Not many 13-year-olds can truth­ful­ly claim to have the pow­er to triple rev­enues from in-app mobile adver­tis­ing; however,native mobile adver­tis­ing firm NativeX – year of birth 2000 – claims to be able to yield ben­e­fits like this with its new ‘psy­cho­graph­ic’ tar­get­ing technology.

A new breed of mobile adver­tis­ing tar­get­ing technology

Peo­ple hold­ing media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies will doubt­less note a cer­tain disin­gen­u­ous­ness in the open­ing sen­tence: a young com­pa­ny is not quite the same as a young human being. In 13 years, how­ev­er, the Min­neso­ta-based com­pa­ny – which began life as W3i and was rebrand­ed to NativeX in March this year – has devel­oped what it proud­ly describes as “the most pre­cise demo­graph­ic tar­get­ing tech­nol­o­gy to date.”

NativeX points out that most of its rival com­pa­nies use a cou­ple of attrib­ut­es at most to tar­get mobile ads – typ­i­cal­ly loca­tion and device type – but NativeX’s tech­nol­o­gy weighs up hun­dreds of thou­sands of addi­tion­al attrib­ut­es, includ­ing edu­ca­tion, eth­nic­i­ty, income, age and gen­der, and many, many more besides. Armed with data as nuanced as this, adver­tis­ers can home in on the pre­cise type of user they are seeking.

Bieber, Bey­on­cé or bears?

By way of an expla­na­tion about how the tech­nol­o­gy works, the team at NativeX cites the exam­ple of a poster ven­dor con­front­ed by a class of 100 high school girls want­i­ng to buy posters. The easy option would be to go for big pop­u­lar­i­ty hyper-stars, so the ven­dor might be tempt­ed to hand out just one Justin Bieber cat­a­log for the class to peruse; you don’t get more mega-pop­u­lar celebs than young Mr Bieber, after all. The ven­dor can prob­a­bly bank on around 20 teens who will buy the mer­chan­dise in mul­ti­ples, but what about the oth­er 80? What – or who – do they like?

NativeX’s smart engine can col­lect and inter­pret data about all 100 stu­dents, pro­vid­ing invalu­able insights into their indi­vid­ual pref­er­ences. This means the ven­dor can hand out cat­a­logs tar­get­ing each girl’s inter­ests rather than a soli­tary Justin Bieber offer­ing, and will reach not just the big Bieber spenders but oth­ers who might pre­fer bear cubs or Beyoncé.

NativeX basi­cal­ly uses anony­mous user sur­veys to cap­ture app demo­graph­ics. Ear­ly tests showed that this type of tar­get­ing boost­ed eCPMs – the mon­ey paid by adver­tis­ers for every 1,000 impres­sions – by 500% to 600%, which is pret­ty impressive.