Canadian mobile-focused ad technology company Juice Mobile has completed its integration with MoPub‘s native advertising exchange, bringing publisher-designed in-app ad units to mobile buyers.
MoPub’s native units are created by participating publishers to match the look and feel of their apps, and appear in the app’s content stream. Through real-time bidding, buyers are able to target mobile users within their audience, and ensure the ads they’re showing are relevant to the publisher’s user base.
MoPub mobile ad units
Juice Mobile’s clients will have access to MoPub’s native RTB exchange through Juice’s programmatic demand-side platform, Swarm.
“A lot of people in the industry are starting to embrace these new formats with the understanding that in a few years, the base level mobile plan is going to look very different than the mobile plans we have today,” said Neil Sweeney, founder and CEO of Juice. “As a mobile company, if you’re not evolving to embrace these new methodologies and units, you’re asking for trouble down the road.”
MoPub’s marketplace hosts inventory from popular apps by The Score, Zynga, Flipboard and Songza. The Twitter-owned publisher platform rolled out its native ad solution in April, with a handful of DSPs on board.
In mobile, native has its roots in sponsored posts on Twitter and in-feed ads on Facebook. It shouldn’t be confused with sponsored content, which is what native advertising often refers to on the desktop web.
Juice has an ongoing relationship with MoPub, and its Swarm DSP already offers access to MoPub’s display inventory. The new deal extends that partnership to native as well.
Sweeney stressed that native should not be a core business, but one of a variety of available mobile ad units.
“I’m loath to walk into a brand and say, ‘You must do native,’ even if it has nothing to do with what that brand is trying to do,” he said. “Based on what their objective is, we can provide them with different methodologies, ad units and tactics. I think that’s always really resonated with people in the market.”
