AppLovin will launch its Adaptive Personalization Platform (APP) after two and a half years of development, we learned yesterday from CEO Adam Foroughi. APP will help brands better serve personalized recommendations on mobile devices and re-target mobile ads.

Key features of the platform are to:

—Learn an individual’s shopping behavior and predict what he or she will be interested in next, creating tailored recommendations.

—Remind customers of items they may have left in a (virtual) shopping cart, and suggest related products or offers.

—Allow marketers to measure effectiveness of personal recommendations by attributing influence and conversions across screens, so they can spend where their users are located.

APP ingest insights from each customer’s shopping behavior across screens and retarget ads accordingly, including location targeting.

These ads will merge with the user experience and show contextually relevant information. AppLovin currently targets U.S. brands as clients but plans to expand its client base to SMBs in the future.

Foroughi released these key findings from product testing:

— APP increased conversion rates from 2 percent to 10 percent.

— Advertisers see ROI from APP within in 2 week .

— APP can reach 70 percent of an advertiser’s audience within 72 hours.

— For every $1 spent, advertisers see$20 in return.

AppLovin’s success can be measured by the growth rate in consumers’ time with mobile.

“Consumption of media is high but transaction behavior is not high yet. And there lies AppLovin’s opportunity,” said Foroughi, who believes the web’s evolution will repeat itself in the mobile web. AppLovin is positioned to help brands better manage mobile consumer transactions.

“By delivering personalized recommendations on mobile to a billion consumers each month, we’ve cracked the code; beta response has been incredible among tops brands across retail, travel and hospitality,” said Foroughi. “We’re excited to officially turn the platform on to give this same opportunity to any advertiser looking to dramatically boost their mobile revenues.”

AppLovin also plans to bring these solutions to social networks. The company could be on the cusp of a promising future given accelerated growth in mobile, where consumer behavior is becoming more and more transactional.

The post Capitalizing on the Growth of Mobile: A conversation with AppLovin appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The “Making Sense of Mobile Advertising for SMBs” panel at SMB Digital Marketing 2012 was aptly named, as the mobile needs of small businesses vary widely by category and level of sophistication, among other dynamics. Dick Larkin (VP, American Marketing & Publishing), Mary Beth Brendza (CEO, App Express) and Henry Tam (VP Self-Serve Advertising, Millenial Media) each showcased distinct products that may appeal to different SMBs depending on their position on the adoption curve.

For Larkin, whose American Marketing & Publishing still prints directories in 500 small communities, simplicity is the imperative. His mobile solution is a dead-simple text service that’s as easy as “customer subscribes to a merchant, receives texts from that merchant.” Too rudimentary? Not in rural markets, where mobile adoption is slower and SMBs demand clear technology. The product is sold by print reps at $995 annually, with ample “coaching” built in. The results over the past 14 months: 4100 customers, $3.9 million revenue.

Brendza also believes in simplicity and guidance for SMBs, but with a focus on the app market. App Express is DIFM (not DIY), and at $75-$100 per month, builds out Apple and Android apps, as well as a single-page, HTML-5 mobile websites for resellers’ clients. The obvious question is, “do SMBs really need apps?” Brendza’s answer: the majority of user time on mobile is spent in-app. Moreover, apps provide a deeper level of feature functionality for SMBs, from scheduling to deals and invoicing.

At the far end of the continuum is Millenial Media, the independent mobile ad network colossus that launched a self-serve local ad service to capture SMBs. The platform includes hyper-local geo-targeting that Tam says “can cut across actual neighborhoods.” He showed a map that plotted ad placements for a recent local campaign to prove that precision targeting was indeed precise. The service began with CPC pricing, but will soon add CPM buys for greater simplicity.

While each product falls at a different point on the mobile sophistication curve, a common thread tying all three together is pricing simplicity: flat rates, easy-to-understand bundles and CPMs.

