Flurry is launching an exchange dubbed Flurry Marketplace for its mobile advertising platform so that the right advertisers can be matched with the right content publishers. The advertisers can offer bids to buy ads in real-time and target the exact audience they want to reach.
San Francisco-based Flurry makes analytics software that monitors consumer behavior on 1 billion smartphones and tablets each month. It captures over 1.3 trillion actions that those consumers perform in those apps each month, so it has a treasure trove of data that is useful to advertisers. With the new Flurry Marketplace, the company has created an exchange where advertisers and content publishers can team up to target ads at intended audiences in an automated, programmatic fashion.
The bidding takes place in real-time with pre-bundled data from more than 300,000 apps. Advertisers known as demand-side platforms (DSPs) and Agency Trading Desks (ATDs) can now reach audiences in a targeted and automated way through real-time auctions.
“Despite big data advances, app publishers continue to sell inventory undervalued and blind because programmatic buyers don’t yet have a platform that overcomes publisher fragmentation and provides quality audience data in order to improve buying decisions,” said Simon Khalaf, Flurry chief executive, in a statement. “Flurry Marketplace aggregates and enriches advertising inventory from thousands of applications with relevant, granular audience data that empowers DSPs, ATDs, and networks to buy efficiently.”
Market research IDC predicts that real-time bidding (RTB) ad spending will top $13 billion by 2016. With such marketplaces, ad buyers can set bids on the ad impressions, or how much they will pay for their ads to be shown to audiences that meet certain thresholds, such as 18-to-34-year-old females who enjoy role-playing games. The dynamic market determines the best price for the transaction in order to maximize the return on investment for both the advertiser and publisher. Publishers can set a floor price to protect the value of their inventory from racing to the bottom.
With Flurry Marketplace, advertisers can get more granular detail such as gender, device, geography, application category, application, and Flurry Personas (or profiles of users who behave in certain ways). Flurry will give advertisers access to more than 300 million monthly unique users and allow them to bid on billions of ad requests per month. The technology is compliant with an industry standard known as OpenRTB. Flurry Marketplace is part of Flurry’s AppSpot data-powered supply-side ad platform.
“Flurry is on a mission to significantly improve and simplify app advertising,” said Rahul Bafna, head of product management for Flurry advertising solutions. “In the long-run, we believe that delivering big-data powered solutions such as Flurry Marketplace is the only way to ensure a win-win-win among advertisers, publishers, and consumers.”
Flurry says that, compared to other mobile RTB Exchanges (and online ones for that matter), Flurry Marketplace offers high-value audience data bundled into the service. The company says this is a significant differentiator because advertisers have more knowledge about the inventory they’re bidding on (i.e., the audience they will reach). The right advertiser will bid more for the right audience.