The List – Juice Mobile

Between mobile RTB, automated media planning and beacon-based attribution, Juice Mobile is always reaching ahead of the curve to come up with unique solutions that anticipate the marketers’ problems before they actually encounter them.

This was a breakout year for Juice. For the first time it was named to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 ranking of the fastest growing companies in Canada, ranking 15th with four-year revenue growth of 678%. Since last fall, its headcount grew from 54 to 87, and it opened a product development office in Waterloo and new sales offices in L.A. and Chicago.

Juice started with mobile RTB, but now it’s more well-known for its unique direct buying platform, Nectar, which provides an middle path between programmatic and traditional direct sales. With Nectar, ad buyers post a mobile RFP laying out the region, formats and volume they want. Invited publishers have 24 hours to put together a package at a bulk rate (using Juice’s marketplace data to help them judge how to value their inventory), and the buyers choose which offers to accept.

The platform is now used globally by all major agency holdcos and 1,500 publishers, including the BBC, Vox Media, Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. This spring saw a major step forward on that front: a partnership with Mediaocean, one of the world’s top media planning platforms, that extends Nectar’s capabilities to all of Mediaocean’s global agency and publisher clients.

Not satisfied with innovating in programmatic, in December 2014 Juice spun off an independent company Freckle IoT to focus on the internet of things called. Freckle’s first move was to launch Canada’s largest mobile beacon network, working with local partners to install upwards of 30,000 beacons in public areas like malls, on street furniture and billboards. In the spring, it expanded south of the border through a partnership with a U.S. network called Blue Bite, adding another 60,000 beacons.

Many marketers see beacons as a way to send offers to customers on their mobile devices while they’re in a store. But that’s only one of its functions, says Juice founder Neil Sweeney. The real promise of its network is to give brands the ability to connect online customer behaviours with real world actions.

“If you’re Procter & Gamble or Mondelez or Unilever, and you have products in all these stores, you want more information about who’s in and around your products and who’s buying them,” he says. “For retailers, that’s where the market is going, and the only reason it can go that way is because people have these super-powered geo-aware devices in their purses and pants.”

The promise was enough to appeal to Mondelez, which selected Freckle as one of eight finalists in its Shopper Futures program this fall. Freckle’s currently working on a 90-day pilot with 7-Eleven and BelVita to connect ad impressions with shopper behaviours like store visits.

Meanwhile, Juice has stayed at the top of its game in mobile RTB. In May, it promised 100% viewability on all inventory bought by its platforms — meaning advertisers only pay for mobile impressions that are verified viewable by an independent provider. Though advertisers have put a lot of pressure on publishers and tech vendors to discount non-viewable impressions, only a handful globally have committed to it. Juice is so far the only Canadian platform to do so.