Addictive Mobility has launched a new data management platform [DMP] for collecting mobile data and targeting app users with first- and third-party data.
Addictive CEO Naveed Ahmad said the DMP [glossary: DMP], christened “Constellation,” formalizes all the work its data science team has done over the past year.
“We started off with a relationship with [University of Toronto’s computing department], we built up our data scientist team, we started understanding our data and building out our algorithms. We’ve come to a point where we feel we’ve got a very robust internal offering,” he said.
In the cookie-less environment of mobile apps, even basic demo data is exceptionally hard to come by, at least with any degree of reliability. Ahmad said a big focus of the new DMP will be accurately predicting the age and gender of users based on their behaviours.
Point-of-interest-based geotargeting (think retail locations, public spaces, urban or suburban regions) is another feature. He said Addictive plans to differentiate itself in the mobile space by using its own database of geographic points of interest, rather than buying data from a third party geo specialist like Factual or Ninth Decimal. He said this will save mobile advertisers substantially on the third-party data fees they’d otherwise have to pay.
But he said the biggest new feature — available to clients whether or not they use the Addictive DMP — is in-app retargeting.
Brand clients typically know the device IDs of the users they want to target, based on who has downloaded their branded or m-commerce apps. By connecting those device IDs with their customer database, they can identify consumers they want to target.
The last step, where Addictive specializes, is reaching the consumer with mobile ads customized based on the action the advertiser is looking to drive.
This has worked out well for Canadian financial brands, who have deep first-party data and a significant presence in mobile. But Ahmad said Addictive wants to branch out to clients with large mobile loyalty programs, like Cineplex and Scotiabank’s Scene program, who can use the solution to send members offers and promotions both in the Scene app and on other apps they use.
“These are the ones who would really benefit from doing the in-app retargeting,” he said.
Beware cross-device ‘smoke and mirrors’
Although CRM retargeting is table stakes in desktop advertising, in mobile the technology is still very much in development.
Ahmad says he’s skeptical about competitors’ sweeping claims when it comes to targeting capabilities. That’s especially true for cross-device targeting, the latest-and-greatest trend in mobile advertising, where algorithms are used to make a best guess at which mobile user corresponds to which desktop user.
“There are a lot of smoke and mirrors. People truly don’t believe in cross-device,” he said, adding that the accuracy of such targeting usually runs in the 40-50% range.
He estimated that only a handful of companies globally can actually do accurate cross-device targeting, and they typically either have a large logged-in userbase (like Facebook) or are partnered with someone who does.
He said Addictive’s brand clients don’t particularly care whether they can connect mobile audience profiles with desktop audience profiles, as long as they can target the right user at the right time. If they can find the right user on mobile, and target them in mobile, that gets the job done.
And when the basic capability to target app users in mobile is still unreliable, it’s too soon to be promising unified cross-device anything.
