The ability to have a holistic view of the mobile marketplace offers up countless opportunities and challenges. ExchangeWire speak with Keith Winter (pictured below), COO, Opera Mediaworks about their position in the market, as well as the trends and opportunities that exist for both advertisers and publishers globally.

ExchangeWire: As a mobile advertising platform, Opera Mediaworks encompasses many different properties. What is your footprint in the mobile industry?

Keith Winter: Opera Mediaworks is one of the largest mobile advertising and marketing platforms globally, reaching an audience of 1.2 billion consumers across all major continents. We work with Fortune 500 brands and more than 85% of the world’s top grossing mobile publishers, and our extensive mobile ad SDK footprint is the second largest within the Top 1000 apps worldwide.

Although the majority of our revenues come from the US and the UK, we are growing quickly in other regions, especially emerging markets like Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

No matter which region we are in, we are laser-focused on helping clients deliver innovative brand experiences that evoke emotion and deliver real outcomes – all of which is fuelled by data, technology, and creativity.

You are well established in the US and experiencing significant growth in APAC. What mobile trends are you seeing in emerging markets?

Asia Pacific is the largest market on our platform, in terms of unique users. This year, we expect to see smartphones cross the chasm and begin to outnumber feature phones in this region. Because of this, connected devices, artificial intelligence, and seamless mobile payments are all on the horizon for the industry.

Another trend to point to this year would be the non-stop growth in mobile video. Driven by consumption across operating systems, carriers, and countries, mobile is now the first screen, surpassing both the TV and the desktop in terms of time spent.

On the consumer side, there is a growing concern around data compression and costs surrounding video consumption, which companies such as ours are addressing through pre-cached video offerings, such as Instant-Play™, that don’t eat up consumers’ data plan.

How are advertisers maximising the mobile opportunity?

The marketers that are truly maximising the mobile opportunity are the ones that are investing in creative assets purpose-built for mobile, such as video ads that are shorter-form, engaging and create 'thumb-stopping moments'. They are also  the forefront of using display ads that leverage the mobile’s native hardware offerings (camera, gyroscope, accelerometer, vibration motor) and native software (apps, messaging, wallet).

The second big part of the mobile opportunity is unleashing the power of context. Marketers that are fully using all of the mobile-centric data available, including demographic and behavioral, device signals, content type/environment, location, time of day, and real-time conditions to inform the creative message are the ones delivering a truly holistic and differentiated mobile experience to that brand's audience.

Are publishers fully prepared for a mobile-dominant world?

They’re getting there. We still see a significant number of 'desktop-centric' approaches being ported over to mobile, such as these 300x250 overlays that is effectively mobile's version of the pop-up ad. We find game developers are ahead of more traditional publishers, given their more mobile-native, in-app heritage.

And then, of course, on the mobile web, you have the advent of ad blocking. Since the initial furore around iOS 9, when ad-blocking apps shot to the top of the App Store charts, we've seen their popularity degrade, and there are no longer any ad blockers in the top 100 iOS apps. But the reality is that the over-deployment of ad-tracking solutions does have a negative impact on the consumer experience (i.e., increasing page load times).

Publishers and advertisers also need to think about adhering to high standards of quality for mobile ad creative that engages and attracts the user, instead of annoying and distracting them.

And publishers, as they shift to mobile, now face this challenge of finding the right balance of monetisation methods, and it may be very different to how they did it on desktop.

Working across the advertiser and publisher space, do you see challenges in transparency in between?

Anytime you have multiple parties involved, with various interests and technologies that they work with, there will always be challenges in transparency. But if you think about the three players here: the publisher, the marketer, and the consumer, they really all want the same thing: high-quality content experiences.

A true 'win-win-win' scenario across the entire mobile advertising ecosystem would be:

-  Publishers being compensated fairly for the great content they are providing users
-  Marketers seeing real outcomes in their business from their advertising campaigns
-  Consumers receiving a delightful, entertaining and informative ad experiences

At Opera, we are committed to helping all three of these stakeholders achieve those outcomes, and we think transparency is one of the key ways that all three can occur.

How is the growth of video impacting mobile for advertisers and publishers alike?

For advertisers, video is providing a distinct opportunity to elevate the level of storytelling. And, unlike video in other formats (TV, desktop), on mobile it can go beyond sight and motion to include a more integrated use of sound, and even introduce the power of touch/feeling (via haptic technology).

A brand that dedicates time on a commercial shoot to create some mobile-specific creative, such as a 6-second or 10-second spot, can see a significant boost in the overall performance of their campaign. Hospitality brands, for instance, that are using 360-degree videos to let the user can 'turn around' and see more of their resort facilities or destination, are creating the kinds of immersive experiences that lead to more conversions (e.g., hotel bookings).

For publishers, video clearly represents an opportunity to enhance their current levels of monetisation. Technology enables ad slots that have been historically monetised as display and enables them for video, which is a big step forward for publishers. They also now have the opportunity to improve the relative metrics of their site/app via the inclusion of more compelling video content, since that is what consumers are looking for today, as demonstrated by the statistics on video consumption on smartphones and tablets.