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Last week, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) introduced legislation to address issues of mobile privacy, specifically putting mobile app developers on the spot to provide adequate notice and consent for data collection. Computerworld provides good coverage of the situation.

It’s only common sense to let your users know what data you’re collecting, how you plan to use it, and whether you’re going to share it. For 4INFO, it’s a key element of our AdHaven advertising platform, and particularly for our Bullseye product. We require all of our sites to abide by best practices in privacy, including providing their users with a clear privacy policy and requiring explicit opt-in when sharing location information. Since we’re a third party bringing relevant mobile advertising to the screen, we have to work twice as hard to evangelize for consumer transparency. Our goal is to have every person understand what data is being collected from their phone, how it is used, and allow them to opt-out, should they desire. (Naturally, I think it’s better to get relevant advertising, as opposed to random ads about products I don’t care about. But you’d expect that from me!)

The industry has been moving in this direction in self-regulation, regardless of legislation. We are eagerly awaiting the rumored release of new DAA guidelines for mobile. The technological hurdles to providing full privacy controls in mobile are large, but the industry has plenty of incentive to innovate new solutions for the small screen.

There’s great news for the CPG brands of the world. Catalina announced the launch of BuyerVision Mobile this week at SXSW. We’re excited about this, because our AdHaven platform is the engine behind BuyerVision Mobile. The market is already showing interest, and both Advertising Age and Mobile Marketer have covered the news.

Outside of self-promotion, why is this exciting? The biggest criticism of mobile these days is the lack of measurability. Folks like Steve Smith at MediaPost have outlined how proving ROI is the biggest hurdle in mobile. BuyerVision Mobile is unique, because it begins with Catalina delivering deep marketing insights to CPG brands, thanks to their extensive coupon and loyalty products. But once you’ve got the insight, you need to act upon it. BuyerVision Mobile provides a powerful way to impact brand sales through purchase-based targeting, and verify and measure that impact. It allows brand to speak to their most valuable customers via the most personal advertising in mobile. More importantly, it lets brands measure the results of their campaigns with certainty, where it counts: at the cash register.

Incidently, that MediaPost article I mentioned above listed the top three biggest challenges to mobile marketing as measurement/ROI (42%), reaching the correct audience  (34%) and data security (34%). BuyerVision Mobile solves all three! More on that in another post.

Your move, CPG brands. Want to make a splash in mobile? Talk to Catalina, and verify the results in the market. Self-promotion aside, it’s really on the results that count.

Verve has nerve! In an opinion piece in today’s Business Insider, Verve CEO Tom MacIssac details the problems in publisher-provided location information. To this, I say “amen!” He speaks truth. The amount of misleading and fraudulent location information in mobile is immense and growing. We identified this issue in 2011 and have watched the number of publishers gaming the system grow in the intervening years. It’s hard work to keep up with them.

So, what does 4INFO do about it?  Well, like Verve, we like to rely on first party relationships wherever possible.  We don’t use IP derived lat-long at all, as it is way too unreliable. But our real secret sauce is our algorithms, which look at multiple signals to determine the likely accuracy of a location. If we don’t think it’s good, we don’t serve an ad against it. It’s as simple as that.

Location is an incredible asset of mobile. Where there is value, there will be those trying to take advantage. We’ve spent years building systems for sophisticated analysis of mobile location data, so that we can provide the most accurate targeting in mobile advertising today.

Alex Rahaman of StrikeAd wrote an a great blog post for MediaPost on cutting waste out of mobile advertising. He raises a common concern: fat-finger clicks and the waste they represent to advertisers who are relying on click-thru-rate as their primary metric for campaign success. I think everybody in the industry agrees that CTR is not the best metric to manage campaign success. Plus, as an end-point, it leaves brand advertising out in the cold. Sometimes branding is the objective – not clicks. But here’s where he lost me:

“The only way to track advertising beyond the initial click is to use a conversion page, which shares real-time information about user behavior to match each conversion to a particular banner ad. “

Well, no.

