Look Ahead: A Push in the Right Direction

By: Nu Yang

Founded in 2010 by mobile advertising veterans, Airpush (airpush.com) is on a mission to redefine the digital landscape, and as online news consumption grows, publishers are looking at companies like Airpush to help monetize their ads.

With offices in Los Angeles and India, Airpush has about 200 employees worldwide. In its first 15 months, the company grew to be the second largest ad network for Android.

“We’re not just an ad network,” said vice president of marketing Cameron Peebles. “We’re an ongoing platform that wants to build businesses.”

According to the company, it receives more than 5 billion impressions a month and has more than 120,000 live apps. Airpush offers eight ad formats for advertisers, such as banners, push notifications, icons, videos and rich media. Clients can create and manage mobile ad campaigns across both Android and iOS devices by using a dashboard that provides advertisers with detailed analytics. Airpush also offers HyperTarget, a mobile ad targeting tool that allows advertisers to target opted-in users based on their app download history.

Vice president of publisher solutions Tan Tmangraksat said for publishers to understand advertisers, they need to think like them. To do that, publishers need to study the details of their audience, such as location and demographics.

“With mobile, there is a lot of fragmentation,” he said. “There are many operating systems and devices, and different players in the space.”

The “secret sauce” Tmangraksat said is data.  With Airpush’s data components, Tmangraksat said it enables them to find the needs of the advertisers and leverage that information to increase value. As a result of that targeting, he said the interactivity would “increase the publisher’s revenue and advertising performance.”

When it comes to user experience, Tmangraksat said “Less is more…Don’t put up 100 small ads when you can put up 10 large ads instead. Publishers will see a much higher return rate and it will increase monetization.”

Both Peebles and Tmangraksat predict native advertising will be the next big wave in mobile. Last year, Airpush acquired Hubbl, a New York-based mobile native advertising and personalization technology company. Airpush and Hubbl released a fully integrated native advertising platform to app publishers in January designed to dramatically increase earnings capabilities for developers of iOS and Android mobile apps.

“Native seamlessly integrates with the user experience,” Tmangraksat said. “The native experience increases the stickiness in readers and works with content.”

Tmangraksat said publishers should understand their audience and integrate a monetization solution as soon as possible. In addition to native, Tmangraksat also sees a growth in programmatic buying and real-time bidding.

“Experiment as soon as possible. Work with a partner like Airpush who has the ability to collect data and give back to advertisers,” he said.