Having recently partnered with four major APAC mobile operators, Amobee's presence in the region has been progressively getting stronger. ExchangeWire caught up with Amobee CEO Trevor Healy to discuss their strategy and how their platform PULSE for Publishers aids monetising publisher inventory.

Can you briefly provide background information on Amobee? What does the business fundamentally do/provide?

Amobee is the global leader defining mobile advertising, providing mobile advertising solutions to large mobile operators, publishers and brands worldwide. Amobee’s advanced, proprietary mobile advertising technology and expertise enables brands to reach target customers on a global scale with leading-edge mobile ad campaigns, from a simple text message to a rich media and 3D experience, to achieve guaranteed results. Mobile publishers and operators work with Amobee to monetise mobile inventory on a global scale and achieve the highest ROI by offering advertisers data-rich mobile inventory.

In February, it was announced a deal had been struck between Amobee and four major telcos providers. Can you speak around the nature of this partnership? Was it a deliberate strategy partnering with only one in each market?

Amobee has built the most robust, scalable mobile advertising platform, Amobee PULSE, which enables mobile operators and publishers to monetise their mobile inventory. With Amobee PULSE, these four leading mobile operators now have the ability to lead the mobile advertising ecosystem in Asia with data-rich, privacy-compliant mobile advertising inventory. While Amobee forges rapidly ahead with these mobile operators, our relationships are not exclusive.

Statements at the time suggested the telco companies in question would be leveraging the Amobee product, PULSE for Publishers. Can you outline what this product is/does for publishers? How will these telcos use it?

Amobee PULSE is a real-time, carrier-grade mobile advertising technology platform that enables large publishers and operators to monetise direct and remnant mobile advertising inventory. Amobee PULSE is based on a weighted, configurable, multi-dimensional ad selection algorithm that addresses targeting, campaign progress, user exposure, operator policies and device constraints. Amobee PULSE capabilities include: a robust ad server, a multitude of targeting options, yield optimisation & mediation engine, business intelligence & reporting and inventory management options. Customers can expose mobile inventory via an RTB exchange, including creating a private exchange with DSPs of their choice.

How will Amobee be able to leverage/mine the vast data sets these providers are sitting on? How much is permissible to be used?

Operators already have long-term and trusted relationships with millions of mobile subscribers, and with Amobee PULSE, they can securely and anonymously leverage demographic data sets.

How will these partnerships encourage greater brand-led investment into mobile?

There are two major trends driving the move to mobile in Asia: 1) continued rapid economic development across nearly all markets that have not experienced a downturn in many years; and 2) notably in Indonesia and the Philippines, populations are skipping the desktop/laptop era, and connecting to the digital world through mobile devices. With so many consumers of all ages and wealth levels on mobile, this is simply the most far-reaching and effective advertising channel for brands.

Will the solution employed here be more ad network-focused? A DMP data-enriching layer? Are there future applications for this in the real time space?

Amobee PULSE is a highly flexible platform and can be utilised by a variety of players in the ecosystem, including premium publishers, mobile operators and ad networks looking for a robust, scalable platform to run their business. Amobee PULSE has capabilities that allow these players to generate, manage and use user data to monetise own or third-party inventory. Amobee PULSE also has an RTB exchange, based upon built-in open standards to allow real-time selling of ad inventory to any DSP in the ecosystem.

What about leveraging formats/channels beyond mobile? Is there scope to expand past the mobile device where location-based datasets are more central to brand strategy?

With our technology, we use location data to run geo-fencing mobile ad campaigns to effectively reach target audiences and drive in-store traffic. For example, we worked with Vertu to identify and reach potential customers for a new high-end smartphone, the Constellation. Using O2 mobile operator data, we were able to identify and target high net worth individuals who had roamed across three or more countries in the past three months. The geo-fencing portion of this campaign was integral to the larger mobile ad campaign that included rich media and in-app video.