Original post : http://blog.adfonic.com/?p=237
As I’m writing this, Steve Jobs has just announced that henceforth the operating system formerly known as “iPhone OS” will be known by the much simpler and device agnostic name “iOS”.
Whatever you want to call it, Apple’s mobile devices have already left an impressive footprint in the United Kingdom, and this seemed like an appropriate time to share some insights into the UK audience reachable through Adfonic’s performance network.
Adfonic served ads in hundreds of apps available through the UK App Store in the month of May, and we’ve been crunching the numbers. While apps don’t account for all of our iPhone (and iPod Touch… and iPad) traffic, they are a significant chunk, so these stats can be taken as a conservative lower bound estimate of total audience size for these key devices.
In May 2010, Adfonic reached more than 800,000 unique iPhone users, and over 500,000 unique iPod Touch owners. We also have a rapidly growing audience of more than 100,000 Android device users.
To put this in perspective for advertisers, it’s useful to make a few educated guesses. First, let’s use what we know about iPhone and iPod Touch user demographics, an area that has been the focus of research lately. iPhone usage is concentrated in the 18-54 age range; we also know that iPod Touch skews younger than iPhone. iPhone users tend to be more affluent, working professionals — ABC1 in marketing parlance.
With this in mind, there are some interesting comparisons to be made with traditional media:
– Publishing: Nielsen estimates the “Young Professionals” demographic at 14,000,000 in the UK. If 45% of our UK Apple and Android users are aged 15 to 34 years old, this gives the Adfonic network a 4.4% penetration rate into this crucial segment. An audience size of 630,000 is roughly equivalent to the readership base of Heat magazine.
– Outdoor: The London Underground has one of the most sophisticated display advertising systems in the world. For a campaign that covers 100 advertising sites, you can expect to reach about 1.4M unique customers, the same as the UK population on Apple and Android apps reachable through Adfonic.
– TV: I wasn’t one of the fanatical followers that got up at 5 am to watch the Lost finale on Sky 1 last month, but I know plenty who did — and plenty more that recorded it to watch later. In total, about 1.12M people viewed this episode, according to the Guardian. In the UK, Adfonic app users outnumbered them by about 30%.
We’re also getting to know where our UK users are. There’s a misconception that iPhone users are concentrated in London, and while there’s certainly a major London audience, check out this click distribution map from a recent iPhone app campaign on our network:
As you can see, the iPhone is an urban device - London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh are the top cities, and the general pattern of usage closely mirrors the population centres of the UK.
When analysing this campaign we also saw that clicks skewed to evening and weekend usage over WiFi in urban areas — in other words, people at home, in a relaxed mood, using casual apps or browsing the web from their mobile phone.
So it’s an exciting time to start looking at the mobile advertising channel as more than just devices and technology; it is rapidly emerging as an audience in its own right, and it is the iOS devices leading the charge in the UK.
(rebloged from http://blog.adfonic.com/?p=208)
This month, we launched our open and transparent Premium Network giving advertiser’s greater efficiency over the way they buy mobile media, while giving publishers greater control over their mobile inventory.
When commentators in the mobile advertising space talk about the factors stifling growth, they often cite the following reasons; the economic meltdown, mobile percentage of ad budgets, web browsers, quality mobile inventory, acceptance by consumers, and the list goes on. We think that the biggest barriers are visibility and access to high quality mobile inventory.
Comparing how ads are bought today through other mobile ads networks, Adfonic’s advertisers will be able choose exactly what mobile sites and apps their ads will run on. Moreover, advertisers will be able to browse publisher media buying profiles on the website and have full visibility on the minimum prices that have been set by the publisher. This change enables advertisers to close the optimisation loop by diverting spend to the sites and apps that are driving the numbers and delivering the results clients want.
On the publisher side, publishers will be able to control and optimise their minimum floor price by gauging how much advertisers are willing to pay for their inventory. Furthermore, they will also be able to control what ads are displayed via the Ad Management interface and specify categories for exclusion.
On other mobile ad networks today, media buyers probably don’t know what mobile sites or apps their ads are going to land on, they cannot report this information back to their clients and they certainly cannot fully optimise camapigns becuase they just don’t know what sites or apps are delivering the results.
In other forms of digital advertising, like online, there’s an implicit expectation that total transparency is already built into platforms and advertisers navigate their way around choosing the best publishers that best fit their media buying requirements. Contrast all this to the well established world of offline advertising and a media buyer would never purchase any time or ad space unless they knew exactly where their ad was going to be shown.
The mobile advertising space has to start shifting towards a more open and transparent business model, aligning itself with some of the norms that have already been established in digital advertising. This is something that is not only stalling the growth potential of mobile advertising but causing advertisers to waste ad budgets unnecessarily and give publishers a bad user experience by not better matching campaigns with publications.
Adfonic will be the first mobile ad network to deliver visibility into process of buying mobile media, we will see what impact this has on the rest of the market over time … watch this space.
Adfonic, la société pour laquelle je suis en charge du Business Development, annonce qu’elle vient de lever 600.000$ auprès de Gordon Shields.
Cette somme sera consacrée à soutenir l’effort de développement de la plateforme et à faire grossir l’équipe.
Le press release complet est sur http://adfonic.com/pr/200907-launch_fr.jsf
Adfonic, première plateforme publicitaire mobile self-service d’Europe. Fondée en octobre 2008 par trois vétérans de l’industrie mobile est basée à Londres et opère également depuis ses bureaux en France, Espagne et USA. Adfonic propose aux annonceurs de cibler finement leur audience et aux éditeurs d’applications et sites mobiles de maximiser leurs revenus à l’aide d’outils de ciblage avancés au sein d’une interface intuitive. Le service est accessible sur http://adfonic.com ou sur le blog: http://blog.adfonic.com.
