Strike Ad White Paper

How to Simplify Mobile Media Planning and

Buying

by

March 2011

StrikeAdPowering mobile advertising

TM

How to Simplify Mobile Media Planning and Buying

How to Simplify Mobile

Planning and BuyingContents

1. Executive summary 3

2. Advertising utopia 4

3. Mobile overheads 4

4. Overcoming the complexity 5

5. Mobile Demand Side Platforms 8

6. The future 10

7. Conclusion 11


TM

3How to Simplify Mobile Media Planning and Buying

1. Executive summary

This report has identified 5 steps to delivering a healthy mobile campaign in order to address the inherent

complexities that have become associated with mobile campaign planning and buying.

1. Educate media agencies and their clients on the availability of platforms that facilitate easier

planning, execution, optimisation and reporting of mobile campaigns.

2. Delivery of planning and optimisation tools, namely a dedicated Mobile Demand Side

Platform ,to eradicate mobile barriers to entry for media agencies

3. Provide transparent third-party ad serving to assure accuracy and confidence

4. Develop agency case studies promoting simplified and optimised planning and buying

process using a Mobile Demand Side Platform

5. Secure the support of agencies and clients around sharing data to measure ROI and overall

effectiveness.

Research by mobileSQUARED has revealed that the emergence of dedicated Mobile Demand Side Platforms will

dramatically reduce the workload for both traditional and mobile specialist media agencies by eradicating

the manual, labour intensive processes of planning, analysing, buying and reporting on mobile. Media

agencies’ expectations for planning and buying campaigns have been programmed through years of

traditional, and more recently, online campaigns. The time to develop and execute campaigns on TV, radio,

and online, for example, has set the benchmark for mobile and the target for Mobile Demand Side Platforms

to aspire to – if not better.

The period of large scale inefficiencies and barriers that have prohibited most media agencies and brands

from considering mobile as a viable advertising investment is drawing to a welcomed conclusion. A new era

of mobile planning and buying has now arrived, where agencies can solely focus on delivering real return on

investment by employing a single platform through which they can plan, book, execute and optimise their

mobile campaigns, all in real time.


2. Advertising utopia

One of the most compelling propositions in advertising is the ability to deliver a real-time advertisement

offering a relevant discount to a consumer standing near a store or restaurant, anywhere in the world.

Similarly, measuring the consumer’s response to the highly-targeted ad based on location, relevance,

and revenue generation is equally compelling. Because of its ability to directly connect the brand with the

consumer, mobile is one of the most exciting developments in the history of advertising.

Mobile has the potential to revolutionise advertising. Aside from a 5-billion strong global mobile audience,

smartphones can utilise the high-speed networks of 3G, WiFi and now 4G, to provide a platform to deliver

compelling and engaging rich media advertisements. Software and analytical tools can generate an accurate

digital picture of every mobile consumer and predict their behaviour, preferences and tastes to serve

relevant and targeted ads. While augmented reality fuses the physical world with the virtual world to create a

scintillating and fascinating environment for brands to connect with consumers. The mobile device’s ability

to incorporate real-time and location into the advertising mix enhances the power mobility has over every

other advertising medium.

3. Mobile overheads

Whilst mobile’s addition to advertising has injected new levels of creativity for brands to communicate with

consumers, mobile also brings significant overheads in the shape of complexity and fragmentation that

media buyers and planners will not have encountered previously. The multitude of networks, from mobile

operator to mobile advertising networks and exchanges, is further complicated by new players arriving

at one end of the spectrum and consolidation from the other. This rapid change is constantly altering the

planners’ landscape of an already bewildering media that is further complicated by fragmentation across

thousands of devices coupled with more and more advertising formats and the lack of unique user tracking.

Mobile has to ensure it is treated equally in all areas of media (from research & insight to strategy to planning to buying to measurement) – this is very definitely NOT the

case at the moment.

Mark Middlemas, Managing Partner, Business Development, UniversalMcCann


Peter Fyfe, Associate Director, Emerging Platforms & Technologies, MediaCom, says mobile must tackle

the operating cost of delivering multi-device, and multi-operating system campaigns, and calls for the

standardisation of ad delivery, reporting, and administration. He rightly notes that “as things stand the

overheads associated with campaign delivery are hugely out of kilter with other media”.

