“In-app advertising is about recall, expanding reach & creating engagement”

There are several challenges that a marketer faces, one of the most crucial being presenting one’s brand in the right manner. In-app advertising is a path-breaking tool that has not only been helping businesses achieve success, but also bridging the gap between the brand and consumers.

Placing the ads in the right place and at the right time and moment is of utmost importance to create a strong engagement with the audience. Done right, a 15-second ad can leave a big impact on the user’s mind for a long span. In-app advertising offers endless marketing opportunities and it is time advertisers took maximum advantage of it. To further explore the growth, application and impact of In-app advertising, some leading industry experts deciphered ‘The Rise of In-app Advertising’ at the 5^th edition of MOBEXX 2021, organised by Adgully on November 30, 2021.

Moderated by Karan Lakhwani, Head of Business Development (India) at AppTweak, the esteemed panellists included:

Aniket Khare, Vice President – Business Development, Merkle Sokrati

Dinesh Arora, Head - Growth & Revenue, Tender Cut

Parul Bhargava, Co-Founder & CEO, vCommission Media

Vatsal Shah, Head of Digital Marketing, Games 24 X 7

Vipul Kedia, Chief Data & Platforms Officer, MAAS by Affle

Throwing light on the current trends in in-app advertising, Aniket Khare said, “There are two or three aspects that are really coming through strongly now. First is that I don’t think that people are looking at in-app advertising more from an inventory point of view. I honestly believe that there are a lot of end point customisations of messages that are being seen here, which obviously is working much better for the customers.”

According to vCommission Media’s Parul Bhargava, what is exciting about in-app advertising is the cross-device transition or tracking of consumers and “seeing how we can pick from where one device left off”.

“So far, we were kind of only switching between web and mobile web, but I think in-app ads are a very good angle to how consumer acquisition or even lifetime value can impact a brand,” she added.

Tender Cut’s Dinesh Arora noted that in-app gives marketers the opportunity to play with rich media and lets the user interact creatively. “Now, brands also need some space where people can actually interact with the categories. In-app gives that opportunity where I did a couple of in-app advertising for my earlier brand, Spartan Poker, where I was able to connect with my audience. So, in-app is more about brand recall and to reach out to more and more audiences and create an engagement,” he added.

Arora believed that in-app advertising will help brands make a much larger and better impact with consumers.

According to Vipul Kedia, in-app advertising really narrows the boundaries between performance and brand to almost negligible, because finally what the mobile medium as a whole and specifically in-app creates is the ability to obviously create a lot of brand recall and awareness, because that is where the maximum time is being spent.

He pointed out, “The strength of the in-app advertising ecosystem is that you can use it for multiple use cases in the manner that you desire and previously what was shared, with different custom experiences for the user in terms of either gamification or rich media or videos. Thus, it allows you to define your own objectives and create whatever environment you would like and, therefore, choose the best way to engage with your customers. And drive the wanted outcomes.”

Vatsal Shah noted that the app inventory has shot up dramatically with the rise of apps and mobile phones. “More than 50% of the online inventory and digital inventory that is available is on apps only. That allows us a massive reach, which can definitely be used for brand recall. But one thing that it also allows us to do is that those ads can be clicked. And the targeting available to us in the in-app advertising space is also massive. So, we can precisely target the users or the audience that we feel that we want our ads to be shown or we feel that these are our target users which drives the clickability of the ads. This also means that we are using the platforms or using the network or the advertising to reach out precisely to the audience that we want,” he added.

Shah further said that those audiences can directly then take action on the ad which also drives performance. “At our end, we believe heavily in performance because for that a lot of games that we have to offer. So, for each game, we believe in performance marketing and we use in-app advertising to promote our performance campaigns heavily through this channel,” he added.

These are edited excerpts. For the complete conversation watch below: