Gil Klein
Managing Director,  Mobfox

Mobfox, a mediation platform, caters to 175+ DSPs across the globe. We spoke to Gil Klein, Managing Director, Mobfox, to understand  how he views the future of programmatic advertising.

MTS: Tell us about your role at Mobfox and the team you handle.
Gil Klein: As the Managing Director, I am responsible for leading Mobfox and our in-app audience-based programmatic advertising platform, which provides publishers with the tools they need to optimize their ad serving, data layers, and automated monetization stack. I also oversee myDSP, our data-driven DSP for smarter programmatic advertising and optimization, as well as our in-house data management platform.

I previously served as an SVP at Matomy, when the company acquired Mobfox in 2014, and I’ve been a member of the Matomy team since 2008, having served as Director of Media Buying, VP Performance and Sales, SVP Advertisers, and EVP Media over the years.

MTS: How has the mobile advertising market evolved in the past two years?
Gil: Mobile has grown immensely in recent years. With US adults spending an estimated 56% of their digital time on their mobile devices, mobile is projected to become the biggest online advertising market by 2020, with video growing the fastest. Advertisers have responded in turn, shifting to personalized, targeted ads for mobile users. Many brands are adopting programmatic to optimize their media strategy and more efficiently target the right audience at the right time.

However, as people are spending an increased amount of time on their smartphones, digital ad fraud has gained traction, especially on mobile. As the industry grapples with this shift and upcoming privacy legislations like GDPR, brand safety, viewability, performance metrics and transparency have become more important than ever.

The use of location and behavioral data is also a major factor that has evolved over the last few years. The availability and amount of location data has grown, as has the industry’s ability to analyze and engage with this data for improved campaign success.

There has also been a noticeable rise in audio programming as podcasts have become very popular. Brands have taken note and have begun to use audio to serve ads, paying CPM rates as high as $80 in some cases.

MTS: How do you see user-generated content playing a bigger role in mobile advertising?
Gil: I think the growing popularity of user-generated content on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. offers an opportunity for advertisers to partner with users and micro-influencers who fit their brand and messaging to better reach dedicated audiences. According to Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising report, 83 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know, and 66 percent trust other consumer opinions posted online. Those are substantially higher numbers than the 46 percent of consumers who trust ads on social networks, which tells us that brands are more likely to leverage user-generated content in their social strategies to engage users in a more natural, yet professional way.

MTS: How does Mobfox package apps for better audience segmentation and transparency?
Gil: Mobfox understands that the better our audience data and analytics are, the more targeted campaigns can become. We use gender segmentation which automatically enhances ad requests. And, since boosting our publisher requests with data-driven gender segmentation, we’ve witnessed an 86% average increase in CPMs and have found that our demand partners see improved returns.

We are also very committed to offering transparency. Mobfox has developed internal tools to detect nonhuman activity and in August 2016, we partnered with Pixalate to implement their real-time fraud protection feature, shifting mobile bid opportunities away from fraudulent traffic, improving transparency and helping to ensure brand safety.

MTS: What are the major pain points for B2B brand marketers in leveraging audience data for creating high-value mobile advertising campaigns?
Gil: Brand marketers are struggling to find the right data platform for their needs. Additionally, third-party DMP and audience targeting can be quite expensive, making it untenable for some smaller brands. Audience data is also not always as accurate or as up-to-date as it should be. These are all major pain points that we try to address with our solutions at Mobfox.

MTS: How do you see AI/ML technologies in mobile advertising offering higher ROI to companies tied to programmatic marketplaces?
Gil: AI’s biggest contribution in the programmatic marketplace is around automation, scalability, optimization, and prediction. AI helps to make sense of the massive amounts of data available to advertisers, allowing them to gather more insights than a human mind can grapple with. This helps to build more effective and scalable smart audience clusters, and can also aid in predictive data analysis.

Building algorithms for optimization is also much more efficient when done using AI, allowing humans to leave the number crunching to computers and focus on creativity and building relationships – with which humans have an advantage over machines.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Gil.
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Also Read: Tech Bytes with Kumaran Sambandam, VP, Mobfox Exchange