Regardless of the costs, the result of this complexity is a convoluted campaign execution process at the

agencies involving: booking the inventory using different payment systems; uploading or emailing the

creative across numerous networks and device types; and, then managing, in effect the same campaign,

multiple times across multiple systems. Further complexity comes from a lack of unified reporting across

multiple networks and the inability to track unique users. This provides a fragmented overview of customer

behaviour which limits the reporting and minimises the return on investment.

“Buying media on mobile can be hugely time consuming,” says Harry Dewhirst, Vice President of Advertising

Strategy, at Amobee. “Multiple buying points and an ever expanding inventory base have made the

landscape a challenge to navigate. Then throw into the mix the fact that media owners had their own internal

processes, proprietary ad serving solutions and rates, the whole process is very resource heavy. We work

with fortune 500 advertisers spending a [£1] million a year on mobile, and therefore the resource investment

makes sense for us. For smaller companies, I can see it being a real challenge managing £20k-£50k

campaigns with the care and attention it needs and deserves.”

In the UK, the average mobile advertising campaign spend is projected to pass the £20,000 mark in 2011,

when the market is forecast to be worth around £65 million, with almost £37 million coming from mobile

display, according to mobileSQUARED. In the US, the average mobile advertising campaign spend will surpass

$100,000 (£61,829) in 2011 taking the market’s worth to $1.24 billion, and making the US the second billion

dollar mobile advertising market after Japan.

4. Overcoming the complexity

Mobile advertising’s revenue growth has been slower than analyst forecasts over the last five years. The

complexity associated with mobile has created barriers to entry to the traditional media buyers, preventing

sufficient in-house agency investment in resource to truly deliver compelling mobile campaigns to their

clients.

“Agencies need the volume in mobile to justify the investment,” says David Fieldhouse, owner and strategy

director at Lucidity Mobile. “At a media agency, there is most likely one person specialising in mobile, and


they won’t have the time to do everything. Conversely, if mobile is entrusted to a digital planner, they do not

understand or have the knowledge of mobile, and won’t have much of a view what to do.”

Despite these “overhead” costs, brands are now requesting a mobile element to their advertising mix.

Approximately 80% of all mobile advertising campaigns globally were mobile content companies, research in

2007-2008 by mobileSQUARED revealed. In 2010, more than 50% of mobile advertising activity was from brands.

There is a growing need from media planning and buying agencies to manage their mobile campaigns

effectively through a single platform.

Not all agencies have a dedicated mobile specialist – IAB research revealed that 49% of UK agencies in

2010 had a mobile specialist buyer, up from 30% in 2008 and those that do, will not have the time to

fully-develop a mobile campaign for multiple clients simultaneously. Whether the campaign requirements

are national or international, multilayer targeting, such as location, gender, age, or handset, multiple pricing

models, from CPC, CPA, CPM and CPD, the importance of the availability of a dedicated campaign manager

is apparent as an enabling influence supporting real-time optimisation, as well as a full, robust and coherent

reporting mechanism.

This makes third-party ad serving networks imperative for agencies to increase their investment in mobile.

Source: IAB Snapshot Research Base: 2008 (115) ; 2009 (106) ; 2010 (160)

Who is responsible for the buying of mobile campaigns within your agency?

Online buyer 52% 50% 51%

30% 44% 49%

3% 6% 16%

2% 1% 2%

Mobile specialist buyer

Search buyer

TV buyer

Others13% 10% 17%

Others: Differs across department, not sure, etc

We are aligned with a mobile specialist


“Agencies are seeing the lack of third-party ad serving as a barrier to them spending money right now,”

says IAB’s Head of Mobile, Jon Mew. “There aren’t that many campaigns using third-party providers and

agencies, and in general, agencies are keen to have third-party ad serving. It makes their life easier with

reporting, and gives them more confidence.”

