Introduction

As users spend more time engaging with media on mobile devices, brands are, not surprisingly, increasing ad spend on mobile platforms. In 2014, almost 20 percent of worldwide digital ad spend is projected to be allocated towards mobile, and this figure is expected to rise to 36 percent globally, and 49 percent in the US by 2017.

Managing ad spend, targeting, and measurement across multiple mobile platforms (including the integration of audience data across mobile, web, and social for maximum cross-channel impact) remains challenging. Advertisers need a sophisticated technology platform that addresses the unique challenges of mobile data collection, media organization, and campaign execution. This technology tool is called a mobile data management platform, or mobileDMP.

This white paper will delve deeper into how a robust mobileDMP can address these challenges and offer a holistic, cross-device view of your consumers for consistent messaging, easy up-selling, and robust analytics to do more of what works.

THE UNIQUE CHALLENGES OF MOBILE ADVERTISING

• Identification of users across multiple devices including desktop, smartphones, and tablets because third-party cookies are not valid or accepted across most mobile channels.
• Fragmentation of mobile environments as users move between mobile web and mobile app.
• Lack of standardized performance or success measurement across environments and devices.
• Confusing new ecosystem of mobile-only players, including mobile ad networks, mobile data exchanges, and mobile analytics.

What is a mobileDMP and Why Do You Need One?

A mobileDMP is a centralized platform that ingests, organizes, and segments an advertiser’s first- and third-party mobile and desktop audience data assets in one place for audience creation, analytics, and execution. Brands use mobileDMPs to:

• Build sophisticated audience segments across first- and third-party data for precision at scale.
• Create, optimize, and activate cross-platform mobile and web campaigns for consistent messaging across all consumer touch points.
• Leverage deep mobile integrations to send audience data to top execution platforms and power targeted mobile in-app, web, and video advertising.
• Connect audience interactions across mobile and desktop touchpoints to provide the most cohesive customer experience anywhere, and track response and actions across various screens and channels.
• Generate robust audience analytics to get deep actionable insights into your mobile audience composition and in-market behaviors.

Mobile data management platforms allow brands to take control of their ever-growing mobile advertising programs. Mobile advertising offers a huge opportunity to capture consumers’ immediate location-based, in-the-moment interests. Customized mobile advertising, when done effectively, delivers extremely high brand engagement and conversion rates.

With a mobileDMP, brands can harness and analyze the massive amount of customer data generated by mobile devices—including intent, geolocation, and purchase behavior—to better target ads across multiple mobile devices and platforms, from in-app ads on smartphones to mobile web ads and tablet-specific campaigns.

The most sophisticated mobileDMPs allow marketers to integrate mobile campaigns with wider digital and offline advertising initiatives to improve cross-channel targeting. For example, a brand could target a consumer on her smartphone after she takes an action on her laptop PC, or target a user on his PC after he visited a retail store (as captured by his mobile device), and then track conversion across devices.

What Main Features Should Your mobileDMP Offer?

Data Ingest

A mobileDMP should allow you to easily ingest first-party mobile audience data into a centralized platform, either to complement the data in your existing data management platform or to use as a standalone solution for mobile marketing. The best mobileDMPs allow you to capture, ingest, and classify mobile users on any mobile device (iOS, Android, Windows) across mobile apps, mobile-optimized sites, and wireless application protocol (WAP) sites.The caveat with Digital Body Language is that it is generally invisible to sales. By the time the average salesperson is aware of the electronic dialogue that has taken place between company and prospect, it is often too late to influence the buying process, scope of engagement, or combat competitive threats.

Data Classification

Once your mobile data is centralized in one location, the mobileDMP should allow you to organize data in hierarchical and intuitive taxonomies. This allows you to reach precise audiences at scale. Mobile data management platforms should also offer deep data classification, as this provides flexibility to build sophisticated and specific campaigns for complex audiences. Make sure your mobileDMP offers advanced audience creation tools that allow you to deduplicate and forecast users across PC and mobile, so you are not hitting the same users twice and wasting your precious media dollars.

