Speaking at a press lunch in Singapore this week, Mark Strecker, Amobee, CEO, and Steve Hoffman, CFO, (and Amobee’s M&A guy) shared insights with ExchangeWire's Wendy Hogan about the value of the Adconion/Kontera acquisitions as well as Amobee and Singtel’s ambitions for ad tech. 

The Amobee cross-channel, cross-device stack is now a full end-to-end offering including a DSP (previously GradientX), RTB Exchange, Brand Intelligence (previously Kontera), Creative House (3D), Lifetime Value (LTV) and Amobee DMP.

With only 10% client crossover, and little product replication, the addition of Adconion Direct has brought Amobee reach to the full suite of digital marketing budgets – social, display, email and video – rather than the comparatively small mobile budgets it previously targeted. Adding Adconion Direct also brings Amobee expanded social capabilities on Facebook and Twitter.

The Amobee DMP contains over 800 million unique profiles, at least 50% of which are sourced via first-party data relationships with mobile operators across Australia, Asia and Europe.

These operator relationships are exclusive to Amobee and currently renew almost automatically due to the platform integration and commercial returns the operators are seeing.

Amobee has assigned its own internal user ID and promises to optimise campaigns across all channels, affording it’s positioning as a tech platform as opposed to an ad network.

Anonymous data exchanges tipped

When questioned, Strecker said: “It’s unlikely the industry will see an open ID for cross device targeting in the near term as the data is too valuable to open up. What is more likely is anonymous data exchanges via third-parties in order to verify ad delivery and solve some of the conversion tracking issues currently plaguing the industry.”

The positioning of Kontera as a unique brand intelligence tool via semantic insights across all digital media – text, images and video – could develop into an interesting brand insights layer in the stack. It also has value as an independent third-party voice to the current second-screen battle for TV brand dollars between Twitter Amplify and Facebook.

According to Amobee, this is a unique stack with mobile at its core, currently equaled only by the likes of Google. Strecker revealed a key component of the next phase is to integrate their offering and align with Singtel’s Enterprise Group, to compete on the enterprise/marketing tech playing field with Adobe, Salesforce and Oracle.

Another developing opportunity is Amobee’s partnership with Cisco and local market mobile operators to open up inventory tied to location in the digital out-of-home (OOH) category via screens in stadiums, shopping centres, airports and hotels.

In terms of growth and investment in the mobile advertising space, Strecker said SMS is still the most popular format as it works across all mobile screens and is easy to execute.

Strecker also said he expects more complex executions such as those on offer by their 3D teams (currently very popular with car manufacturers in the US) will become more common in Asia as low-priced smartphone adoption accelerates.

When questioned about Amobee’s financial performance, Strecker insisted Singtel recognises the business is in growth mode and as early market entrants, the focus is on a land grab in the short term.

Wendy Hogan is based in Singapore and covers the APAC market for ExchangeWire. Follow her on Twitter.