San Mateo-based start­up Draw­bridge, whose ad retar­get­ing tech­nol­o­gy helps mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies and brands tar­get their ads to rel­e­vant con­sumers across devices and plat­forms, has just announced that it’s now added sup­port for video ads to its reper­toire, too.

A gate­way to new cat­e­gories of adver­tis­ing 

The Sequoia and Klein­er-Perkins backed com­pa­ny has been mak­ing a name for itself since its launch in 2010 by ana­lyz­ing user behav­ior to locate the times when they are most like­ly to be using mul­ti­ple devices. That in turn allows mobile adver­tis­ing firms to use desk­top data to refine the tar­get­ing of their mobile ads.

Vet­er­ans of media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies will prob­a­bly notice at this point that throw­ing video into the mix doesn’t fun­da­men­tal­ly alter the firm’s exist­ing cross-plat­form tech­nol­o­gy. It remains essen­tial­ly the same. How­ev­er, Drawbridge’s CEO and co-founder Kamak­shi Sivara­makr­ish­nan says that the addi­tion of video sup­port is still a sig­nif­i­cant devel­op­ment for the firm. For starters, video adver­tis­ing has been ris­ing marked­ly on mobile. But Sivara­makr­ish­nan says that the move will help her com­pa­ny branch out into oth­er cat­e­gories, like enter­tain­ment and auto­mo­tive advertising.

She gives the exam­ple of some­one watch­ing a movie trail­er on their com­put­er. That’s the kind of thing movie stu­dios would like to know about, so they can deliv­er tar­get­ed pro­mo­tions and mar­ket­ing to that person’s smart­phone. She was at pains to clar­i­fy, how­ev­er, that she doesn’t envis­age Draw­bridge ever com­pet­ing with mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies:

“I don’t think we’ll ever be a cre­ative shop,” she said. “What we will do is expand our arse­nal to sup­port a myr­i­ad of for­mats that are very rel­e­vant across a spec­trum of performance.”

New met­rics, new partnership

As part of the new video sup­port, the com­pa­ny has added some new met­rics to its ad report­ing: it’ll now look at viewa­bilty, com­ple­tion rates and drop-off points in addi­tion to clicks and impres­sions. More­over, Draw­bridge can not only host ads direct­ly, it can inte­grate with oth­er plat­forms, too.

And to com­ple­ment the new sup­port for video, the firm has also announced its first for­mal part­ner­ship with the Twit­ter-owned mobile ad serv­ing plat­form MoPub,

Janae McDo­nough, MoPub’s Direc­tor of Exchange, said:

“Part­ner­ing with Draw­bridge pro­vides imme­di­ate ben­e­fits to our clients, as well as advances video adver­tis­ing in general.”