PlacePlay helps iOS & Android app developers increase their revenue with targeted, in app, advertising solutions. To learn more about PlacePlay, please visit http://www.placeplay.com
My name is Ryan Morel and I am the CEO of PlacePlay headquartered in Seattle… PlacePlay is a really simple business - we help iOS & Android app developers make more $$ with targeted mobile advertising. Before we talk about PlacePlay I want to spend a little bit of time on the market – you guys probably already know all of this – but it’s worth repeating.
As we all know – the smartphone market has exploded. There are around 1 Billion active smart phone subscriptions and about 200 million more are being activated every quarter. Lots of people. The most amazing part is this isn’t just in the US or Europe – this explosion is happening everywhere – places like Brazil, India, China are experiencing triple digit growth in consumers who have access to smart phones with high speed data connections. Let’s talk a little bit about what’s unique about smart phones vs. other gadgets we have today.
First they are always with us and they are always on. Most of you are probably playing LetterPress right now in fact – my user name is “ ryanmorel ” feel free to add me on GameCenter…. Your mobile devices keep you connected to the things and people we are interested & passionate about 24X7 at all times in ways that our laptops or PC’s never have.
Second, our phones know where we are, when we are there, and what’s around us. I bought a lighting cable from the Apple Store app when iPhone 5 came out – and I had to drive to Alderwood to get it. When I got to Alderwood and got out of my car – I got a push notification from the app asking if I was there to pick up my cable and if so, they’d have it ready for me when I walked in to the store. If you can get past the freaky part of that – that’s a fantastically amazing consumer experience – that was totally impossible just a couple years ago….
Lastly, unlike with feature phones, or even laptops/PC’s, we use smart phones to work, communicate with friends & family – and play. And we use apps built by 3 rd parties and made available on App Stores to do most of these things…. We use Apps a LOT.
The average smart phone users spends 77 minutes every day w/ apps. 77 minutes playing angry birds, looking up recipes, communicating with friends, building presentations – whatever it is. The most amazing part is this is growing by about 20%/year… As devices get more powerful, we’re seeing more and more companies push their mobile web users to an app experience vs. the mobile web…It’s amazing…. Despite the massive # of smart phone users, the data we get from them and the huge amount of time we all spend with apps….
Somewhere around $1B/year is spent to engage all those users who spend 77 minutes/day in apps….That’s less than what EA reportedly paid for Popcap. To put that in to comparison
People spend about 4X as much time watching TV as they do using their smartphones, although this is coming down….But about 50X is spent on TV advertising vs. Mobile.
People actually spend more time using their mobile apps than they do reading newspapers or magazines. But 30X is spent on print advertising vs. mobile.
Again, somewhere around $1B on mobile…..
There are lots of opinions on why mobile advertising is still small. It’s new, people don’t get it, they are comfortable spending billions on 1 way advertising like TV & print…. All of those opinions are just excuses for the reality that mobile advertising just sucks. Instead of using what’s unique and awesome about mobile, we just took crappy web display advertising and just made it smaller, or crappier….
When we started thinking about PlacePlay Advertising and about how we were entering a market dominated by platform owners like Apple & Google – we decided the best way was to just do less.
Instead of focusing on trying to fill the billions of ad requests out there – we were going to try to take the information that is provided to us in every app session like Location, Time of Day, the session time of the user, their actual behavior in apps to serve the right ad, at the right time.
So. Taking all of the data that we have available to us, instead of serving an ad that a user has no chance of engaging with – we can serve them an ad that they might actually be interested in….Location + time of day are huge here. Why serve an app ad to someone at 6pm when they are out and about, when we can serve an ad for a deal for dinner, or drinks, that’s right around them? If we don’t have the right ad, we can just not respond…..
Consumers like it because we deliver advertising that is relevant to them. We ’ve had developers call us to tell us that their users have told them that they actually like our ads. Advertisers like it because they aren’t paying for wasted impressions, but instead paying for impressions that actually lead to consumer action…
Most importantly, for us, developers love it because we pay more. On average, we’re paying 2-5X what other ad networks pay…Sometimes more…. Developers who use our SDK are receiving bigger checks from us than they are getting from iAd or Admob.
To wrap this up, we believe that we can help accelerate the growth of mobile advertising by delivering the right ad, to the right person, at the right place & time to provide everyone in the value chain a better experience….