Tag: mobile ads

New mobile ad platform raises $7 million in funding.

mNectar, an app promotion startup, has created a new mobile advertising platform called Playable, which allows gamers to demo a game on their mobile device before they choose to download or purchase it, and the company has raised $7 million in Series A funding from New Enterprise Associate (NEA).

The new groundbreaking mobile ad platform provides consumers with a better shopping experience.

In an interview with GamesBeat, CEO and founder of mNectar, Wally Nguyen, said “We created this company to solve the problems of mobile advertising.” He added that “Our ads give you a chance to instantly sample games and apps. We can connect people with the right apps.”

According to Nguyen, their “playable ads” improve the shopping experience of potential mobile game buyers as they browse through new game options. “Today, everything else doesn’t tell you what you are getting,” Nguyen commented. It is the hope of mNectar to solve the app discovery problem that so many mobile app developers have due to the huge amount of mobile game competition that exists within app stores, which makes the chance of being discovered quite difficult.

The CEO of mNectar said that the firm is equipping mobile ads with cloud delivery and mobile app virtualization. This enables consumers to try out a playable demo of an app or a game prior to downloading it. This results in higher advertising revenue for application developers and produces an experience that is more enjoyable for mobile users.

The interactive ads are many times more effective than other mobile advertising.

Presently, the majority of mobile users depend on friend recommendations, app ranking lists and app reviews in order to determine which game to play. Standard ads, such as pop-ups, banners and videos, do not give the consumer any real indication of what the actual gameplay would be like.

The user retention rates of interactive advertisements are four times more effective compared to other types of ads like interstitials and they are two times better than mobile video ads. According to Nguyen, these results have received verification by independent ad measurement firms.

Playable gives users the chance to experience the real product for a brief time. This helps them to instantly decide whether or not the game or app is worth downloading or buying. The CEO explained that the unique mobile advertising platform leads to fewer retention issues because users know precisely what they will be getting when they download the app.

The marketing industry in the United Kingdom is poised to watch smartphone ads leap ahead of newspapers and magazines.

A new forecast was recently released regarding the future of mobile advertising in the United Kingdom, and it is believed that by next year, the channel will overtake the newspaper and magazine ad market, as well as the spending for TV commercials.

The forecast also predicted that spending on these smartphone and tablet ads will reach £4.5 billion in 2016.

The report was published by eMarketer, which is expecting to see a growth in mobile advertising spending by 96 percent during 2014, to bring it to a total of £2.02 billion. That said, even by the end of this year, it will still be only a sliver behind the forecasted £2.06 that is expected to be spent on print ads in newspapers during the same period of time, said the eMarketer report.

The mobile advertising opportunity in the U.K. is being seen as massive due to the device penetration there.

The report stated that “half of Britons are expected to own an iPad, Kindle, or similar tablet device by 2018”, and with this mobile device usage, it is easy to understand why the ad market over that channel is set to grow by another 60 percent in 2015, to bring it to £3.2 billion in total.

The report went on to say that “Continued robust growth in the mobile channel is driving the bulk of [overall] digital ad growth in the UK.” As both mobile and video ad spending is taking off at an explosive rate, eMarketer feels that this will only drive the ad spending throughout this year and next.

In fact, the complete market for digital advertising in the United Kingdom is expected to be worth £7.25 this year, rising to £7.97 next year, and then to £8.64 by the close of 2016. The report suggested that mobile advertising aimed at smartphone and tablet consumers will make up almost 30 percent of the overall ad spending that occurs in the country, this year. That figure should increase by over half by the end of 2016.