Is This the Age of AI in Mobile Advertising?

Desktop advertising revenues are dropping due to ad blockers. According to eMarketer, publishers are scrambling to overcome the major loss of profits. As consumer browsing shifts to mobile phones, mobile advertising technology is ramping up at significant rates. Mobile advertising startups are now utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically make optimizations to mobile campaigns, a complex job currently filled by analysts at large programmatic trading desks.

Spotad, an AI app developer, also uses machine learning in combination with historical client marketing data to inform the startup’s real-time demand-side platform (DSP), which is used to place bids and buy ad space. Popular DSPs everyone knows about include Google’s DoubleClick, Facebook’s Ad Manager, and Amazon’s Advertising Platform. With a custom-built DSP from Spotad, mobile app developers around the world can finally earn what they deserve from app views and interactions.

Desktop and mobile are two huge chunks of programmatic ad buying. But video is quickly taking over as a huge contender for top revenue stream, with the entire web heading toward video adoption. HTML is adapting to video embedding, and you see a lot of website video headers these days as a result. Spotad’s platform promises to automatically optimize video ad buying and campaign optimization too. This includes increasing brand awareness through new channels, reaching new audiences, and optimizing video completion rates by honing down on geo-locations and time of day, among about 20 more optimization levers.

“We see the value in turning branded video advertising into a measurable component that fits well into our machine learning methodology. Our video ads’ ease of use, combined with our robust data, AI infrastructure, and vast traffic reach, offers a disruptive solution that the market has yet to experience,” says Tomer Horev, Spotad’s CSO and co-founder.

Bidalgo, another startup using AI for its programmatic advertising platform, is also an official marketing partner of Facebook, Instagram, Google, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Bidalgo’s AI automates and optimizes the ad-buying process from start to finish, from automatically creating new ads, setting the budget and rate for each ad, and optimizing the campaigns when they’re bringing in enough data. The company delivered more than 25 million installs in the past year, and it generated more than $1 billion in revenue for app developers.

“Using Bidalgo’s AI solutions has allowed us to not only scale to millions of users with incredible return on ad spend but also understand what type of additional game content to produce and who our target audience is on a deeper level,” says Filippo De Rose, head of marketing and ad monetization at Pixelberry Studios, a San Francisco-based app developer. “Bidalgo was one of our key partners in breaking into the top 20 grossing apps.”

Until recently, mobile advertising was largely impersonal; users saw ads that they were highly unlikely to engage with. But with automated mobile DSPs from startups like Spotad and Bidalgo, app developers get their share of the revenue pie, and the consumer also wins with more personalized ad experiences.