Mobile Advertising – Getting the Right Ad!

At a Mobile Monday last week in Boston, representatives from the advertising industry discussed what brands are doing in mobile today. The panel discussion was sobering. Despite a lot of hype, mobile advertising has yet to become an established part of the media marketing mix. In mobile there is still a void in ‘standardized’ reporting that big advertisers and media buyers want to see. This contrasts to web advertising where the types of measurement and response systems advertisers are used to have been implemented. Advertisers want to know who will be seeing their ads and what the associated response metrics are. Is this so hard to satisfy?

Right now the answer seems to be yes. The current state of most mobile ad networks is that an advertiser is able to create ads without supplying targeting keyword tags beyond the most rudimentary of subject, language and country – even those are not enforced or available much of the time. This lack of keyword tags means that ad queries, even if they have keywords closely associated with the type of user (age, sex, interest) and context (time, place), are either not served ads at all or are served generic ads that only meet one or two keywords. The result is irrelevant ads or no ads.

The good news is that things will change for the better as mobile advertising is just where web advertising was 10-15 years ago. This was the era before industry accepted keyword target matching mechanisms and reporting systems appeared. Today, the web advertiser is able to effectively target the audience they want and directly track results. So how long do we have to wait?

At mJetz we have the ability to generate very sophisticated keywords directly associated with the user and the context of the ad. In order to make sure that the right ad is served, we are building logic that allows us to select ad networks in real time based on the relevance of the ads that they serve. This logic will monitor which ads are being served thereby continually improving the quality and relevance of the ads the user sees. We are also able to measure the direct results of ads based on user type, context and placement within the mJetz application. Together with the ongoing improvement of ad networks, ad application logic will over time ensure that the right ad gets delivered to the user.