ZestADZ – Mobile Advertising Blog

Ad networks serving clicks on Porn sites
I have recently noticed that two other mobile ad networks in India were serving massive amounts of AD inventory on Porn sites masking them as porn ads (which by the way is illegal in India, in case someone forgot to mention them). This is a fraud that they do not want the advertisers to know and this also happens to generate them a lot of one time, 100% bounce rate user clicks.

Pressure from advertisers = 100% bounce rate of the Click Throughs
This issue is part driven by the advertisers need for more click inventory but hey, Sure – results do matter but are they really pertinent?. How do you check whether they are coming from a right TG?. Whether the user landing on your landing page will really generate results for you?.

Advertisers must understand it is easy to generate clicks, especially from tons of porn, irrelevant and fake clicks that most small publishers indulge in. Porn sites based clicks are irrelevant for most advertisers because they are fake clicks where the intent of the user is something else when he sees the ad and the end result is something else (therefore the user might come on your landing page but he will never ever come back again because your brand / advertiser) has somehow cheated the user.

I am sure that this click fraud will show dismal results on the long term for those advertisers and I pity them because they’re being cheated. Anyways, lets see how this works.

1. Networks advertise on Sites which are not really targeted by the advertiser under FAKE but enticing ads.

2. Networks generate a dummy page which gives no other options but a few of their own ADS

3. User clicks on to the landing page (now where the hell is that naked pic???)

Asif Ali
www.zestadz.com

With all the fuss and furor over Behavioural Targeting (BT) it is worthwhile to see what the brouhaha is all about in general, and what it means to the mobile community.

In a nutshell, BT allows advertisers to target relevant ads to you as a person as opposed to the page you are currently viewing. In order to do this, the ad engine needs to understand you in a broader context – as an example if you are viewing a page on Credit Cards – are you looking to get a new credit card or are you already a customer of ICICI Cards and are looking for their customer service number because you don’t have it handy. Knowing the difference can save the advertisers precious ad budgets and can save you a lot of irritation. The difference is a subtle one, and in order for the advertiser to know the difference they will need more information than the page you are viewing. They would need a history of your interactions – that is, whether you reached the aforementioned page through a search string “top 5 credit cards” or “ICICI Cards” that would tell the advertiser which camp you belonged to. Piece of cake!… Au Contraire! This would require what a benign but pranky “Peeping Tom” does… or “wiretapping” what the powerful but hideous US President Nixon did and impeached. A subtle but a serious difference.

The essence of contextual targeting (CT) vs Behavioural Targeting (BT) comes down to what is depicted in the following table

Table 1 – Contextual Targeting vs Behavioural Targeting.

In order to facilitate BT Ad engines collect a range of pertinent information such as:

• Pages Viewed
• Ads clicked
• Search queries
• Search clicks
• Blogs visited

As depicted in the following figure

Figure 1 – Elements of Behavioural Targeting:

When used in a morally conscientious manner BT can add significant value to users and deliver enormous value to advertisers. Likewise, it can save users significant amount of irritation to users by providing them a quality experience and reducing irritating and irrelevant ads. But who is to decide how much of the user behavior the system should know and how much is too much?. [Some of you might remember the CRM – Customer Relationship Management system in a large hotel chain in the US in the mid 90s that worked a bit better than planned - bell captains in any one of its 185 locations knew about the “double scotch” and other intimate preferences of its marquis clients. Owing to customer complaints around “respect my privacy, you shall not know too much about me” the Hotel Chain had to decommission its CRM application]. This is the counter argument to “Information is Power” – Too much information is dangerous. Hence, despite the power and potential of BT, advertisers are hesitant to leverage BT.  This is depicted in the following figure:

Figure 2 – Marketers Rank Content Based Targeting More than BT

When advertisers consider BT, it is imperative that they give users more control over their personal information. “It is mine. You cannot have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me” says Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web.

Luckily for advertisers, viewers are willing to receive targeted advertisements if they can partake in the monetary upside from the advertisements. This is depicted in the following figure.