In terms of planning, agencies in online could target the 18-24 youth market across France, Germany and

the UK, for example, and acquire the relevant data from sources such as comScore to view the top five

sites for the target demographic in terms of unique users, analyse the most competitive rates, and book the

campaign accordingly. In doing so, the planner’s decision-making process is assisted by identifying the top

five networks to access the target unique demographic users using the aggregated URLs and de-duplicated

traffic, supplied by the ad network. The buying process is centrally managed by a third-party ad server.

These platforms assimilate all of the available web data to construct, deliver and, most importantly, track an

online campaign.

Whilst these single consoles are commonplace in agencies to assist with ad delivery, increasingly Demand

Side Platforms are also being used for automated trading, optimisation, and real-time bidding. These

platforms combine to enable the execution of national and international campaigns within minutes and hours

and not days as is the case on mobile. They are viewed by agencies as the ideal way of buying media more

efficiently.

However, while many online Demand Side Platforms can now include mobile inventory into the process,

they are not all necessarily optimised for doing so. A dedicated Mobile Demand Side Platform is able to

deal much more efficiently with the complex nuances of the mobile channel including mobile-specific

planning and targeting tools, location-awareness capability, third-party ad serving and unique mobile user

tracking. Complete utilisation of the mobile channel cannot be addressed simply by bolting on limited mobile

functionality to existing online Demand Side Platforms.

Brands are asking where do their ads appear, and we have to tell them that their ads will appear across a number of different mobile apps,” Adams adds. “We

cannot provide our clients with 100% inventory.

Nick Adams, Global Digital Planning, Carat


The emergence of a dedicated Mobile Demand Side Platform provides the opportunity for both the

traditional and ever-expanding mobile media planners and buyers to deliver compelling campaigns in

a highly-efficient manner for their clients. After all, agency planners and buyers have already had their

campaign creation and execution timelines – and expectations set by existing tools, such as Demand Side

Platforms, and have set the benchmark for mobile campaigns.

The capability to easily create, book a mobile campaign at scale, and then view the subsequent results

and report, is a powerful tool for agencies,” says James Hilton, Joint CEO at M&C Saatchi Mobile. On the

web, these tasks are viewed as a very seamless system but are yet to migrate onto the mobile platform,

which remains very disjointed. With an agency planning and buying tool the agency has their own reporting

dashboard to see the impressions which led to this number of conversions, and rebook and optimise

accordingly.”

5. Mobile Demand Side Platforms

The emergence of Mobile Demand Side Platforms deliver a single console through which agencies can plan,

execute and evaluate hundreds of mobile campaigns, minute-by-minute, on a national or global basis. It

means agencies can build a campaign once and deploy automatically across multiple networks, publish to

the target network, and even set a spending and viewing caps.

Using sophisticated algorithmic real-time optimisation, tracking, insight and analytics, agencies can now

obtain unparalleled levels of efficiency and visibility over their mobile advertising campaigns, driving real

return on investment. This means agencies can rapidly and efficiently execute upon multiple campaigns that

target and bid in real time for thousands of variables from creative, price and acquisition through to audience

segments, location, channel, demographic, carrier and handset, as well as advanced tracking.

What’s more, the real-time functionality permits the agency to see how the campaign is performing and

reallocate the remainder of the budget halfway through a campaign from iPhone onto Android, for example,

to maximise response. In doing so, this overcomes one of the issues of existing mobile display practices of

ad-serving blindness and limited visibility of tracking.

As Nick Adams, Global Digital Planning, Carat, highlights, “there is a long tail with a lot of inventory, which is

blind and means that we’re never quite sure what we’re getting.” He says that for the major brands that Carat

works with, the inventory is not the most appropriate. The issue with in-app advertising is that the brands’

ads will appear across a number of different mobile apps that are not transparent, which means that the


agency can only provide a sample list to its client of where their ad could appear.”

The importance of visibility is that an agency’s clients need reassurance that their brand will not be

compromised through a bad user experience or their content appears in inappropriate locations. The Mobile

Demand Side Platform addresses this lack of inventory by listing all of the campaign’s participating URLs. It

can also add great value to the ‘long tail’ by showing the effectiveness of unnamed inventory by particular

targeting variables.