Mobile-Specific Audience Data Marketplace

To extend audience reach and prospecting, it is critical that your mobileDMP provides integrated access to third-party mobile consumer data that is specific to mobile. Such data includes mobile actions related to purchase intent with interest-based, past purchase, demographic, and geographic data for prospecting and modeling to drive maximum audience extension.

Data Export and Partner Integrations

In addition to data ingest capabilities, your mobileDMP should offer the ability to transfer data out of the central mobileDMP platform to your mobile partner ecosystem. Some mobileDMPs tied to demand-side platform (DSP) technologies lock your data into the platform by tying your assets to specific media networks. This limits scalability, hampers insights you can garner from your data, and does not allow you to optimize audiences based on media performance. The most advanced mobileDMP solutions allow you to send audience data created with a mix of first- and third-party data to any partner, facilitating deep integrations for mobile retargeting across multiple ad networks, exchanges, and media sites.

Cross-Device Targeting

For an integrated and united marketing strategy, cross-device targeting is a critical feature that every mobileDMP should provide. Cross-device targeting allows brands to unify campaigns across different types of mobile devices (iOS, Android, tablet, smartphone, and so on), as well as tie mobile and web campaigns together for cross-channel measurement and optimization. Unifying campaigns across devices is a core denominator in your customer engagement initiatives.

A comprehensive mobileDMP should have the ability to use a cookieless or statistical ID to ensure that a user’s profile is not fragmented across mobile web, mobile app, and desktop environments. These unique IDs allow advertisers to understand a user’s movement across devices and environments, and can be strengthened and become even more stable depending on the sophistication of the mobileDMP technology.

Mobile Audience Analytics

User-level analytics provide powerful and actionable insights on audience behavior across media properties and devices. All mobileDMPs should offer analytics tools that provide detailed consumer profiles at the attribute level, so you can understand your audience at the conversion and defection levels, as well as gain insights into any other characteristics that move your customers to specific actions on mobile. A true mobileDMP also allows you to push users down the purchase funnel through precisely timed cross-channel targeting, while continually analyzing the contribution of multiple media channels and devices in the attribution mix.

How Can You Benefit From Adding a mobileDMP to Your Current Marketing Stack?

The right mobileDMP allows you to:

• Support all mobile devices, including collecting data in both cookie-based and cookieless environments.
• Manage and normalize all first- and third-party data across devices in a centralized platform to create a unified view of your audience.
• Create precise and compelling audience segments with all of your audience data.
• Activate audience segments across the entire digital ecosystem to target your audience with consistent messages across mobile, web, in-app, and desktops.
• Leverage in depth audience analytics to increase the effectiveness of mobile display campaigns and drive adoption and downloads of your mobile applications.

Drilling Down: Specific mobileDMP Use Cases

Mobile Marketing Use Cases:

• Retarget users visiting your mobile properties or downloading your mobile apps with mobile and desktop advertising.
• Leverage third-party data to prospect new consumers to engage with your brand across any mobile device.
• Drive adoption and downloads of your mobile applications.
• Leverage first- and third-party data to create customized user experiences across devices.
• Better understand the profile of mobile converters to continually optimize for higher ROI.
• Understand what TV shows your consumers are watching to inform TV ad buys based on consumer viewing behavior.
• Build heat maps of physical locations your target audience visits to optimize campaigns on all marketing channels, including web, mobile, outdoor, direct mail, TV, and radio.

Implementing a mobileDMP

There are three phases involved in implementing a mobileDMP.

1. Discovery Phase

During discovery meetings business objectives will be confirmed and the priority use cases will be reviewed. From there, a plan will be created to determine a high-level tagging strategy and identify any roadblocks and corresponding mitigation plan. 

