In today's Supply-Side Spotlight, we're interviewing Conor Donnelly, VP of Programmatic Business Development at MobileFuse, a platform revolutionizing ad tech by helping brands, agencies, and mobile apps achieve their marketing objectives while unlocking revenue opportunities for publishers in the mobile and CTV space.
1.) Hi Conor, and thanks for taking the time to chat with us today. Let’s begin with a quick summary of your company’s role in the digital advertising space.
MobileFuse is one of the largest in-app advertising and CTV platforms with a focus on brand performance, based on quality and scale of inventory.
We serve leading brands, agencies, bidders, and app developers across a variety of verticals. We drive successful outcomes for our clients by reaching highly curated and receptive audiences via unique solutions combining moments-based targeting, patented location verification, custom creative, and data-driven insights across a large location-based in-app and CTV exchange
2.) With the average US consumer having access to 10 connected devices—across mobile, CTV, and more—how does MobileFuse help partners reach the right audience at the right time?
MobileFuse works very closely with our in-app & CTV publishers to ensure they are passing the most transparent and granular, privacy compliant first-party data that is available.
We are also able to match this first-party data with additional layers like purchase history, retailer specific data, and intended buying patterns to curate the most effective audience segments. Our machine learning algorithm is then able to optimize based on these parameters to provide an audience pool to our buying partners that is most likely to engage at that time.
MobileFuse’s Mindset Targeting™ leverages real-time data, based on day of the week, time of day, weather, events in the area and behavioral patterns to locate an engaged audience and serve the most relevant ad based on those current data points.
3.) Sustainability is rightly a big focal point for the whole digital advertising ecosystem at the moment. How is MobileFuse working to reduce emissions and promote a greener approach to advertising?
MobileFuse takes a lot of pride in being one of the leaders in sustainability in the digital advertising space.
Over the last couple of years we have reduced our carbon footprint dramatically. Some of the strategies we implemented to reduce our emissions included deploying technical optimizations that efficiently scale servers only when needed, and reducing server-side CPU usage. Additionally, we implemented AI software that intelligently predicts when downstream partners will bid on ad opportunities, significantly reducing unnecessary server pings going to demand-side platforms. All of this resulted in a drastic reduction in using data centers, which are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
Our ongoing partnerships with leaders and regulatory bodies in the space will also help to further certify our status and help promote and educate other companies in the space on how to reduce their carbon footprint. I’d like to mention too, that MobileFuse offers home electricity bill incentives to leverage green energy and I now get $10 a month towards my bill—basically a free lunch a month!
4.) Big changes are afoot when it comes to consumer privacy, with initiatives like Apple’s ATT reducing advertisers’ ability to target in the mobile space. How is MobileFuse tackling the addressability challenge for mobile advertising?
First and foremost, MobileFuse is committed to ensuring a user first experience and supporting all privacy legislation or IAB Tech products like Global Privacy Platform (GPP) and was among the first advertising platforms to utilize the GPP.
Working within GPP guidelines and US state-specific privacy signal requirements, MobileFuse has become an early adopter of two of the major alternative ID solutions, Liveramp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS), and The Trade Desk’s UID2.0. Essentially, we are using privacy compliant first-party data from our publishers, aggregated data like age, gender, purchase history to create segments, and contextual targeting to show ads on relevant content. Did I mention we adhere to all privacy standards?
5.) Programmatic advertising and brand safety go hand-in-hand, with brands keen to ensure their ads are placed in the most suitable and appropriate spots. How does MobileFuse approach brand safety in mobile app advertising, and where does SPO fit in?
MobileFuse thinks of brand-safety as a major foundation to everything we do.
Currently we are ranked as the #1 SSP on Pixalate’s Mobile Seller Trust Index for brand safety and scale. We are excited to have that recognition, but that does not come close to telling the whole story around our reduction of fraudulent traffic. MobileFuse works with a variety of third-party brand safety providers to ensure that our solutions are effective. We also have a team of in-house experts who are dedicated to brand safety. MobileFuse uses pre-bid brand safety filters to exclude inventory that is deemed to be high-risk. MobileFuse also conducts post-bid brand safety reviews to ensure that ads are not placed in inappropriate or harmful contexts. We also feel SPO is key to brand safety. We are reducing multiple access solutions to large publishers as many of our app partners have moved over to a single path via the MobileFuse SDK, for the highest level of efficiency.
Finally, we are leveraging the latest AI tools to dynamically optimize our entire exchange to ensure the highly vetted, quality traffic that we send to auction, is the inventory that has the highest likelihood of being transacted on. It's not the most glamorous of work to monitor all of this, but it creates the basis for everything we do.
6.) With in-app advertising such a fast-growth area of our industry, what are some of the future trends your team is excited to explore—and where should media buyers be focusing their attention in the coming weeks, months, and years?
MobileFuse is beyond excited to continue to focus on ways to reduce our emissions, provide the most efficient supply path and inventory into our bidding partners, and increase the success for brands and agencies by curating audiences within the privacy complaint requirements referenced earlier.
We believe the growth of mobile video is one of the fastest-growing segments in the industry as more users are now watching videos on their phone rather than computers and the ads can be more engaging and effective than traditional text-based ads. As the MobileFuse SDK continues its successful adoption rate we will see greater scale and performance on our exclusive Fusion OutStream Video to support this growth. Our team has also embraced the shift in AI capabilities to further enhance our programmatic auction efficiencies with DSPs and SSPs.
Finally, we believe media buyers have an even greater responsibility to support companies in the space that are fighting for inventory transparency and stamping out fraudulent traffic, are stewards of working towards a green and sustainable industry, and support the latest privacy conscious requirements to provide relevant and actionable advertising campaigns.
I hope I wasn’t too wordy—there are a few recurring themes in these answers that you might discern we are pretty passionate about! Thanks for the opportunity to share our thoughts!
And a big 'thank you' from the BidSwitch team to MobileFuse, too—plenty of food for thought! If you'd like to learn more about MobileFuse or connect and begin trading today, you can find them in the BidSwitch UI now.