Self-Service Mobile Advertising: A Conversation With Jumptap

We’re doing a bunch of research on self-service advertising by talking to companies that provide various ad formats such as paid search and display. This is mostly in the online realm, but we’re starting to see a move toward self service in mobile, led by companies we’ve profiled here in the past like AdLocal and Jumptap.

Today I had the chance to talk again with Paran Johar, Jumptap chief marketing officer and digital marketing veteran. He stressed that the company is seeing rapid growth in advertiser demand for mobile. Its April launch of tapMatch was an attempt to meet this demand with a self-serve mobile marketing tool.

This is essentially a play toward moving “down the tail.” Mobile marketing so far — and Jumptap’s traditional base of advertisers — has mostly been national brand advertisers or agencies. But the growth in advertiser demand is pushing this opportunity toward more mid-market advertisers as well as existing advertisers that want to extend their campaigns.

This is happening as advertisers are moving budget out of traditional media into more measurable online and mobile campaigns. Interestingly, the mobile marketing pace of adoption could be faster than what we’ve seen online because many advertisers have already been trained to think in terms of self-service performance-based marketing (read: Google).

When we think of self-serve advertising and the concept of moving “down the tail,” the SMB segment comes to mind. This, of course, is an elusive and fragmented market that is difficult to wrap your arms around from a sales perspective. Meanwhile, it often correlates to resource-constrained small businesses that aren’t the first to jump in the pool with new self-service marketing tactics.

For that reason, we aren’t “there” yet for SMB mobile marketing, agreed Johar, but that is where a great deal of the opportunity could eventually lie. Yellow Pages publishers have their eyes set on this segment, with their oft-heard “cross platform” local consultative sales strategies. If there is one thing they do have to accomplish this, it’s the direct touch points with SMBs via local sales channel.

This is the antithesis of self service, but Jumptap also sees potential in this SMB segment. An easy-to-use self-serve mobile marketing platform is one angle to attack it. We’ll also see lots more targeting tools integrated soon, according to Lara Mehanna, director of product management. For more from Mehanna, check out this video that walks through tapMatch.