The post SMB Digital 2012: SMBs’ Mobile Needs Vary Widely appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In a panel on mobile local ad networks, Verve Wireless CMO Greg Hallinan, xAd CMO Craig Hagopian, Where VP of BD Dan Gilmartin and AT&T Interactive SVP William Hsu each offered data and context to validate mobile’s efficacy.

Hagopian: xAd’s geocoded ads earn 3 percent to 8 percent CTRs, with secondary actions on these ranging from 25percent to 50 percent. This can be explained by the mobile search user’s “intent to act on information within an hour.” The query chain, or funnel, is dramatically compressed.

Hallinan: Verve’s local display network is seeing a “significant increase in the volume of locally sold mobile ads.” And once on-board, those businesses show a high propensity to renew, and at three to five times the level of the initial spend.

Tsu: Similar to Verve, AT&T’s branded local display network is driving $3 eCPMs on average. These can escalate to as high as $10 to $15 in some cases.

While local targeting is essential to capturing mobile user intent, the panelists added that context plays an equally central role in optimizing an ad’s relevance for an individual consumer. As an example, Where recently ran a campaign for Halls that geofenced a one-mile radius around the areas of a city where the flu index spiked, driving consumers to nearby CVS, Walgreens and Walmart.

The post DMS ’11: The Mobile Formula: Location + Context = Relevancy appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Mobile ad network Greystripe today announced a deal with Media Networks Inc. to better sell locally targeted mobile advertising. It’s mostly a channel deal that utilizes MNI’s sales force to sell local ads on Greystripe’s mobile network.

This lets Greystripe better reach locally segmented advertisers without having to build its own sales force — quite an investment as we all know. Time Warner-owned MNI has about 60 to 70 salespeople who already sell various forms of locally targeted print and digital media.

Greystripe meanwhile reaches 30 million monthly uniques and 2,500 mobile sites and apps. It mostly focuses on national campaigns for brand advertisers like Axe, Burger King and Buick, but this deal broadens its addressable market.

Specifically, MNI works with regional and mid-market segments like insurance and education (Hofstra University, Tennessee Tourism, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Arizona). Besides broadening the advertiser base, these are companies with local or regional advertising needs.

Meanwhile, BIA/Kelsey projects the U.S. mobile ad market to reach $1 billion this year and $2.9 billion by 2014. Location targeted ads are the fastest growing portion of that, growing from $400 million last year to just over $2 billion by 2014.

Though a growing portion of that will come from small-business advertisers, the majority of locally targeted mobile ad revenues will be mid-market and national companies that evolve their mobile campaigns. Today’s move, and others like it, should accelerate this shift.

Greystripe meanwhile continues to innovate in other ways. It’s best known for its Flash-transcoding technology, which brings “iAd-like” rich media ads to iPhone and Android. This helped boost its 2010 year-over-year revenues by 400 percent.

The post Greystripe Moves Down Market With Time Warner’s MNI appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

ULocate announced that it will extend its location targeted ad network to a small batch of third-party publishers. Known as WhereAds, they’ll include locally targeted inventory on Geocade, Jambase, MocoSpace and Superpages.com. The location targeted and presumably more relevant ads are seeing CTRs up to three times greater than comparative mobile ads according to the press release.

Next, Jumptap has announced it has launched a self-serve tool for mobile app and Web site publishers to join its ad network. This is very much in line with the strategy previously expressed in talks we’ve had with Jumptap CMO Paran Johar. The idea is to maintain a core business in premium mobile ad placements but also begin to move down the tail with self-serve offerings to smaller publishers and advertisers whose hunger for mobile continues to grow.

Lastly, Todacell has announced it will likewise expand, though its growth comes in the form of $1 million in funding and geographic expansion. The latter will include sales offices in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Bombay. Like uLocate’s strategy above, its publisher partners will be limited to about a dozen, allowing it to focus on a premium and limited crop of inventory. Funding comes from current and former employers of Amdocs.

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