2. ​Execution Phase

In this next phase, more details are determined for data collection on m.com, .com, and mobile apps. A mock taxonomy is then created and presented for review, and approved. Once finalized, the tags are deployed and raw data is ingested and classified in the taxonomy.

3. Rollout Phase

User permissions and account logins are then created. Platform training, including best practices, are conducted. Once completed, first-party campaigns are run, then third-party campaigns.

Case Study: Telecom Carrier Leverages InMobi’s Third-Party Audience Segments from Oracle Marketing Cloud.

• Objective: Brand awareness
• Target: Consumers considering purchasing a smartphone subscription plan
• Solution: Targeted user in the market for smartphone subscription plans and look-alike audience segments

With a clear focus to engage prospective customers while adhering to pricing benchmarks, InMobi’s integration with Oracle Marketing Cloud enabled this leading US telecom carrier to target multiple audience segments, at scale:

• Consumers considering cell phones and plans
• Consumers considering mobile accessories
• Consumers considering mobile devices
• Consumers wanting movies and videos on mobile devices
• Consumers wanting prepaid plans
• Consumers considering smartphone purchases
• Top tier spenders at cellular retailers

The Challenge

Identify and engage North American customers currently in the market for smartphones and new subscription plans.

The Solution

InMobi identified and engaged prospective customers by:

• Leveraging Oracle Marketing Cloud’s behavioral smartphone and plan purchase intenders.
• Using innovative formats that enhanced the ad experience across both smartphones and tablets.
• Optimizing ad delivery to maximize engagements using InMobi’s analytics platform.

The Creative

The creative highlighted either phone offers or unlimited plans available if the consumer switched to the carrier.

The Results

The brand awareness campaign delivered over 83 percent click through rate (CTR) lift (compared with the run-on-network control group) by leveraging Oracle Marketing Cloud’s audience segments. The campaign also met or exceeded the carrier’s target key performance indicators (KPIs).

Your mobileDMP Checklist

The right mobileDMP offers untold advantages to brands looking to improve customer acquisition and brand reach across multiple mobile devices. Here is a quick checklist of questions to ask a mobileDMP provider:

• Can you capture and analyze intent, geolocation, and purchase behavior across multiple types of devices and mobile operating systems?
• Do you support advanced and cross-channel targeting? Specifically, can your platform enable targeting of users on their smartphones for actions they performed on their PCs, or target users on PCs after they physically walk into retail stores with their smartphones?
• Can you track conversions across devices and measure the impact of audiences, ad frequency, creative, and other campaign features on conversion across channels?
• Can you manage and track campaigns across channels—mobile web, mobile apps, web, and in-store?
• Can you link mobile payment information with user actions to get closed loop feedback?
• Does your technology use a well-rounded approach to mobile user data collection that addresses both cookie-based and cookieless environments?

Conclusion

The mobile era is upon us. Brands that do not leverage the most sophisticated mobile advertising solutions will fall behind in the race to capture consumers’ increasingly divided attention. True mobile advertising promises to allow brands direct access to their consumers by targeting the individual across any device, from smartphones to PCs, tablets, IP-enabled devices, game consoles, and beyond.

But mobile marketing also comes with a host of challenges—namely, collecting and deriving insights from the massive amounts of consumer data generated each day on various forms of mobile devices. Marketers need a sophisticated mobileDMP platform to analyze geolocation, purchase, and intent data from millions of mobile consumers, and combine findings with data from digital and offline advertising to dramatically improve the impact of cross-channel campaigns.

With the right mobileDMP mobile advertising becomes the cornerstone of a brand’s overall Modern Marketing program, reaching more in-market, intent-driven consumers with the right messages at the exact right time in the purchase process. But marketers must act fast to adopt sophisticated mobileDMP tools. Without an advanced mobileDMP, brands run the risk of doing mobile advertising in a vacuum—missing out on the cross-channel, cross-device synergies that will help the most nimble brands capture more market share in the years to come.