Monetizing Premium Social App Ad Inventory and Scaling a Capital-Efficient Business: appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham (Part 5)

Sramana: One of the activity advertising concepts you talked about was branded interviews. Would you provide more details about that concept?

Chris Cunningham: There was an application called Social Interview. Users could post interview questions to their friends. It was almost like a gaming behavior. We took that interview and were able to get it sponsored by a brand.

Another example I can provide illustrates Coca-Cola’s case in early 2008. Rather than putting their banners around Pick Five, we created a “Pick the Five Things That Make You Happy” concept. We did that because Coca-Cola was [running] the Open Happiness campaign. That campaign was on all of their bottles. We took something that was organic and viral, the Pick Five list, and allowed them to list five things that made them happy. Over a quarter of a billion people created Coca-Cola branded lists. This is the science of leveraging existing behavior rather than putting banners around an app.

Sramana: So you were able to leverage a Coca-Cola campaign that already had tremendous visibility and insert it into people’s online social interactions.

Chris Cunningham: That is correct. That is a good example of how broad and powerful this type of advertising can be.

Sramana: Earlier you mentioned that you have allowed publishers to unlock net new inventory. How do you do that?

Chris Cunningham: The publishers today such as Yahoo, AOL, ValueClick, Facebook, and others use profile data, cookies, and page views to trigger ads. That is how advertising works today in digital with search removed. Today our technology has evolved to where we trigger ads based on what people do. We can trigger an add when a user writes a review, uploads a comment, or completes a game.

Essentially we are building the next generation of DoubleClick. They started off as a sales organization and evolved into a tech company and later into a platform. They evolved into a billion-dollar company that allows display advertising to be tracked and monitored based on page view. Our prediction is that the page view impressions will become extinct. Social gaming companies are not building banner placements. We were forced to innovate an ad delivery mechanism tied to what people do, and that is what we call activity.

If you think about our business market it really has not changed since late 2007 or early 2008. We have always focused on asked these questions to our publishers: What do people do in your game? How do users spend their time with you? What is the most popular activity? The rest of the industry asks different types of questions. The ask things like: How many impressions do you have? How many page views can I sell? How much traffic comes to your site? We have made a substantial break as far as the distinction between how advertising is being delivered.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Monetizing Premium Social App Ad Inventory and Scaling a Capital-Efficient Business: appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham
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