Aggregate Lead

An interesting briefing just now, with not one company but two. At one end of the sofa, mobile social networking firm Moblr. The company has 160,000 registered users, but according to CEO Christophe Hocquet, is currently attracting around 600,000 unique users per month to its site, most of whom don’t register. There are no membership fees, in the absence of which, it has two revenue streams: virtual gifts that members can buy to give to each other. And advertising. Which is where RingRing Media, sitting at the other end of the sofa comes in.
RingRing launched in May and has just clocked up its 100 millionth ad impression. It’s a specialist mobile media planning and buying agency, and its trick is to aggregate the ad content from eight different ad networks, including AdMob, Decktrade and Admoda, though not, at this point, the ones that sell space on a CPM basis, such as Fourth Screen Media.
The ads from these networks are then placed on the mobile Internet properties of its publisher-side clients, which include Moblr, Taptu and Mobango. Around 40% of the revenue from the ads goes back to the originating ad network, with the remainder being split roughly 80/20 in the publisher’s favour.
Moblr boss Hocquet is already impressed with the revenue that RingRing is generating for the company.
“When we started out, we looked at Google, Yahoo!” etc., but they did not work for us,” he told me. “They don’t seem to understand that mobile is not just an extension of the web.”
RingRing Managing Director Ben Tatton-Brown concedes that virtually all the ads the company is placing are for mobile-centric companies like Jamba, Dada and mobile social networking services looking to drive traffic to their mobile offerings. But he believes those who constantly ask when the big mainstream brands will join the mobile party are missing the point.
“There is plenty of money being spent on mobile advertising,” he told me. “Our clients are spending between £10,000 and £400,000 a month. We are just focusing on where the opportunities are today, but come the day that Land Rover or other mainstream brands start spending money on mobile advertising, rest assured, we will be there.”
Using RingRing’s I’AM platform, says Tatton-Brown, mobile web publishers can sell all their advertising inventory, rather than the 20-50% he claims they currently sell. RingRing has also developed a solution for publishers who have an agreement in place with a mobile ad network to sell space on a CPM basis. This sets the CPM network as the default network to serve the ad if the required CPM is achieved, with RingRing’s aggregated network kicking in if not.
“Our theory is that you might as well make some money as no money,” he says.
It sounds sensible in theory, and from the noises Moblr’s Hocquet was making, RingRing’s publishers like what the company has to offer too.

David Murphy
Editor