Tracking the Truth

DM: David I know you have been in the mobile business for some time, tell us a little about your background.

DF: Sure, I started out in Radio and TV with the RAB and Emap Advertising, then in 2005, I joined the agency sales team at mobile marketing firm, Incentivated. This was in the days before the iPhone, and I picked up a lot of technical knowledge about mobile and SMS.

I left Incentivated to join Mediacom as their head of mobile. I think I’m right in saying I was the first head of mobile at a top 10 media agency. And I was one of only two heads of mobile in the global network, including Group M, so I was pulled into a lot of Group M business for clients such as VW, Shell, NatWest, Procter & Gamble and  RBS. When I arrived, our mobile billings were around $100,000. When I left, they were $4m.

I left Mediacom in 2010 to found Lucidity Mobile, which was a dedicated planning and buying agency for mobile media, ran that for 18 months, and then sold it to Fetch Media to concentrate on the current business, which is the Mobile Future Group.

There are two sides to this business, which function independently. The first is Linking Mobile, which is an affiliate network for mobile. I was often asked for CPA (cost per acquisition) buys by our clients, and I couldn’t find anywhere to buy it, so with my two partners, Phil Jones and David Philippson, we set it up. Phil is our CTO, and together with Dr Paul Hayton, a mobile software genius, they built the Linking Mobile platform.

DM: So how does it work?

DF: It tracks a click from an ad on a publisher’s site or app, through to the acquisition on the advertiser’s mobile site, and then attributes that conversion to the publisher. For each action that is required on the consumer’s part, whether that’s completing a form or downloading an app, the publisher knows exactly how much they will earn, and obviously for the  advertiser, it’s no-risk advertising. It also allows publishers to fill remnant inventory with premium brands.

DM: So how many advertisers do you have?

DF: Over 30, and we are currently generating 500m impressions per month.

DM: There’s a bit of me that’s surprised that number (of advertisers) isn’t higher.

DF: It will be when we have 10 people out there covering the ground. We only launched in May but we scaling up quite aggressively this year. We’re also adding new functionality to the platform, such as click-to-call, where the publisher will be paid if the consumer places the call and stays on the line for an agreed length of time. We also include QR codes and SMS as advertising media on the platform.
 
DM: So what’s the other side of the business?

DF: This is AD-X. This is patent-pending app tracking technology that can track app downloads and usage.

DM: OK, tell me more.

DF: It allows advertisers and brands to monitor their spend on app promotion campaigns. They get full visibility of clicks, so they can see which sites and apps are delivering the best results, and they can also see when someone has downloaded the app, and used it book a room, for  a hotel-booking app for example.

The solution is totally independent and can be used for ads on mobile sites, in apps, social media, search, SMS, QR codes. As long as the click takes place on a mobile device, AD-X will track it. This is an important point. Up until now, to do what AD-X does, you would have needed a piece of code for each of the ad networks and you could only track on clicks from ads within apps, as opposed to mobile sites and all these other channels.

The final point is that it doesn’t rely on the UDID (Unique Device Identifier), which Apple deprecated with the launch of iOS 5, meaning that it will be removed at some unspecified point in the future. We built the solution in the summer, we’ve been testing and developing it ever since and it’s now out there in the market, and by the end of the month, we should have it certified for use with the 10 major mobile ad networks.

DM: So how do you sell this? It sounds like the sort of thing an ad network might want to integrate within its own platform.

DF: Indeed. We are selling direct to brands and agencies, but we are also doing some deeper integration with some of the ad networks. We refer to it as the plumbing for app promotion campaigns.

DM: And how do you charge for it?

DF: We have a few different models, but it’s mainly cost-per-click, like an ad-serving tool.  It allows advertisers to optimise their media spend, and saves them money. And we are already generating a load of data. We have seen 28m handsets since launch, and we are tracking 600,000 app downloads a day across 160 apps worldwide on different platforms.

DM: And final question, which Operating Systems does it work on?

DF: iPhone, iPad and Android apps currently, with Blackberry, Windows Phone 7 and HTML5 web app compatibility to follow soon.

David Fieldhouse is CMO at Mobile Future Group