Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Asher Delug, CEO of Airpush (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell us more about these three patent-pending ad formats and what is special about them.

Asher Delug: Our three patent-pending formats are unique. One is the push notification ad. This is an opt-in, so the user opts in and then starts receiving about 1.5 notification ads a day. The ads are shown in the notification tray of the Android device. Users can also opt out at any time. A huge segment of the market, which is the personalization apps like wallpapers and themes, could not use banner ads. Imagine putting an ad banner in a wallpaper app. Airpush notification ads provided the first opportunity in history for those apps to monetize, and those apps are 40% of the apps on Google Play. Push notification ads really filled that hole in the market and provided a huge opportunity for wallpaper apps, launcher apps, and so on to monetize.

The second ad format is Icon Ads. It basically emulates the practice where you receive a new phone and the device manufacturer has already installed icons on the phone. What Icon Ads does is once the user opts in is that it places a sponsored icon/shortcut on the user’s phone desktop. The user can either click it and install it, or the user can delete the icon with one click. Both of those ad formats are truly native to the mobile experience. They are not just taking desktop formats and shoving them into a mobile device. We are using native features of the device with an opt-in and opt-out, because the apps are new and unique, and it is important to make users aware of them ahead of time, so they are not surprised by seeing these new types of ads.

SM: What segment is adapting the Icon format?

AD: Personalization apps really have a sweet spot with push and icon, because those are the only ways to monetize those apps, unless they want to charge for the app. The third one is our SmartWall format, which is our fastest-growing format right now. SmartWall is a full-page ad shown within an app. When you launch a game and you complete level 1, you see a full-page ad between level 1 and level 2 of that game. That is a very big format in the market that everybody is applying. What is unique in our approach is that SmartWall is an interstitial, which encompasses half a dozen interstitial sub formats and dynamically optimizes between them. That means that there are different interstitial types, for example, video ads, full-page rich media ads, etc.

Prior to SmartWall, developers had to choose between those. The problem with that is that developers may choose a video ad, but say one week another type is performing much better and they are missing out on it because they committed fully to video ads. With SmartWall, the developer doesn’t need to commit to any interstitial format. They put our smart interstitial format in their app and our optimization algorithm determines what the best sub format is for any given ad request based on a) the network connection of the user and b) the yield of the campaign. Today, if there is a very profitable video ad on the market, that will be shown. If tomorrow there is another type of campaign, that will be shown.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Asher Delug, CEO of Airpush
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