Research by mobileSQUARED was unable to identify any one of the major media agencies (in the UK) using a 3rd

party ad server to upload and track their mobile campaigns. This means brands, agency clients and the like,

remain 100% reliant on the media to supply the data to provide visibility of the campaign.

Not surprisingly, many major media agencies maintain that mobile remains an “experimental” medium

for their clients. This description is somewhat misleading and could be perceived as detrimental towards

mobile. Research by the IAB in 2010 revealed that media planning and buying has become a short-term play

because of the uncertainty of client budgets, coupled with agency confidence at striking late deals from a

tactical – instead of a strategic – perspective. Commercial pressures have prompted increased demands for

accountability from risk-averse clients encouraging their agencies to stick with the proven audience delivery

mechanisms of TV, print and online.

Outside the brands that are dedicating budget to mobile on an annualised basis, mobile has been positioned

as an experimental medium because it is attracting left-over budget. Whilst this has often been viewed

as a detrimental factor in the development of mobile advertising, when applying the tactical reasoning of

agencies, it is understandable given the global economic uncertainty. Until agencies have the budget to

develop campaigns strategically for their clients, mobile is not necessarily an afterthought, more an untried

luxury. However, a change of phraseology away from “experimental” should be encouraged.

Phraseology itself can be a major issue when selling mobile internally at media agencies. “Mobile has to sell

As a Global brand director, or a CMO for a brand, I don’t want to deal with timing issues, technological issues, compatibility issues, multiple networks, so the

natural thinking is let my local market guys do it. TV, cinema, internet I can plan and book in one day, which is most definitely not the case with mobile. This is

making it difficult for us as an agency to be totally sold in to mobile.

Michael Iskas, Global Head of Integrated,Communications Planning, Aegis Media.


itself better into the wider agency world,” says Mark Middlemas, Managing Partner, Business Development,

UniversalMcCann. “Get planners to better understand the role mobile can play in their clients’ world. Speak

the same language as the other media it competes against – very definitely a fault-line of the digital/online

world.”

6. The future

Beyond the fragmentation, compatibility and technological issues, planners are confronted by limited data

on the mobile consumers, and where there is transparency of data, it is fragmented and has to be collated in

what is a manually-intensive task. This means planners are processing data instead of ... planning.

“At the moment there is not one de facto platform for a media agency to run a campaign on,” says M&C

Saatchi Mobile’s Hilton. “There is a distinct lack of technology that can pull all the data from campaigns

whether over multiple operating systems, or networks, and then have the ability to aggregate multiple data

points.”

Third-party ad serving and the introduction of Mobile Demand Side Platforms, will provide agencies with the

Source: IAB Snapshot Research Base: 2008 (115) ; 2009 (106) ; 2010 (160)

What experience do you have with mobile advertising?

Experimented and liked it 19%

21% 32%

17% 17% 21%

15% 21% 16%

0% 3% 6%

Regular part of client proposals

Experimented then stopped

A significant part of our business

None50% 39% 25%

Difficult to sell in to our clients


consistency in the planning and data tools that they desire, and the campaign optimisation and return on

investment demanded by their clients. Furthermore, mobileSQUARED expects third-party ad serving to provide

the impetus for media agencies to migrate more digital spend on to mobile faster than currently projected.

Research by the IAB in 2010 to assess media agencies opinion of mobile, revealed that mobile is expected to

account for 11% of an agencies total digital ad spend in 2011, an increase of 4% in 2010. This is perhaps not

a surprising development given that 9% of agencies’ client campaigns had a mobile advertising component

in 2010, and that will represent 19% in 2011.

The ability to plan and execute a mobile media campaign efficiently and to buy with the aid of a Demand

Side Platform aligns with the existing short-term tactical campaign-spend strategy adopted by the majority

of agencies to maximise their risk-averse clients’ budgets. Furthermore, the availability of processed data will

provide the visibility required by a planner to create a campaign within a defined period of time, and educate

the client about the small screen audience to incentivise a shift in spend towards mobile.

