Hot on the heels of its recent appointment of Michael Collins, the former CEO and founder of mobile marketing agency Joule, as its new chief executive, mobile advertising startup Adelphic is to partner with Vivaki’s Audience on Demand (AOD) unit, one of the biggest agency trading desks on Madison Avenue, to launch a new mobile audience targeting platform.
Smart predictive modeling
This is quite some turn of events for the startup, which was launched in 2010 by co-founders Jennifer Lum and Changfeng Weng (both erstwhile colleagues at the Apple-owned mobile advertising network Quattro). It quickly raised $2 million in seed funding and scooped a whopping $10 million in Series A funding led by Google Ventures in December last year.
The company impressed investors with its slick data mining tools, which analyze 30 different signals simultaneously in order to pinpoint a visitor’s location, time of visit, age and gender. Unsurprisingly, it’s been delivering appreciably improved campaign results for mobile advertising agencies and brands as a consequence.
But Vivaki has clearly also been impressed by Adelphi’s smart predictive modeling technology. While ad targeting is taking off in the world of mobile phones advertising, with other similar outfits like AdMobius also coming on stream during the same period as Adelphic, the latter’s technology has substantially overcome one of the biggest problems in mobile phones advertising – the lack of a consistent ID for mobile users.
“Beyond the cookie”
Vivaki describes Adelphic as a mobile DSP (Demand-Side Platform) and, according to Jennifer Lum, it will allow the AOD to extend the reach of mobile users beyond traditional mobile advertising exchanges. Essentially, she says, Adelphic will enable the desk to “target content on all mobile devices — including tablets — through direct integrations with mobile Web sites and apps, exchanges and other supply side platforms.”
The deal will result in Vivaki and Adelphic collaborating on joint proprietary methods for segmenting mobile users according to unique consumer behaviors. Describing the new approach as “beyond the cookie”, the new partners say that it will allow “mobile to grow exponentially.”
Jason Pope, Vivaki AOD’s VP, said:
“We are excited to partner with Adelphic to further evolve our proprietary approach to driving mobile audience buying. Our hope is that this new blueprint for mobile audience buying will better leverage data that’s inherent to the ecosystem.”