​Reinventing Mobile Programmatic

Desktop advertising has come a long way from the first banner Ad in Oct 1994. As display advertising evolved and matured, there eventually arose the need to move away from segment-based buys to very-fine grained individual buys. Programmatic buying empowered marketers to achieve the efficiency desired, growing disproportionately with the rise of display advertising.

Interesting as it seems, mobile advertising adapted itself to the ways of the display advertising world. Consequently, early mobile users experienced banner ads retro-fitted to suit mobile devices. While the focus stayed on capitalizing from the App economy and monetizing users, the user herself was completely ignored, and solving for the problem of ad experience on mobile remained unexplored.

Banner Ads continued to grow for a while, and then it all started to fall apart. In fact it got to a stage that the term ‘ Banner Blindness’ was coined.

Given its ramifications, the advertising industry turned towards fixing the banner ad problem innovatively. Among the multiple innovations publicized, the one that really caught the attention of the advertising community was the Native Ad format.

Unlike programmatic on desktop, which evolved after desktop matured, mobile programmatic grew rapidly right from the onset of mobile advertising. Unfortunately, mobile programmatic is built on a fallacy: banners that worked in display, will work in mobile. Mobile programmatic, like Mobile advertising had never been defined keeping the user in mind.

Today, we are proud to announce the launch of the InMobi Exchange.

With native we redefined mobile advertising keeping the user at the center. With mobile programmatic, we are pushing the envelope even further by bringing automation to native media buying. It now sets the stage for innovation on mobile programmatic given the constructs of how native advertising functions within the case of small-screen devices.