I noticed a commenter took issue with that statement as well. There are many options beyond a conversion page to measure advertising impact. In our case, 4INFO can actually measure campaign impressions against purchase lift at the register, through partnerships with first party data companies. This is particularly powerful in the CPG vertical, where clicks are far less important that purchase decisions.

So, yes – the industry must think beyond CTR. But there are real solutions for measuring mobile campaign impact that go beyond immediate actions on the phone, and these will prove to be the most accurate for certain campaigns. It’s all about highly precise targeting of mobile audiences, and measuring impact against the campaign goals, whether action is taken on the handset or in the real world.

The folks in Cupertino had their big event today and now the world knows that the iPad Mini with a 7.9″ screen will be shipping as of November 2. At a price point of $329 on the low end, it’s a little more expensive than I expected to see. That said, I still think this is going to be THE gift of the 2012 holiday season. People will justify the higher price point, whether with Apple brand love, or because the colorful options. At the end of the year, there are going to be millions of eyes trained on the latest and greatest mobile device.

What does this mean for advertisers? This is a huge opportunity. Because the screen has the same resolution as the iPad 3, it means existing advertising will work, right out of the box. Here are the top three groups that should act to take advantage of this new mobile audience:

1. App Developers & Mobile Content Creators
Got a game? Got a utility?  Got a mobile magazine? Got streaming music? Got an e-book?: This is your moment to get in front of a brand new audience. Come December 25 there will be thousands of people browsing the App Store, looking for content to download to their brand new toy. Visibility is key to growth, and movement up the “top app” ratings that really drive exponential organic growth. It’s not just the apps who have an opportunity here – this is the chance for digital magazine publishers to grab up market share. Hey Newsweek / The Daily Beast, are you listening?

2. Consumer Packaged Goods Companies
Who makes most of the decisions at the grocery store? Well, statistics show that the answer is mom. Who keeps the kids entertained with her iPad? You guessed it, that’s mom again. I think moms are going to be a major audience of the new iPad Mini. As such, big brands and CPG companies should be leaping into targeted iPad advertising. Placements in the most popular apps go fast, so start your mobile campaigns early to lock up the inventory at reasonable prices. When mom is deciding what products to buy for the big New Year’s Eve party, you want your product featured on the new iPad Mini she’s playing with.

3. Automotive Companies
It’s common wisdom that tablets provide excellent advertising engagement and positive experiences for the car shopper. True enough. When car-buyers are forming their short list, the presence of an automotive brand with a fun and engaging tablet experience can have enormous impact. The iPad mini will bring a whole new audience of car shoppers, looking to engage with rich media experiences that are unique to mobile. If you’re in automotive, you need to have ad placements ready for the end of year shopper audience.

Don’t take my word for it – do your own research on the value of mobile device advertising, but don’t miss the window to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the iPad Mini. Early presence on such a popular device is going to deliver great returns.

The IAB report is out and mobile advertising continues to grow, nearly doubling to $1.2 billion in the first half of 2012, and growing from 4% to 7% of all Internet ad spending, compared to the same period last year. This is no shock, given the explosion in the popularity of smartphones. Pew Research Center tells us that as of September 2012, 85% of Americans have cell phones, and 45% have a smartphone.

All those smartphones create a lot of page views on a lot of mobile web sites. All those new apps create even more. The result is an explosion of ad inventory, ripe for the picking. Industry analysts have been all over the situation, with very public critiques of low CPMs,  and public mobile companies have been quick to point the finger at the rapid growth of mobile users outpacing their ability to monetize the mobile channel.

This puts the onus on us – those in the mobile advertising business – to create value in what we offer the brands and business who look to us to find and motivate their mobile audiences. Simply “being there” in mobile no longer enough for brands, nor should it be. In order for mobile advertising to have value, it needs to reach the right eyes, at the right time, with the right message (we’ve all heard that phrase a thousand times!) – and move the needle in terms of campaign goals. This is where targeting becomes key, and measurement even more so. In this new flood of mobile inventory, it is more important than ever to evaluate mobile ad campaigns by their ability to create the desired reaction – whether it’s buying a certain brand of soap, or clicking through to purchase an app.  This technology is our focus, and this is what allows 4INFO to deliver campaigns with results that outpace the larger ad networks.

