Lowering the Mobile Ad Barrier: A Conversation With Mobclix

As more and more attention is devoted to mobile usage, mobile advertising is getting awareness as an attractive ad platform.

Favorable ad performance metrics (i.e., CTRs) over online equivalents have caused many advertisers to begin to look at mobile marketing in earnest. A strengthening economy will further this — erstwhile causing a general back-burnering of mobile advertising.

Another factor that will accelerate mobile marketing adoption will be simplicity. At its early stages, many marketers have been scared away from mobile by a combination of complexity and fragmentation.

Follow the Google

Solutions to both of these problems are the name of the game for companies playing in the mobile ad space. Google, for example, is bundling mobile and online advertising by integrating mobile campaign management with the existing AdWords “work flow.”

As for the fragmentation challenge, we’ve seen a few ad exchanges pop up. These provide a mediation layer and one-stop shop for advertisers to reach many different ad networks. They also purport to add transparency and more efficient mobile ad buys.

The benefit here is also to gain the reach of many different ad networks — each reaching different users and publishers — all in one place. So far, these ad exchanges have most notably included Mobclix and AdWhirl (recently acquired by AdMob), and are analogous to some of the online exchanges such as Yahoo’s Right Media.

Today, Mobclix made an interesting move to simplify mobile ad buying one step further. The company announced a partnership with a few different non-mobile ad networks including AOL’s Advertising.com and Traffic Marketplace.

These networks will pull Mobclix’s mobile ad inventory into their platforms, giving their advertisers the ability to buy mobile and online placement. As part of the deal, they’ll bundle Mobclix’s mobile campaign analytics into their own dashboards.

Keep it Simple Stupid

The idea here, according to Mobclix cofounder Krishna Subramanian, is that more and more advertisers are buying media across different platforms including mobile, online, print, television, etc.

Allowing online ad networks to feed advertisers into mobile distribution makes it that much easier on them. Tying together mobile and online reporting also allows advertisers to begin to see how the two affect one another in the increasingly convergent media world we live in.

But most of all, it eliminates the need for a given advertiser to form a separate relationship with a mobile-only ad network. Again, the name of the game at this early stage of mobile advertising’s growth is simplicity. Reaching out to online ad networks to bring their advertisers into mobile is a step in this direction.

Mobclix works with about 20 different mobile ad networks, including JumpTap, Mojiva and VideoEgg. It claims 3,500 publisher relationships and serves about 4 billion impressions.