SUMMARY
Aims To Re-define Mobile Advertising In Philippines
SilverPush, the San Francisco and Gurgaon-based cross-device retargeting company, has partnered with Philippines-based mobile marketing agency Mobext. With this partnership, which will be officially launched this September, SilverPush will come up with a new technological innovation in the marketing and advertising domain.
The new technology aims to create tailor-made mobile ads based on consumers’ commercial-viewing preferences on television. This cross-device retargeting technology will be an amalgamation of offline and online marketing with TV analytics and mobile advertising.
Partner companies will have commercials integrated with a high-frequency signal called the SP Audio Beacon. These signals can be detected by special apps installed in mobile devices. The company works with various app developers, on a revenue sharing basis, to make sure the consumers install this special app. The servers receive the signals and store details such as device ID, campaign and time to the database.
Post analyzing these data points, the retargeted mobile ads are created that have been customized based on the consumers’ ad viewing preferences. Consumers are therefore exposed to ads that they watch on television.This would help brands focus better on their mobile advertising efforts and deter them from blowing up their marketing budgets on ineffective television ad campaigns.
According to Millward Brown’s Ad Reaction 2014 global survey, 42 percent of the respondents used mobile devices while watching television to fill up their time during ad breaks. 24 percent stated that they use mobile devices to look-up certain information that they come across during watching television. These data points do suggest that cross-device (TV to mobile) re-targeting is smart marketing strategy.
Philippines has been dubbed as the text and social media capital of the world and Filipinos are ardent TV viewers. Therefore, Arthur Policarpio, CEO of Mobext Philippines, is really excited about the future of this technology in the country.
“This technology has a lot of potential because of the sheer number of mobile users here in the Philippines. Plus, we all know that Filipinos are big TV viewers as well. It’s difficult to say exactly its impact, but I believe that this new approach will further strengthen the role of mobile in advertising and other related industries,” he said.
Founded in October 2012 by Hitesh Chawla and Mudit Seth, SilverPush was among GSF Accelerator’s first batch of startups. It was founded in Delhi, but moved to the US in 2013. The company has created mobile ads in six countries for over 50 brands including Google, Dominos, Samsung, Candy Crush, Airtel, P&G, Kabam and Myntra.
Talking about the company’s expansion plans with Inc42, Chawla stated, “We are expanding geographically via global partnerships – with the US and Australia being the next countries in focus. For India, we are building our own sales force.”
“In terms of our new products, we just launched TV analytics, which is solving some of the biggest pain points of advertisers. We are also working on data-based TV-buying platform,” he added.
Last year, it raised $1.5 Mn in a funding round led by IDG Ventures and Unilazer Ventures. The round was also participated by Prashant Mehta, former chief executive of Komli Media; Fabrice Grinda, founder and former CEO of OLX and Krishnan Ganesh, founder of Tutor Vista. Its existing investors GSF Accelerator and 500 Startups also participated.