The mobile display advertising space has been continually predicted to “take off” for the last two years.  But with a 17% average fill rate, advertisers are clearly still hesitant about aggressively investing in mobile.  With the recent advent of several improvements in technology, the hockey stick for demand in mobile display may now be closer than ever before.

Why have advertisers been slow to adopt mobile?  While there are many issues to be resolved in mobile, such as the lack of real-time bidding, two main reasons stand out.

First and foremost, has been the inability to know who an advertisement reaches.   Cookies on mobile devices are actively wiped by the many mobile operating systems, making identification of a viewer over a long time period difficult.  This lack of history makes audience identification and targeting challenging as well.  Advertisers find it difficult know who they are reaching, and with what frequency, so they are only willing to pay RON prices; publishers can’t identify which part of their audience they are selling so they can’t demand the higher CPMs they are used to getting for online inventory.

Second, the inability to measure brand and purchase lift in mobile has been limited.  Click through rate (CTR) has been used as the default success metric in mobile.  But as multiple studies have shown, there is no correlation between increases in CTR and increases in either brand or purchase lift.  This inability to measure success on the most critical metrics for brand advertisers means that it has been well-nigh impossible to attribute  an ROI to mobile campaigns.

For a CMO today, given the audience targeting capabilities online and the ability to provide a clear ROI for those campaigns, going to a CEO and trying to explain why you can’t provide this same data-driven result in mobile is uncomfortable.  So while everyone knows mobile is a strategic platform, you can only  justify spending a limited amount of strategic advertising dollars.

However, mobile ad networks are beginning to deploy technologies which make calculating ROI for mobile campaigns easier.  Substitutes for persistent cookies are beginning to appear, thus allowing tracking of a viewer over a longer period of time.  These include “cookie-like” technologies that exist where OSs can’t reach them, or the use of geographic patterns to identify a specific device.  With these technologies, audience reach can be known.  Advertisers will be comfortable paying more for inventory and publishers will be satisfied that they are earning a fair price for their inventory.

At the same time, new methodologies for attribution and measuring brand or purchase lift post-campaign are appearing, thus providing a justifiable campaign ROI a CMO can leverage.  Some of these are survey-based, others are technology driven, and some combine both.  Whatever method is used, the ability to tell an advertiser the exact impact of their advertising campaign will take mobile display out of the strategic investment category and into the mainstream.

Assuming that ad networks and technology vendors deliver these technologies, the promise of mobile display, so long in coming, may finally have arrived.

Originally Posted on September 6, 2012 by Kirsten

The FTC has published a guide to help mobile app developers observe truth-in-advertising and privacy principles. This is a great resource to app developers, because it conveys guidelines without creating the regulatory burden of law. We get advertising inventory from a wide variety of mobile applications, and it’s key to us that app developers observe privacy principals. The mobile ecosystem is complex, but it should be easy for a user to figure out what an app does and what information that app shares with others.

A marketer’s dream is to target a person in the right person at the right time, but an individual’s nightmare is to feel like someone is tracking them. Is there a midway where both smartphone users and marketers can meet?
i.e. Would it be so bad to get a money saving coupon right when you’re about to pay full price on an item?
Apps that request user location or zipcode are already tracking user location and serving ads relevant to that zip, so this notion of invading on user privacy is not as controversial as it seems. To battle the assumption of invasive user tracking, marketers and ad networks have gone to great lengths to prove that they aren’t using PII (personally identifiable information).
A team of British researchers developed an algorithm using tracking data on phones to predict their location in 24 hrs, down to an accuracy of 2 meters. Some people think this is too close to home since personal data is being used to track people, but in the scope of things, isn’t each user’s data just a smidgeon of data in a huge database?