Performance-based marketing ideal for direct response mobile ads

September 7, 2010

Mark Roth is CEO of OfferMobi

OfferMobi, a performance marketing ad network for mobile advertising campaigns, has increased its advertiser click volume 180 percent since the company launched in April.

As the company continues to move forward, it aims to expand and enhance its media platform for publishers and advertisers. Mobile Marketer’s Kaitlyn Bonneville interviewed Mark Roth, CEO of OfferMobi, New York.

Here is what he had to say:

What is the premise of OfferMobi?
The premise of OfferMobi is to provide a way for advertisers to pay only for performance, instead of paying for just clicks or impressions that they might do on a more traditional mobile ad network.

With OfferMobi they are only paying for specific actions that are taken on a mobile device.

For example an action can be a lead form completed or it can be a registration, sign up for a service (premium SMS for example) or it can even be a sale.

It’s totally focused on ROI and we enable our advertisers to track what they are doing and only pay for the actions that they want taken.

Why the need for a performance marketing mobile ad network?
Well, mobile is another medium that advertisers could use and it’s likely to follow along similar progressions that other mediums have followed.

The start of it traditionally has been branding and getting the message out, but then as things evolved depending on the cause of the advertiser, they might need to track more specifically and spend their dollars where they know they are getting the ROI back.

There’s a need for certain advertisers to be able to track the ROI and spend their advertising dollars where they see the return. Mobile is likely to follow a similar progression

What does performance marketing look like on mobile?
It looks much the same as it does on the Web as far as what the advertisers are trying to accomplish.
The main differences have to do with making sure that the offer and landing page fit properly within the context of a mobile screen.

Whereas an offer on a computer may require a significant amount of information from the user, mobile offers require much less information usually keeping it down to two or three fields or some type of simple sign up process.

Which sites, advertisers and publishers comprise your network?
We have a lot of different publishers and advertisers on our network.

Starting with advertisers, we are working with a lot of lead generation companies for example where we aggregate leads for different verticals.

Education is one of the larger verticals such as colleges, traditional dating Web sites that are using mobile devices on the front end to drive more customers and other dating sites that are totally mobile specific that view all their business and allow all their searched between mobile to mobile devices.

We are also working with some of the major brands in the pay-per-call area such as Service Magic, Allstate and in lead generation space looking for leads in insurance and debt consolidation.

On the publisher side, we have a large amount of publishers that are affiliates from the online world that are looking to expand their business into mobile.

So they have experience driving traffic on the Web and they recognize the opportunity that mobile brings, so there are a lot of players coming in from the online side.

Many of them are doing arbitrage buying traffic from mobile ad networks on a CPC or CPM basis.

We also work with sites directly such as some of the large social networking site which have proven to be some of our best traffic sources.

How does OfferMobi work for advertisers?
Advertisers are anxious to get into the mobile space, so there’s a wide range of readiness among the advertisers. Depending on their readiness, we will work accordingly.

If they already have sites and creative ads designed for mobile then we can get them up and running more quickly. 

If they only have been so far working online, then we can work with them to create the offers themselves, the landing pages, whatever is required.

We’ll work with their staff whenever they have the resources to do it or we will use our in-house team to develop the sites and creative ads for them and then we will either post it and post the info back to them, or in certain cases the advertisers like to host it and we provide the code and sites through the advertiser so they can host it.

We’re very flexible as far working the way we need to with each individual advertiser.

So, what's the problem with the traditional CPC and CPM underpinnings of most mobile ad networks?

Inherently, I wouldn’t say that it’s a problem. It’s just that the method may not fit the goals of the advertiser. In certain cases it will. 

When they are interested strictly in branding and they want to get their name out into the marketplace via mobile, CPC or CPM may work for them fine but as ROI becomes more important and direct-response advertisers come into play, then that model is not going to work as well so they might need an alternative in the CPA realm.

It’s really a matter of applying the right model to fit the goals of the advertiser.

In certain cases when the advertiser needs to tie things back to specific campaigns to see which advertising dollars are working, then the CPA model comes into play.

Are advertisers on board with this?
Absolutely. I think the growth that we’ve seen from all sides speaks to the fact that they are on board and they are continuing to come on board each day.

For example, we’ve seen our own network grow to more than 6,000 mobile publishers since our launch just earlier this year, and I think this speaks to the power of our performance model.

We’re at the stage where it’s not “will we be in mobile” or “when” but more so “how” and what we need to do right now.

We are seeing, across the board, that advertisers know they need to be present in mobile.