AdColony is growing! We recently crossed AdColony’s 11th birthday (November 15th) and we couldn’t be happier with our progress. More than a decade later, the mobile landscape looks very different, with more competitors and complexity than ever, but we’ve persevered through a focus on transparency, delivering award-winning ad experiences, and focusing on results for advertisers, mobile developers, and great experiences for end-users, succeeded.
Brand & Exchange
This year, we truly became the in-app marketplace for brands to reach consumers. What we call “brand advertisers” are the non-gaming ads most non-industry people think of when they think of digital ads. AdColony gives today’s biggest brand advertisers like Disney, Starbucks, Unilever, Toyota, and many more, the opportunity to reach consumers where they’re spending the most time — on their mobile device.
As a vote of confidence from the ad industry in general, AdColony won the Best Mobile Ad Network award in the 2019 Readers Choice Awards presented by Adweek. With over 15,000 ballots cast, AdColony beat out Google and Unity Ads for the award. Our brand teams around the world have focused on strong, mutually beneficial relationships with our clients, even as we embrace and accelerate our programmatic offering, and we believe this win means we’re doing the right thing.
Overall, the Brand business experienced very healthy growth across all regions this year and especially during the last quarter, even though historically the third quarter is not a strong growth period for the advertising industry globally, as brands and agencies prepare for the big holiday season. The fact that AdColony’s Brand and Exchange teams bucked this trend and grew the business across back-to-back quarters signals to us that our continued focus on relationships, amazing technology, and programmatic infrastructure is working, and makes us optimistic that growth will continue.
We’re now most of the way through the fourth quarter, and we can say things are looking up here as well. As more and more brands have realized that mobile apps, and mobile games especially, are the best way to reach consumers on their most personal screens, the only devices they have with them every day, AdColony has been there for them with the ad space and custom creative experiences.
Publishing
At the heart of AdColony’s advertising business is our supply, powered primarily by our SDK. Our first-party SDK inventory offers advertisers access to audiences and optimizations no other platform can offer and sets us apart from our competitors by owning much of our supply directly.
AdColony’s SDK is integrated into thousands of the top apps across iOS and Android around the world. Known for our video technology, our SDK now features several IAB standard banner display options, making it amongst the most flexible monetization platforms for developers. The latest version of the SDK is also certified by the IAB’s Open Measurement Group, adding an additional layer of transparency for all clients and partners.
Thanks to our Advanced Monetization Program in May and June, and continued momentum throughout the year, we can now proudly say that we have an SDK presence in 42 of the Top 100 gaming apps worldwide. We were very happy to welcome publishers like Playgendary, Outerminds, Kolibri, FGFF, Metajoy, TastyPills, and PopCore to the AdColony family of publishers. They’re in good company!
This year also fantastically underlined AdColony’s commitment to being a technology and transparency leader when it comes to monetization technology for publishers. As one of the few players in the industry to support advanced bidding, our partnerships with Mopub, Fyber, MAX (Applovin), and others offer fair and even bidding processes for each ad impression, giving advertisers more options for impressions, and higher potential revenue for monetizing developers than traditional waterfall mediation methods.
We even hosted a panel session at GDC 2019 on the topic of advanced bidding and the prospect of programmatic playing an ever-growing part of publisher monetization strategy. As the year went on, the trend exploded.
As the rest of the industry, including mediation partners, have begun to embrace the technology we’ve been out on the bleeding edge of for over a year, we are seeing positive new trends around advanced bidding, and we’re excited to continue pushing things forward.
Performance
The term “performance” for AdColony means app-install marketers running ads to get more installs for their gaming apps. Fundamentally, the best way for today’s hottest mobile games to maintain long-term growth and financial success is to acquire users in other apps. AdColony’s wide network of apps using our SDK for monetization gives user acquisition (UA) managers targeting options to find the perfect users for their own apps. In addition to video ads with unique end-cards, UA campaigns can take advantage of Aurora
HD Playables, and now banner display ads with the introduction of AdColony SDK 4 in September making AdColony a “one-stop-shop” for performance advertiser needs.
This year, our performance business development teams, successfully on-boarded and reactivated a number of advertising partners. We’re delighted to welcome HyperMedia, FloHealth, and Starling Bank in EMEA, Mistplay in North America, and B-Bridge in Japan as partners, amongst many others.
AdColony was founded as a performance-oriented company, one of the first in fact, and we’re excited to have maintained that legacy even as the industry has changed and morphed dramatically over the past decade. The difference for us is that of relationships — with as much experience and first-party data as we have, our dedicated campaign managers (yes, that’s all they do) know what it takes to help a UA campaign succeed, giving our UA partners less to worry about than any other performance marketplace out there.
Looking Forward
We’re improving our technology both on the front-end with more improvements to our creative and to our SDK. We’re also upgrading our technology on the back end to deliver better results for advertisers and developers, and improving transparency with more partnerships.
Relationships are the core of who we are. Whether our publishing growth teams are diving deep on integrations and ad zone strategy, or our brand sales team is showing off our award-winning ads from around the world, or educating clients on the potential of mobile gaming for brands, creating meaningful, mutually beneficial industry partnerships is our number one priority, and we believe our results this year reflect that commitment to delivering results for supply and demand partners, shooting for substance over style (okay, definitely with some style!), setting the benchmarks when it comes to high-quality mobile ad creative experiences for users, and focusing on in-app as the new primetime around the world.
Whether you want to integrate our SDK to give consumers ads they’ll actually enjoy, with the latest technology behind them, or reach consumers on the most important screen in their lives as an advertiser with award-winning creative (that we’ll do for you in-house!) we’re eager and excited to work with you. If you want to grow with us in Q4, into 2020, and beyond, feel free to reach out!
Join the Conversation
Are you ready for 2020 and a new decade of mobile? Tweet us at @AdColony. For the latest AdColony mobile news and updates, follow @AdColony on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or connect on Linkedin.
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