Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Gil Dudkiewicz, CEO of StartApp (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What other trends besides the call to action becoming more precise and location becoming a wider spread phenomenon do you see?

Gil Dudkiewicz: One of the trends we are seeing in mobile is unique new ad units that didn’t exist before on the PC.

SM: I recently edited a story on Facebook’s earnings. The volume of mobile advertising as an industry has really gone through the roof between 2011 and 2013. Obviously, there is a huge percentage of digital advertising that is going to mobile right now.

GD: That is also the point. If you look at it, there was a huge pickup in the last few years. There was almost no industry of mobile advertisement a few years ago. In a way, it is a totally new industry with the volume we have today.

SM: What about effectiveness of mobile advertising? Can you talk about how effective mobile advertising is?

GD: There are lots of things we do today with mobile – anywhere between pay-per-call for ordering a pizza or going to a movie, shop online, etc. I have been in advertising for many years on the PC. The first thing that changed was the amount of hours people spend for shopping, for example. You see people searching for things at different hours and more on weekends. It is also very different on holidays. This is something we didn’t see on the PC.

SM: Is that because people are more on the mobile? How much of it is because an ad, when it comes up on the mobile screen, it covers it completely?

GD: It is probably a bit of both. Most advertisements are not covering the entire mobile screen. I think it is because people are with their mobile phones much more.

SM: I tend to pay more attention to the ones that do cover the entire screen. The little banners that float on the bottom, I tend to pay less attention to. I wonder what percentage of mobile ads do cover the entire screen.

GD: I don’t have the data on it. But I can tell you that the click-through rate on mobile is not less than on the PC. In both of them, the quality of the ad actually counts. A lot of what we are doing is in the search, and that definitely picks up unbelievable numbers.

SM: What about in game advertising? How much of your portfolio is in game advertising?

GD: We have a lot of games we work with, but we are trying not to do anything that is interfering with the user experience in the game. What we have in game, for example, are exit ads. When you are leaving the game, you can get a full-sized ad. But we are trying not to put banners on top of the screen while people are playing. This has to do with the syndrome of people clicking on banners by mistake.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Gil Dudkiewicz, CEO of StartApp
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