Mobile Native Advertising Needs More Transparency

Consumers' embrace of mobile devices is well-documented, but many advertisers are still new to the mobile space and the mobile native opportunities.

Ionut Ciobotaru, Founder & Managing Director at PubNative, explains how publishers and advertisers can improve the performance of mobile advertising in this interview which was recorded at 2016 Native Advertising DAYS - read more about this year's amazing conference. PubNative is a mobile monetization platform designed that enables app publishers to execute and enhance their revenue strategy through native ad formats.

https://youtu.be/79emd-D-enY 

Publishers need to understand what advertisers are looking for
"Publishers and advertisers should work together to improve their performance on mobile meaning that advertisers need to talk to publishers about the difference in formats between social or messaging and publishers need to understand what the advertisers are actually looking for; Is it a conversion? Is it a sign-up? Is it a registration? Is it just users reading the content? So there needs to be a dialogue between the two parts and it has to be enabled by technology in order to create efficiencies in this ecosystem."

How to get started with mobile native
"In order for publishers to improve their mobile native advertising they need to first try native advertising, so they need to start somewhere; integrate some native units and then A/B test the performance so they can constantly change the native advertising and understand what works best for their audience.

RELATED: 4 Indispensable Tactics for Mobile Native Advertising

The same applies from the advertiser side but from a different perspective. They need to understand which users they are targeting and which format works best, which type of audiences, which vertical of the app? Is it a social app? Is it a utility app? Is it an entertainment app that fits best with their goals?

And different advertisers have different goals and those goals fit different publishers so they need to understand the new order of mobile advertising where each app has a different type of audience."

Transparency makes economic sense 
"A topic dear to me is about transparency. I truly believe that if advertisers know where their ads are being served and to whom and the publishers know who is buying that inventory and at what price we can increase the efficiency and create better value for both the advertiser and the publisher and maybe even in the end for the user who would be seeing better ads.

What's happening currently in the mobile native space is dominated by Facebook

What's happening currently in the mobile native space is dominated by Facebook which is one of the walled gardens where advertisers don't necessarily know where their ad is being shown. They know the user obviously because they have the Facebook data, but they don't know where exactly the ad is being shown and how it's being shown.

Obviously, Facebook is working to improve performance but if advertisers knew exactly where the ad is being shown and the audience they targeted, they could buy that audience directly from the publisher cutting the middle man, generating more revenues for the publisher and paying maybe less. So that would be one of the advantages of transparency versus the lack of transparency."

The best tip for mobile native advertising
"Mobile native advertising or native advertising, in general, the way I see it has to fit not just the form and the function of the content it is being seen on but also it has to be contextual. You need to understand what the user is seeing, how he's interacting with the app or the content he is currently seeing and showing ads targeted towards that behaviour or towards that time that the user sees it in order for him to get value out of that advertising. That applies to both publishers and advertisers.

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Interview by: Louise Jeppesen