Event Video
URX's Lauren Nemeth on How Deep Linking Works In Mobile Advertising
Earlier this year at ATS New York, Lauren Nemeth, chief revenue officer at URX gave a refreshingly honest keynote presentation about the reasons behind her decision to leave programmatic after spending over seven years at AppNexus and Google combined. The main reason behind her decision, Nemeth said was: “because I was tired of not making money in mobile”.
In this TraderTalkTV episode, filmed at ATS New York 2015, Nemeth delves in to the reasons why programmatic does not do well when there is a lot of publishers fragmentation, walled gardens and mobile web solutions that do not make sense.
Today, content resides in many places. The publisher ecosystem in mobile has become hyper-fragmented. This presents two problems: firstly; consumers struggle to find relevant content, and secondly; monetisation is really hard for publishers.
Consumers use a small number of mobile apps that are primarily owned and controlled by the biggest content platforms, such as Facebook, Apple and Google. This means that those players dominating the app market also control how users discover content outside of their own app content.
What this means for our industry is: if content remains fragmented and app discovery remains limited then we have huge reliance on Apple, Google and Facebook.
Deep linking has grown in popularity over the last year and a half as mobile publishers have exposed their deep linking structure to platforms, enabling a form of contextual targeting on mobile.
Deep linking allows publishers and advertisers to resolve users to content within an application. This form of contextual targeting is good for the app owner, the content owner, the advertiser and the user.
Nemeth describes how the main uptake has been in commerce, a sector that is typically not well addressed in mobile. Without unlocking commerce demand, mobile will remain primarily gaming and entertainment dominated.
There is no denying that Facebook is the dominant player in the mobile space. The social giant will always have more data and the majority market share but other platforms can make moves towards being more competitive.
Nemeth suggests that publishers and advertisers need to start thinking about “taking advantage of now” and create experiences that exist across mobile web and apps, in recognition of the reality that they are not going to be consumers default app destination. Brands need to discover a way to put their store front in front of users when they’re in the intent stage of their path-to-purchase.
Standard mobile ad units do not make sense and do not provide a relevant mobile experience. Publishers and advertisers need to bring consumers to an application where they can execute.
Nemeth’s three key messages for publishers and brands were:
1. Drive mobile discovery through relevance and immediacy
2. Focus on what mobile users want to do instead of what they have done
3. Use deep linking to streamline the path to purchase
Nemeth’s keynote was followed by a fireside chat with Ciaran O’Kane who posed questions such as:
With indexing almost impossible in apps, deep linking is effectively indexing for apps. Does deep linking then allow contextual targeting?
Do publishers and marketers want contextual targeting in apps?
Is deep linking likely to be a breakout monetisation strategy for publishers in mobile?
Can deep linking be used to surface content to users and stop big players like Google and Facebook dominating publishers’ traffic?
How does deep linking tilt the balance towards direct demand in-app?
Will context out do audience buying in mobile?
