, and with im-plementation that only requires adding an “ad tag” instead of a full SDK. For advertisers, it of-fers a very powerful engine with live optimisation with proprietary algorithms. For develop-ers, its augmented Carousel gives more information about the product, while the augmented wall adds real estate for art. The most innovative option is “Swiper”, a preview of a product with the immediate choice of either downloading the app by swiping right or “scrapping” it by swiping left.

Key Feature: Ad-tag implementation (no SDK) Tagline: Data driven app marketing

The Applift “Swiper” ad format

Source: applift.com

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Final thoughts

User experience and monetisation need not be a difficult balancing act any more. While discretion is always advised before deciding how many and what type of adverts to include in your application, there are a number of solutions to raise your eCMPs without sacrificing the mood and flow of your application: if anything, these can be used to your advantage in dis-playing the right advert at the right time. Marketing has found its subtle strategies, and the variety of choice is truly larger than ever.

Mobile Native Ads Guide

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