Fast Talker

David Murphy catches up with Jeremy Copp, CEO of mobile advertising technology company, Rapid Mobile

DM: So Jeremy, there seem to be a lot of mobile advertising firms out there these days, what makes Rapid Mobile different?

JC: We have three points of difference. The first is that we are a technology provider. We licence our platform, which fits the needs of the advertising value chain but hides the mobile complexity. So its a white-label solution that the publisher takes and integrates it and it delivers a mobile advertising channel for their properties. Its designed for larger publishers with serious mobile properties. So one example is Metro, who publish the free daily newspapers. Metro Mobile is their mobile web property and it uses Rapid technology to serve the content and deliver advertising into it. 
Our second USP is the breadth of the types of ad that we can deliver. We are not wedded to standard types of advertising. We can do text in SMS, graphics in MMS, display ads on mobile Internet sites, or within mobile applications, or interstitials, where you click on a link, and while youre waiting for it to load, it displays a full-screen ad.
And the third point is that we understand the different phone types. We have a device knowledge database that understands the optimal format for delivery to each phone, so we can optimise it so that the user gets best the experience of the advertising, and the creative only needs to be produced once.

DM: So do you work with operators, D2C companies or both?

JC: Operators are not our preferred route to market; its a tricky process working with them, and of course, they want revenue from the data traffic. We prefer to work with publishers. We see clients wanting a broad reach to the market, and they want to get properties and applications and ads out to users without segmenting by network

DM: And how many customers do you have?

JC: Across all areas of the business, weve signed up around 10 over the past three to four years. But we are just at the stage where our customer acquisition rate will accelerate significantly. Over the past three to four years, we have been getting together reference customers such as Betfair Mobile, and building the technology, but we closed a round of funding at the end of February, so now we have the resources to address the market harder and faster, and the technology has been proven in commercial deployments. 

DM: So tell us a little more about the technology if you would.

DM: Targeting is at its heart. Our Ad360 platform has a rich selection and contextualisation engine. It supports volume-based and auction-based advertising. So you can buy 250,000 impressions, or in the auction model, you specify a price per 1,000 impressions and then we use that to select the ads to maximise revenue for the publisher. So if you have three advertisers at 10, 30 and 50 CPM, it will choose the 50 one, provided the other parameters line up. 
Theres also a range of other contextualisation parameters like time of day, age of user, plus an open framework that allows the publisher to inject contextualisation parameters into it from a user or CRM database if they have information about the users and their preferences.

DM: And whats the business model? How do you make your money?

JC: We take a share of the ad revenue in lieu of licence fees.

DM: How much?

JC: It varies on a case by case basis but typically, we would look for 20-30%

DM: And is this your sole revenue stream or is the company involved in other things too?

JC: At the moment, most of the revenue comes from two other areas of the business. This is really a reflection on the maturity of the mobile advertising market, which is still at a nascent stage. But we feel were in a strong position as it grows because we have a real technology platform in real commercial deployments, so we have learned a lot already.

DM: So what else are you into?

JC: Broadly speaking, our capabilities lie in enabling service and content providers or advertisers to reach different types of mobile devices without worrying about what they are. So we have three platforms. The first is ad360. The second is something called Active Provisioning, which automatically delivers applications to any phone. If youre looking to extend the online experience to the mobile space, usually you just build an application and port it multiple times to all the different handsets. We enable the app to be built just once and then optimise it for each handset at the point of delivery. Like the advertising platform, Active Provisioning is available a white-label solution, so customers can build one version of the application and let the platform deploy it across all devices. It minimises the time to market.

DM: So how much of a challenge is it keeping up with new handsets as they come on the market?

JC: Weve built the technology to do it. As a new device connects to download an application, we can connect with it to understand its capabilities and configure the application. So the database grows organically as we auto-interrogate devices when we are deploying applications and optimising mobile web content.

DM: So what's the third platform?

JC: This is our Mobile Internet Framework. This is a platform for building mobile web sites and optimising them for different devices. We can build the sites for the client, or give them the tools to do it themselves. So often, we build the first site and then they take it on. And again, the revenue model for Active Provisioning and the Mobile Internet Framework is a revenue share. So we look for applications and services that have a revenue component such as gaming or betting, or others where there is a subscription.

DM: So a lot of what you do is based around people going online on their mobile. What do you make of the mobile web? There are still a lot of people who dont bother with it.

JC: I think its in its early stages. There is a realisation that is not the web and that the mobile experience is a very different one, so it needs dedicated technology and content. Having said that, it is a very powerful medium that takes advantage of the personal nature of the phone and the fact that people have their phones with them all the time. But it behoves everyone to think about what type of content they want to offer via a mobile site if theyre going to get people to come back.