When clients loosen the purse strings and their agencies are granted increased flexibility towards campaign

planning and can evolve beyond the short-term tactical approach to a longer-term strategic play, mobile will

be included within the advertising mix.

“It is all about ease of use,” says Michael Iskas, Global Head of Integrated Communications Planning, Aegis

Media. “Applying mobile to an integrated global strategy should not create a thousand problems, and

endless compatibility issues, it should not take the time it does to plan a mobile campaign, I should not have

to separately work with 12 different operators. All of this is a deterrent. We need ease of use.”

7. Conclusion

Mobile media planning and buying is entering a new era of significant change with the availability of

dedicated Mobile Demand Side Platforms. There can be little doubt that true investment by big brands in

mobile has been held back by the apparent complexities of being able to transparently plan, execute and

analyse mobile campaigns across thousands of publishers whilst delivering real return on investment.

The emergence of Mobile Demand Side Platforms will dramatically reduce the workload for both traditional

and mobile specialist media agencies by eradicating the manual, labour-intensive processes of planning,

analysing, buying and reporting on mobile.

Media agencies’ expectations for planning and buying campaigns have been programmed through years of

traditional, and more recently, online campaigns. The time to develop and execute campaigns on TV, radio,

and online, for example, has set the benchmark for mobile and the target for Mobile Demand Side Platforms

to aspire to – if not better.

The period of large scale inefficiencies and barriers that have prohibited most agencies from considering

mobile as a viable advertising investment is drawing to a welcomed conclusion. A new era of mobile

planning and buying where agencies can solely focus on delivering real return on investment through

employing a single platform through which they can plan, book, execute and optimise their mobile

campaigns, all in real time.

5 steps to a delivering a healthy mobile campaign

1. Educate media agencies and their clients on the availability of platforms that facilitate easier

planning, execution, optimisation and reporting of mobile campaigns.

2. Delivery of planning and optimisation tools, namely a dedicated Mobile Demand Side

Platform ,to eradicate mobile barriers to entry for media agencies

3. Provide transparent third-party ad serving to assure accuracy and confidence

4. Develop agency case studies promoting simplified and optimised planning and buying

process using a Mobile Demand Side Platform

5. Secure the support of agencies and clients around sharing data to measure ROI and overall

effectiveness.



TM

About StrikeAd

StrikeAd was set up by entrepreneurs Alex Rahaman and Simon Wajcenberg in 2010 to satisfy the global

need for a streamlined media planning and buying environment on mobile. StrikeAd FusionTM is the worlds

first dedicated mobile demand side platform.

StrikeAd Fusion

StrikeAd Fusion is a proprietary technology platform created to answer the ever growing need of media

planning and buying agencies to manage their mobile campaigns effectively through a single platform. Our

unique platform is not a bolt on to an existing DSP but a mobile-specific platform in its own right, a single

console through which agencies can plan, execute and evaluate hundreds of mobile campaigns, minute-by-

minute, on a global basis.

With sophisticated optimisation, tracking, insight and analytics, StrikeAd Fusion offers agencies unparalleled

levels of efficiency and visibility over their mobile advertising campaigns driving real return on investment.

StrikeAd Fusion Benefits

Scalable / Transparent inventory / Dedicated to mobile / Huge mobile reach / Significantly optimises agency

media spend / Open API’s can integrate with existing web DSP’s / Delivers significantly greater ROI

StrikeAd Engage

StrikeAd EngageTM offers media planners a complete managed service to get their mobile campaigns up

and running. We appreciate that agencies aren’t always familiar with mobile advertising. so we’re here to

them deliver their mobile campaigns through our StrikeAd FusionTM platform.

For more information, please visit www.strikead.com


mobileSQUARED is a mobile research agency based in the UK specializing in mobile advertising,

content/apps and services in 20 key mobile markets around the world. The company comprises

mobile analysts and journalists that have been covering, tracking, forecasting the key areas

of mobile since the late 1990s, and have worked for some of the most influential newsletters,

magazines, and written industry-shaping reports on advertising, content/apps and services.

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