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Mobile native is a highly promising advertising opportunity: it lets advertisers create engaging digital experiences for potential customers on mobile – a critical medium for advertisers given that consumers are adopting it in droves.
As with any new advertising opportunity, mobile native can also create anxiety among advertisers, who fear their expertise in the medium isn’t far enough advanced, the formats and creative choices too limited, and the scale too small to warrant a test.
But automation can greatly allay those concerns. Automating mobile native advertising makes it easy to launch, run, evaluate, and begin to build internal expertise about the medium. Here’s how automation addresses some of your most immediate concerns about testing mobile native.
Concern #1: How to build the internal expertise to run a mobile native campaign
While institutional knowledge about how to approach digital display and search is high for most brands, their understanding of what works on mobile native will be far lower, if not nil. Mobile native advertising combines the mobile platform and the native advertising tactic, both of which are still in the “emerging” phase of adoption by most brands.
But behavioural, performance, and even operational insights are actually an output of automated campaigns, especially in the beginning. Through automation, advertisers are able to run many executions of creatives and strategies across many publisher environments at once, and with minimal custom creative development. This lets them see which combinations work best for the brand.
Automating your initial mobile native test is also an efficient way to see what works well, enabling you to decide where to double down on custom native opportunities with specific publishers.
Concern #2: Acquiring enough mobile native scale and inventory to make a test worthwhile
Brands can be forgiven for thinking the mobile native advertising environment is highly fragmented and tough to scale into. After all, the fact that the creative is customized to each mobile publisher’s environment is the marquee benefit of mobile native.
But in fact, there is plenty of mobile native supply, and it’s easy to access as long as you’re plugged into a single demand source. InMobi Exchange, whose mobile native advertising marketplace Rubicon Project powers, reaches more than 750 million active unique users per month across 30,000 mobile applications. To take advantage of the largest share of that mobile native inventory, you just need to supply your demand source with as many creative components to build mobile native creative as possible, which leads to the next and final concern…
Concern #3: Achieving creative standardization
How can you take advantage of mobile native without significant creative resources to build custom units for each mobile publisher?
Many mobile native units are comprised of a finite set of creative elements: square icons, full images – some of which are in IAB standard sizes – and text. Supplying a variety of creative elements in each of these categories will maximize your chances of being eligible to appear in a significant number of mobile native environments.
Julian Mossanen is VP of Sales and Client Development, Buyer Cloud, at Rubicon Project
