Capturing Intent In Non-Search Performance Marketing: Zephrin Lasker, CEO Of Pontiflex (Part 6)

Sramana: Where are you finding the best traction in mobile advertising?

Zephrin Lasker: Our product is called AppLeads. It is one of the only pure in-application advertising solutions available. When you interact with the advertisement, you never have to leave the application. Most other mobile applications will launch a mobile browser and take the user away from the mobile application.

With our application, a user just fills out their registration information one time. After that, when they receive an advertisement via our mobile platform, they will just tap to opt into the advertisement and they immediately are back in the app. They can then deal with the advertising information later. Game applications were big in the early days, but today we are finding more and more traction from utility apps. Those are apps that range from finding a name for your baby to turning off your 3G connection to save your battery life.

The mobile space reminds me of 1999 on the Web. It is fast, dynamic, and a really fun place to be. In many ways, the Web has become less dynamic today. It is interesting to see the cycle and the dynamics that are emerging.

Sramana: If you were to itemize your top publishers in the mobile space, who would they be?

Zephrin Lasker: We are in confidential discussions with 10 of the largest application providers. We do work with PowerSaver, FreeAntiVirus, and a few other companies. In terms of games, we are in Medieval Lite. We also have a number of different ringtone-maker applications. We are in over 1,000 applications today. There is so much shift in that space that it is hard to pinpoint one publisher as the most dominant.

Sramana: If I were going to put an application on your site to monetize a game application, and I have 200,000 users who have installed that game, how would the money flow?

Zephrin Lasker: We have a lot of application developers come to us. We look not only at the volume that the application developer has, but also at the opt-in rate they can provide on our ads. Games may have a very low opt-in rate because people are very into the game and don’t want to be bothered. With medium-sized apps our goal is to get them to a thousand dollars a day in relative short order. Our top 30 application developers all make $10,000 or more a month. That is mind-boggling to most of them because they are used to getting very small checks.

We just did a study with Tesh Interactive that found that half of mobile application advertising clicks are accidental. Users are actually trying to do something with their application and inadvertently hit the advertisement. That is why Google has taken steps to create a two-step click process to remove those accidental clicks. We have been revolutionary for the market because we are opt-in only. That is so much more valuable than just a click. That is why we can get rates up to $100 for a click.

Sramana: How does it work for non-mobile publishers?

Zephrin Lasker: Non-mobile publishers have lower CPMs. They can be anywhere from $10 to $40.

Sramana: Are you pitching to people who are using advertising networks to move to your network?

Zephrin Lasker: Yes, absolutely. What is nice about it is that they do not have to give up their advertising network because the inventory that we created is green space that nobody was monetizing before. They can still run their normal advertising networks and just use us to create a entirely new strategy.

I hate going into an existing market and competing for existing demand. It is a pain. You are always fighting with somebody, and there is no room to innovate when you are competing on price. We just want to create an entirely new category that we can own, develop, and innovate. The gross margins of the business were 20% when we started and are up to 60% now.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Capturing Intent In Non-Search Performance Marketing: Zephrin Lasker, CEO Of Pontiflex
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