Nectar is Toronto company’s new “core product”
Juice Mobile is packing its bags and heading to Barcelona. This Saturday the agency’s executive team will fly to the Spanish city for the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) to launch its latest ad platform, Nectar.
Conceived as an alternative to the industry standard of pricing mobile ad space based on supply and demand, Nectar instead charges based on environmental factors such as location, age and type of device. Juice CEO Neil Sweeney said the system is designed to give weight to the contextual components he believes make ads valuable.
Publishers can view current mobile campaigns on Nectar, then decide how many impressions to offer, which properties they want to sell space on and set a price. Using that information, Nectar’s algorithms create “optimal buys” for media agencies.
“If an advertiser like Microsoft is looking to do rich media in Western Canada on iPhones, Nectar will reach out to the publications inside the system and pull in an audience and allow those publications that fit the campaign,” he said.
Juice chose to launch Nectar at the MWC because of its status as a hotspot for mobile news and releases. “It’s sort of ‘the one,’” Sweeney said. “You’re going to see a bunch of stuff coming out this week. It rivals, in many ways, CES, for announcements.”
Gearing up to the launch, Juice planned MWC demos with media and technology companies. Sweeney said the agency is looking to add mobile inventory from several international media companies to Nectar, including online media companies that will have a presence at the conferences like Google, Twitter and Facebook.
Ad space from several publishers is now available on Nectar, including mobile inventory from the BBC, St. Joseph Media, Corus and Metro International. Postmedia will sell its mobile ad space exclusively through the service.
While Juice still offers the real-time bidding platform it launched in October 2012, Sweeney said Nectar is now Juice’s “core product.” He said it’s more efficient in delivering quality mobile ad options for both publishers and media buyers than the real-time bidding process.
