Weve primes move into display advertising

Weve the joint venture company between  mobile operators EE, O2 and Vodafone is sounding out potential partners to launch an automated display advertising service it hopes will improve the often complicated process of booking mobile campaigns.  

Weve

The joint venture company aims to launch an automated trading service, known as a demand side platform (DSP), that will let advertisers more intelligently target its current base of 17 million mobile users with display ads in real-time. 

Weve claims the service, due to launch in beta by the end of this year, is designed to ease the process of both booking campaigns, as well as analysing the campaign analytics, as it will provide advertisers with a single point to book campaigns targeting users on its network. 

A Weve spokeswoman confirmed the plans with Marketing Week, adding that it was in discussion with a number of partners to launch the service with. Marketing Week understands Weve is in discussions with mobile advertising firm Adfonic about using its Madison DSP. An Adfonic spokesperson declined to comment on record when approached for comment by Marketing Week. 

James Connelly, managing director of mobile specialist agency Fetch, says: “Media buying is moving to a data-led model. Facebook works well because it has a lot of data on its users and this [the proposed DSP from Weve] looks like it could work just as well.” 

“If we can use this [when booking client campaigns] to identify mobile users’ behaviour and then serve them with a more relevant ad, then we’re like to be able to book bigger campaigns.”

Meanwhile, each of the three Weve stakeholders are also working towards unifying how they allocate the IP addresses of their users – formerly this had been done differently. This process will help advertisers more accurately measure the performance of their campaigns by reducing the discrepancies in the separate campaign analytics produced by media owners and buyers, which often differ.  

In particular, Weve is understood to be working on an alternative to advertisers having to rely on cookies – which are not as accurate on mobile devices as they are on desktop – for campaign analytics. This is something the joint venture company believes would be a ‘USP’ for its display advertising proposition.    

Milton Elias, head of mobile at OMD, says the market lacks a simplified process of viewing consolidated campaign analytics at present, with advertisers often less willing to book mobile campaigns as a result. 

“There’s not a robust amout of choice [of campaign analytics] at present, clients need to see a comparison of the number of ads requested and the number of ads served to judge the return on investment of a campaign,” he adds. 

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