Figure 3- % of customers who would willingly share personal information in exchange for

This brings us to the whole subject of permission based marketing (www.permission.com) as pioneered by Seth Godin. ZestAdz is built on the philosophy of permission based marketing, where by users/subscribers opt-in to receive tangible and measurable value for the privilege they afford to marketers to make offers to them. Mobile marketing tends to focus on short attention spans, instant purchase decisions and tends to be targeted at younger audience. Hence as depicted in Table 1, contextual targeting is a better mechanism for mobile advertisements. Not to mention the fact that people view their mobile device to be a lot more personal than their web terminal and any intrusion (real or perceived) is viewed as an intrusion to their privacy.

Hence mobile advertisers will be better off staying with contextual advertising… at least for now.

Nat D. Natraj
nat [AT] mobile-worx.com

Referenes:

• iMedia 2006 Summit
• Jupiter Research 2007

BDA Connect Director Kunal Bajaj together with Prof. Tom Kosnik, Stanford University and Mohit Gundecha, Research Associate, Stanford University released an excellent Research Report on the Future of Mobile VAS in India.

ZestADZ was a part of the research and we shared our thoughts on the industry and the directions it is moving in. Download the report from the BDA website

Livemint.com carried a great article about how we at mobile-worx are planning to launch free content services through our content and community portal mklix.com

Read the article here

A great article at Businessweek talks of shrinking click-through rates on online advertising networks. This is another reason why online advertisers need to try mobile advertising as a compelling medium. The article also clearly talks of targeted advertising as serious option to address this issue.

Targeting and relevance is an important feature of ZestADZ which enables advertisers extract the maximum bang for their buck.

ZestADZ helps advertisers to target users based on

• location,
• keywords,
• device profile and
• mobile media (SMS, WAP or J2ME).

If you would like to try mobile advertising – Simply sign up at ZestADZ, pay using any credit card and get started rightway.

The last two months have been very busy @ ZestADZ for a variety of reasons. We’ve been chasing a lot of publishers and advertisers in India and Asia Pac. Many of those publishers are also being chased by both Admob and more recently by Google. Its good to have them in the market – competition is making us work much harder and the entry of both is in a way a recognition that the Indian market is getting ready for prime time in mobile advertising.

We have also been in the process of setting up a partnership in Asia Pac (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) and a sales office in Mumbai, India

I thought it would be great to write about the common misconceptions that we hear in the Indian market and clarify them on this blog, so here it goes.

Myth: There is little or no traffic from the Indian market
Reality: There is more than what most of the mobile ad companies thought there is.
We have acquired an inventory (varying) of around 4+ million impressions a month and growing.
Admob claims to get 350+ million impressions from India (per annum). There is the traffic and potential for much higher traffic, but the real issue is that there are very few mobile sites and services from India that have a lot of traffic. That means all that traffic (from India) is landing up on sites out of India at the moment.
Myth: Publishers can earn for every WAP impression
Reality: While we wish this was possible but is not possible. Though the mobile ad rates in India can be a premium while compared to other markets and sometimes advertisers (knowingly or unknowingly) opt for CPM campaigns, it is not always the case. The advertiser must get real value for every rupee (or a dollar) ; and a CPM campaign is not always the most optimal way of doing that.

Myth: Publishers can recover as much as Rs. 1.00 – 2.00 every SMS message
Reality: We are ZestADZ are trying to monetize (almost) every SMS that comes through our networks. But publishers must realize that in a price sensitive market like India, it is a hard sell to get advertiser to pay Rs 1-2 for every message, especially when bulk SMS spam is very cheap and the laws go easy on both the SMS Spammers and Carriers

Myth: Publishers can run the campaigns themselves, if we pass the ad inventory to them.
Reality: This breaks the fundamental reason why ZestADZ exists. As an online platform, ZestADZ enables serving of contextually, geographically relevant ads within mobile apps and games. If we were to pass the ads to the publishers then the advantages that the advertiser has – the freedom to easily and quickly start campaigns, target a relevant user group, pay online and get real time responses and reports – are lost.

ZestADZ must integrate with every service – WAP, SMS or J2ME applications and games at real-time so that the ads are targeted and delivered at real-time.

Hope this clears the air for now. If you do have more clarifications, please do write to me at asif [at] mobile-worx dot com or comment on this blog

Asif Ali