Location-Based Marketing Startup Placecast Is Moving Into Mobile Ads (And AdTech) With PlaceAd
Summary
This will put inventory from mobile publishers like BET Networks, Songza, My Fitness Pal, NGMoco, Flixster, MSNBC, Handmark and EA on to PlaceAd. Meanwhile, Placecast’s existing brand advertisers for its marketing business include Starbucks, L’Oreal, Kiehl’s, Pizza Hut, HP, Subway, and SC Johnson, and CEO Alistair Goodman tells us that these would be likely candidates to be initial and early users of the DSP. “There’s been an enormous amt of interest in getting that scale for advertising, too.” While the PlaceAd DSP is a sign of how Placecast is leveraging the data it collects on user behaviour, and extending more products to the customer base it has amassed, it is also a sign of how, for newer players tapping into the growth of mobile advertising, the bigger gains right now may be precisely in adtech. This is a smart move, considering that there is consolidation underway in mobile ad networks — the latest being JumpTap getting acquired by Millennial Media — as companies try to scale to better compete against the likes of Google, which has a a disproportionate lead at the moment. “What we are offering is a single buy for mobile display ad campaigns that use location and geofencing to give them a really strong tool, which will be particularly good for those selling goods and services in the real world.” In addition to linking up with larger ad networks and the audience targeting based on criteria like location, age, gender, device and other factors, PlaceAd will provide a dashboard for publishers and media buyers to track responses to campaigns; enable real-time bidding on a per-impression basis; and provide the ability to use analytics to update ad campaigns down to specific store locations.