Does mobile display advertising need third-party ad serving? The answer is definitely yes!

Third-party ad serving is commonly used in online advertising. In the first years of online display advertising, ads were served directly by publishers. However, it became quickly evident that agencies needed a central campaign management system to serve, manage, track and analyze the media bought from multiple publishers. Atlas, Eyeblaster or DoubleClick are examples of providers of such capabilities. Similarly to how online display advertising evolved, mobile display advertising has now reached the point where it needs third-party ad serving.

During the experimental stage of mobile advertising, agencies used to run small campaigns on a specific mobile publisher or ad network. Running such campaigns was coordinated with one mobile vendor, such as Quattro Wireless or Nokia Media Network (Enpocket). Nowadays, a mobile campaign can span across many publishers, sometimes even more than twenty. Setting-up, managing and analyzing such a campaign are daunting tasks. Agencies need to send the media plan, the creative for ads and subsequent changes to each publisher. Sometimes this is done via email while other times the agency has access to an interface within the publisher’s system. Agencies also need to get the reports from each publisher and consolidate these reports. Using a third-party ad serving system gives agencies the opportunity to escape such painful processes by easily setting-up the campaign only once in a central system. They are also able to effortlessly pull out reports and analyze the campaign across publishers. Moreover, agencies can check the delivery, instead of relying solely on publishers’ self-reported numbers.

On a broader scheme, third-party ad serving can help solve two of the main problems that are holding back mobile advertising from booming: difficulty of execution and lack of analytics.

So, just as agencies use third party ad serving for online display advertising, they now need third-party ad serving for mobile display advertising. Does it make sense for agencies to use a different system for mobile from the one they use for online? Clearly not. Nowadays, agencies run cross-channel campaigns and they want to be able to set-up, manage, serve and analyze all channels from a central place.

If the benefits are so great then why isn’t third-party ad serving already the norm in the mobile industry? The reason is implementing third-party ad serving in mobile is very complex and difficult. In order to serve ads on various mobile publishers, a third-party ad server needs to be integrated and work with the ad server of the mobile publisher or ad network. In online advertising this is less difficult given the relatively small number of ad servers (such as DFP or AdManager) and more than a decade of advancements in technology and standardization. However, mobile ad serving technology is very fragmented, still in development and lacking in standards. The integration needs to be done with each of the many mobile ad servers for publishers that are out there and that use various proprietary technologies: Millennial Media, Quattro Wireless, Ringleader, AdMob, AdInfuse, 4th Screen, Amobee, MADS, Smaato, Mojiva to name just a few from a very long list.

Eyeblaster is a leader in taking on the challenge of mobile campaign management, with Channel Connect for Mobile, a comprehensive third-party mobile ad server for agencies with capabilities of integrating online and mobile.



Georgiana Mirea | Senior Manager of Product Planning, Mobile