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发帖数: 1034 | 1 September 4, 2014 5:15 AM
Ruth Reader
xAd announced a $50 million raise for its mobile geomarketing platform today
, but the company says it doesn’t even need the money; it’s building its
business on profit alone.
The funding may be yet another sign that growth funds are looking to get in
on the future of mobile advertising.
Yext, a local listings management and search tool that xAd uses, took in $50
million in June to help it grow. It looks like investors are placing their
bets early on mobile ad platforms as mobile advertising revenues continue to
build.
xAd takes geomarketing to an extremely hyper-local level, not based on
zipcode like with Facebook for example, but based on an app users’ actual
location. For instance, let’s say you’re at Walmart and you open an app on
your phone, an ad request is called based on your device id and location.
xAd tells me it might get other information about you depending on the app.
“We can look in our system and say, have we seen this ad id before? What
other ads have we shown them that they’ve responded to, and where else have
you been?” said Monica Ho, SVP of Marketing at xAd.
Where this is really effective is for competitive conquest campaigns, said
Karen Soots VP of Media Services at Blooming Brands, an xAd customer. “You
can put ads out for people who are in the same location as a competitor’s
restaurant and reasonably near our restaurant,” said Soots. The hope is the
ad encourages the viewer to go to a Blooming Brands restaurant, like
Outback Steak House or Carrabba’s, rather than the competitor’s restaurant.
The company also offers analytics, like how effective ads were at attracting
consumers to a product. Then there’s Footprints, the company’s real-time
consumer visualization platform. “Footprints is like a real-time
visualization of who’s opening their phone and where they are, and you can
see how many people are at [a location] at a given time, given day, given
month,” said xAd founder and CEO Dipanshu Sharma. The software basically
shows xAd how many people it can potentially target, which is key, because
geomarketing is all about hitting as many precise targets as possible. “If
there’s only two people [in a location] it’s not worth targeting,” said
Sharma.
The company says hyperlocal advertising can’t work unless you have scale.
That’s why xAd has spent so much time and money getting big, fast.
In terms of competitors, xAd is looking to contend with the big boys, like
Facebook and Google, who are rapidly building ad platforms with geofencing
capabilities and already have massive amounts of data about their many users.
xAd is integrated into 15,000 apps and operates in six countries, with
expansion to China and France imminent, which means it can send out a lot of
refined ads. That is what differentiates it from its competitors and why
growth funds would be interested in it as a company. xAd is profitable, and
all its expansion has been funded by profit. In fact, it’s profitable
enough that the company doesn’t know what it’s going to do with this round
of funding. It sort of just has it.
It’s that guy at the gym that just wants to get “huge.” So xAd wants to
know, do you even lift bro? |
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