Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with John SanGiovanni, Co-Founder and VP of Product Design at Zumobi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Facebook and LinkedIn are doing the same. They switched away from banner ads to pushing content in-stream. What works really well is if you can do content marketing in-stream.

John SanGiovanni: That is exactly right. Many of the publishers that are doing in-stream native advertising are doing it in a site-specific way. The challenge with some of those approaches is that they are difficult to scale. What we have innovated with the ZBi platform is that it allows us to do the same type of native and in-stream mobile advertising, but at scale across a series of different high-volume app publishers, which is the Holy Grail.

SM: In the example you gave us earlier, both Motor Trend as well as Chevrolet are your clients?

JS: That is correct.

SM: Please extrapolate that for us into this stream of publishers? What is the stream of publishers you are working with?

JS: We have a host of publishers. If you type “Zumobi” in your favorite app store, we work with many major publishing brands. The Motor Trend example is an example of a deeply collaborative project between the advertiser and the publisher and got 11.2% click-through rate. It was one of the most performing mobile ad campaigns through which the data has ever been shared. It validated the concept of native advertisement.

Another one of our big partners is American Express. They wanted to do native mobile advertising, but they wanted to use it in a different way. They wanted it to be very participatory. They wanted to let the individual user upload a photo that demonstrated how that person uses her credit card. If she found a new restaurant or bought a new pair of shoes, she could take a photo with her phone and upload it into the ad experience and have a personalized, customized ad experience.

Instead of having the ad be a takeover of a single app, American Express wanted to serve that campaign across multiple of the apps I just mentioned and that have ZBi technology for native advertising. As a result, everywhere that campaign ran, users were able to tab into their photo ticker, or they were able to connect their car to their Facebook or Twitter accounts. All the things they wanted to do they could do across each app. That was a nice way to both have the depth of a mobile ad campaign, but also to achieve scale in a sense that any app that has ZBi technology could run those units.

SM: Describe the ZBi platform.

JS: We have a deep background in user experience, and we feel that most of the advertising platforms didn’t take into account the user experience part of advertising at all. Almost all ad platforms on the market were rendered as a 320 x 50 banner at the bottom of the screen. The user tapped on it and it expanded to full screen. It was not very elegant or organic. We took the same user interface design philosophy that we apply to building great apps and applied it to our advertising platform. As a result, we have a variety of different units that are designed to nicely blend in to the app at different stages of the user flow. We can have an elegant loading screen presentation, for example, which feels like it is presented by [style] placement on the homes creen, it doesn’t feel like a banner. When you get to the home screen of the appm we can actually activate a new content section inside the app, so we can light up a new channel of branded content inside the app. That channel is served and tracked as media, but it looks like it is part of the app itself.

SM: So it is advertising content, but it is made to look like original content.

JS: It is appropriately branded and represented as such. We would certainly represent to the user where there is branded content and which is the editorial content. On https://zumobi.com/adlab you can see dozens of examples of campaigns and units that have thought differently about how to render this content in an organic and elegant way within the app. The goal is to try and come up with a more integrated placement within the app and do it in a modular way, so that every app can embrace those standards.

SM: In a nutshell, what you are doing is content marketing through this platform?

JS: About half of the ZBi campaigns are content marketing. Native advertising means two different things. One is the in-stream philosophy. The other thing it means is seeing the phone as a phone and using the native capabilities of the phone itself inside the app. Examples of that would be American Express. They wanted you to be able to tap into your photo role.

Another example would be social media. It is compelling for a brand to get a user to tap a Twitter follow button and have the user instantly follow the brand as opposed to having to log back in. That is a native requirement. We built that capability into ZBi. Or if there is a clothing sale, for example, and an advertiser wants the user to be able to put a reminder on a native calendar on his phone, we also built that into ZBi. There is a whole host of native features that we have lit up as well. Generally I would say that native advertising falls into two buckets. One is content marketing and the other is deep integration with the phone.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with John SanGiovanni, Co-Founder and VP of Product Design at Zumobi
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