Analyst Roundtable: XappMedia Introduces New Ad Format and Facebook's Buy into a Virtual Future

Today’s BIA/Kelsey Analyst Roundtable had a very futuristic theme to it. We began the conversation with Facebook’s announcement of their acquisition of virtual reality company Oculus VR earlier last week.

And XappMedia has announced a partnership this week with NPR to bring audio ads in native form, essentially creating a brand new form of mobile advertising.

BIA/Kelsey Senior Analysts Mike Boland and Abid Chaudhry were back again this week to talk about these two topics today on the latest in our Analyst Roundtable series.

Chaudhry started the discussion with Facebook’s $2 billion purchase of the virtual reality gaming company Oculus VR. “We’re going to be in a post mobile world in a few years from now and Facebook is putting their bets down that virtual reality will be the next big thing,” Chaudhry said.

Chaudhry said he expects Oculus VR will continue as a gaming system and more of a “laboratory purchase” by Facebook. Mike chimed in and said,” This is a platform play. They want to own the physical touch-point with the consumer.”

Boland began his discussion of XappMedia’s new mobile ad unit with a video demonstration of how the new ad format will interface with consumers. The unit is expected to debut this week on the NPR platform. “I think this is going to represent a lot of the innovation we’re going to see just not audio ads but just in the general thinking of native advertising that’s more resident to the use case of mobile advertising.” Boland believes this should give advertisers a clearer picture on the ROI. For a more in-depth analysis, take a look at Mike’s recent blog post here.

Check out today’s analyst roundtable below: