Why mobile ad verification is essential

By Kirby Winfield

As the fastest-growing marketing medium, U.S. spending on mobile advertising increased 79 percent over the last year and promises to surpass $1 billion by the end of 2011, according to IDC Research.

Mobile advertising is among the riskiest and least transparent forms of advertising available today. But it is also one of the most effective and deserving of technology to increase safety and ensure the quality of the media buy for advertisers.

Adds up?

In many cases, mobile marketers are still purchasing blind buys and experiencing impressions discrepancies of up to 50 percent or more, making the need for verification necessary.

Verification provides transparency and safety, and allows data to be easily aggregated across multiple ad servers and platforms.

Mobile marketers can proactively manage campaigns more effectively and ensure that the target audience is being reached through placement, demographic and category data.

Verification not only makes mobile ad buying easier, but also provides performance data that can be used to maximize mobile ROI.

Mobile advertising allows marketers to target audiences via devices and operating systems which provides greater granularity in audience buys.

Also, mobile advertising helps marketers can gain information by device type –iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows – and obtain in-view and placement metrics at the benefit of marketers who use the data to reach their desired audience.

Publishers who use the same data achieve the same type of transparency to optimize their mobile inventory offering.

Here are five things every marketer should know about mobile ad verification:

1) Mobile ad verification protects mobile buys from undesirable content

2) Mobile ad verification provides transparency needed to increase advertiser confidence

3) Mobile ad verification can be implemented quick and easily

4) Mobile ad verification provides campaign data aggregation across multiple ad servers and platforms to provide a full campaign summary

5) Mobile ad verification metrics can be used to increase performance of mobile ad buys

However, there still remains a small group of skeptics which continues to question the credibility and value of verification.

Here are five misconceptions of ad verification:

1) Verification is all about make-goods: Not all verification is created. Verification is about proactive campaign monitoring and catching mistakes, thus avoiding post-campaign make-goods

2) Verification is difficult or costly to implement: Not true. Most verification solutions offer multiple implementation solutions, including ad server integration and universal append tags that make for one-click verification

3) Verification is only about brand safety: Not true. Verification is about ensuring that a message is reaching its target audience, whether that means in-placement, geographic, demographic, category, keyword or cookie targeting

4) Verification is only for long-tail advertising: Not true. Premium buys benefit from ad verification targeting abilities as well as performance metrics such as ad engagement which can be used to increase campaign performance

5) Verification interferes with campaign delivery: Not true. Most ad verification solutions fire events associated with an ad, but do not interfere with the ad itself nor do they use a server-side redirect

MOBILE DISPLAY advertising is rapidly gaining the attention of Madison Avenue and has increasingly found its way into the marketing mix of advertisers and agencies.

Marketers can expect investment in technology to increase exponentially as well.

As a result, mobile verification will become a fixture and must-buy for marketers looking to maintain mobile safety and sustain premium CPMs.

At its core, verification strives to make advertising a safe and efficient marketplace for both buyers and sellers regardless of whether the ad is served on a computer or mobile screen.

Kirby Winfield is CEO of AdXpose, Seattle. Reach him at kirby.winfield@adxpose.com.