TechBytes with Jeremy Bondy, Global VP Revenue, Vungle

By Viraj T On Nov 29, 2018

Jeremy Bondy
Global VP Revenue at Vungle

Vungle‘s technology is designed and engineered to help ensure their clients maintain the best user experience and serve the right ad to the right people to help gain high-quality users. We spoke to Jeremy Bondy, Global VP Revenue at Vungle, to understand how their technology stands out in an environment where customers are being overwhelmed by advertising.

Tell us about your role at Vungle and the team/technology you handle?

As Global VP Revenue at Vungle, I manage the company’s global sales organization, consisting of supply, direct and programmatic demand, performance optimization, creative teams, analytics and the strategic partnership team across our seven offices internationally.

What I love most about Vungle is our dedication to our partners. We focus on acquiring the highest-value users for our partners and delivering the best ad experience to mobile users. Our technology engages the right audiences and generates more revenue with high-converting in-app video ads.

What is the overall state of Mobile Advertising in the AdTech industry?

The industry continues to get smarter every day. Performance advertising will continue to dominate the industry as advertisers recognize it as the only way to truly achieve mobile performance. To optimize the success of performance advertising, people should be thinking about getting their strategies right across a few core areas:

Measurement – We’re seeing much more complex approaches to gauging bids in performance buying. We’re mapping against retention, ROAS, or a combination of the two, downstream events and various weightings of each. The sheer amount of creatives launched into the wild in pursuit of a high impression to install (CVR) ratio means that numbers are the game.
Placements – Multi-bidding is another element bucking the performance advertising trend with people placing more importance on how much they are willing to pay for the desired interaction with an ad by application and by geography.
New technologies – Naturally, new innovations, formats and technologies can support the path to achieving better results, but there needs to be a clear tie back to performance.

How has GDPR affected Vungle’s ability to leverage in-app Mobile Advertising?

We pride ourselves on being agile, partnering with our clients and adapting to a rapidly changing ecosystem. The GDPR has been no exception. Many people thought that the GDPR would have a significant negative impact on advertising revenue but our belief is that companies that can shift to a purely contextual advertising model should still be able to deliver healthy yields. We have built our business on contextual targeting, so while it’s no secret that many of the user-centric AdTech companies have struggled, Vungle has maintained performance and acted as a soft landing for many of our publishing partners and advertisers.

In an environment where customers are being overwhelmed by advertising, how does your technology stand out?

Our technology is designed and engineered to help ensure our clients maintain the best user experience and serve the right ad to the right people to help gain high-quality users. 93 percent of the creatives we serve across billions of impressions per week are Vungle-made, meaning that they are tailored to the environment that they’re serving. Given that virtually all dollars with Vungle are tied to a downstream event, advertisers are bidding hyper-competitively to win each impression, driving very relevant ads for the end user. In addition, our Data Science team has been tooling and re-tooling our algorithms for apps on mobile for seven years and will continue to do so, resulting in a ton of knowledge that’s been accumulated in rewarded and non-rewarded environments.

According to you, are in-app advertisements driving Mobile Programmatic Advertising?

Unfortunately, not yet. The two main reasons for that are:

Some performance buyers have closed-loop attribution, whereby, they’re able to measure performance and almost synchronously adjust bids, which are hyper-competitive.
Brand budgets often have so many bites from the apple taken between the brand itself and the end publisher that the 10 cents, 15 cents, or optimistically 30 cents on the dollar that remains is just not enough to be competitive, but things are starting to change.

Is Native Advertising truly the best? How does a company like Vungle succeed in an ever-evolving mobile market?

We partner with our advertisers and publishers to help them accomplish their Mobile Marketing goals. Because of our strong partnership with our clients, we make sure we are at the forefront of new technology and new formats. Our Vungle Creative Labs regularly test new formats and technology with key partners to help people discover more of the mobile apps they love.

Being a business leader, how do you think AI will change in-app Mobile Advertising?

In many, many ways! I’d be more interested to know what AI won’t touch in due time. However, there are a few ways that AI will change in-app mobile advertising that stand out the most to me. First, deep learning will help drive decisions behind when and where to show the ad. Second, AI will change what’s in the advertisement itself and the “story telling” piece of it all. Third, AI will be the tool that advertisers rely on to answer how much they should bid for an impression on a publisher app.

How does 2019 look for Vungle?

We’re focused on omnipresence of our solutions. We’ve been number one for a long time in the rewarded format and have grown our interstitial business in the last few years. Next year, we’ll be expanding our existing presence outside of this segment of mobile apps. One area we’re focused on is granular buying and optimization tools. In particular, we’re looking to help our clients understand where their budget is going and build the tools needed to improve their campaigns. Another area of focus is accessibility — we are continually working on expanding our footprint and we look forward to giving our clients more reach in 2019.

We’ll be taking a big step forward with our company, which we’ll be excited to share more details around in the new year.

Thanks for chatting with us, Jeremy.

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