The Post-IDFA Alliance – made up of Liftoff, Fyber, Chartboost, InMobi, Vungle, and Singular – has launched ‘No IDFA? No Problem’, a resource for mobile marketers and app publishers that aims to help to transition seamlessly in the wake of the upcoming iOS 14 update. This will give users the choice to block IDFA at app level and require the industry to adopt the App Tracking Transparency Framework (ATT) and SKAdNetwork inline with Apple’s consumer privacy guidelines.

The resource features a range of videos, articles, case studies, best practices, webinars, and tools to help guide mobile marketers and app publishers through the more privacy-centric mobile advertising environment.

The alliance is also working together to develop techniques and protocols to maximise client success, investing in research into alternatives such as ‘blended LAT traffic’.

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The tech giant has invested in Glance, which serves news, movies, travel, sports, food, and games content on the lock screens of people’s smartphones, and VerSe Innovation, the parent company of content and news aggregator app Dailyhunt.

Glance secured $145m in investment from Google and existing investor Mithril Capital. The platform, which is part of the InMobi Group and owner of video-sharing platform Roposo, delivers AI-driven personalised content in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bahasa on Android lock screens, boasting 115m daily active users.

It says it will use the Google-led investment to deepen its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, expand its technology team, launch new services, strengthen its brand, and drive expansion into more markets.

“Glance is a great example of innovation solving for mobile-first and mobile-only consumption, serving content across many of India’s local languages,” said Caesar Sengupta, VP, Google. “Still too many Indians have trouble finding content to read or services they can use confidently, in their own language. And this significantly limits the value of the internet for them, particularly at a time like this when the internet is the lifeline of so many people. This investment underlines our strong belief in working with India’s innovative startups towards the shared goal of building a truly inclusive digital economy that will benefit everyone.”

Google’s investment in VerSe is part of a round of over $100m, which valued the company at over $1bn. The round also included investment from Microsoft and AlphaWave, among others. The company’s Dailyhunt platform provides local language content in 14 Indian languages and it recently launched a short-video app called ‘Josh’.

The company will seek to use the capital injection to scale up its new app, expand its content offerings, and leverage AI.

The money invested in the startups by Google comes from the tech giant’s India Digitization Fund. The fund, launched earlier this year, includes a $10bn commitment by Google to India’s digital economy. This investment will take place over the next five to seven years and be done through a mixture of equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure, and ecosystem investments.  

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Duo join Mindshare’s UK arm
Mindshare UK, which is part of WPP, has appointed Kristiina Railo as head of new business and marketing, while hiring Laura Ponniah as role of partner for Grow@Mindshare.

Railo will be responsible for taking Mindshare UK’s audience-first proposition to market, and ensuring that the benefits to brands of proprietary tools including DX are clearly communicated in a competitive marketplace. She has also been tasked with driving new business growth for the agency in key sectors such as finance and retail.

She joins from GroupM Finland, where she held the role of digital growth director and led the launch of the mContent department. Prior to joining GroupM, she was CEO at Vapa Media Oy and has also held senior leadership roles at OMD Finland.

Ponniah will lead Mindshare UK’s full-service agency for fast growth brands, where she will guide the division’s overarching strategy.

Previously, she was head of client growth and innovation at Publicis Media Content. She has also held senior roles at Zenith International and spent a number of years at UM International.

“These two senior hires will be pivotal in the next phase of growth for Mindshare, as we look to double-down on what makes our audience-first approach so effective for brands looking for tangible results,” said Helen McRae, Mindshare UK CEO.

“Kristiina is a force of nature, which is just what you need to be to lead a successful new business and marketing department. She brings with her deep experience in running digital operations, which means she also understands from the inside out what will make the biggest difference to our clients.

“Lara’s expertise makes her the perfect addition to the Grow team. In a division focused on helping fast growth brands build their business and brand, her skills across content, media, creative and analytics will be invaluable. I’m thrilled that both these talented individuals have joined Mindshare and look forward to working alongside them.”

Leanplum names FitzGerald as president
Kate FitzGerald has become president of multichannel engagement platform Leanplum, where she will look to use her experience to drive success across the company’s sales, alliances, business development, customer success, marketing, human resources, and finance organisations.

Prior to joining Leanplum, FitzGerald was president of Americas sales at Marketo, group vice president of North America sales at Oracle Marketing Cloud, and vice president of worldwide sales at Salesforce Service Cloud.

“I’m delighted to assume this new role and continue to help progressive brands build meaningful and lasting relationships,” said FitzGerald. “Right now, we’re developing the future of customer engagement and multichannel marketing, and I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to continue to spearhead our growth with the support of our incredible employees.”

Palaniappan joins Just Eat’s board
Just Eat has appointed Jambu Palaniappan as independent non-executive director on its board with immediate effect. He is currently executive-in-residence at Atomico.

Previously, Palaniappan was head of Just Eat rival UberEats’ European business. Before that, he was regional general manager for the Middle East & Africa at Uber, where he oversaw market strategy and operations.

“I am delighted to announce Jambu’s appointment to the board of Just Eat as non-executive director. He brings significant expertise in the online food delivery industry, both in terms of technology and customer service, while his experience in market expansion ensures he will add considerable value to our Board,” said Just Eat chairman Mike Evans.

“I look forward to working closely with Jambu as we continue to successfully deliver on our hybrid marketplace strategy.”

Pegasystems hires Fuentes to lead information security
Carlos Fuentes has been appointed chief information security officer at Pegasystems, a customer engagement and digital process automation software provider. He will oversee the company’s existing information security strategy and implementation, including risk management plans relating to information security, physical security, business continuity planning, crisis management, privacy, and compliance.

Fuentes joins Pega from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he served as vice president of security and data for the US payment system, overseeing security of the Federal Reserve’s Fedwire product suite. He also served in IT and security management positions at Verizon, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance, AIG, and Fujitsu Consulting.

“Im excited to join a company with such a successful track record of growth, as well as a focus on client success and cloud choice,” said Fuentes.  “I look forward to enhancing Pegas approach to security for the company and our clients so we can continue to focus on providing industry-leading tools that enable great customer experiences.”

Management gets a reshuffle at Shutterstock
Stock photography company Shutterstock has made Steve Ciardiello its interim chief financial officer following the departure of co-chief operating officer and chief financial officer Steve Burns. This has also seen Stan Pavlovsky, who had been serving as co-chief operating officer and head of strategic operations, named as president and chief operating officer.

Ciardiello will remain as chief financial officer until a successor has been named. He will also continue in his existing role as chief accounting officer.

“I want to thank steven for his significant contributions to the company over the past seven years, first as a member of our board of directors and then as our co-chief operating officer and chief financial officer,” said Jon Oringer, founder, chairman and CEO of Shutterstock. “In these roles, Steven had a meaningful impact on developing and executing our strategic financial and operational priorities. We wish Steven all the best in his future endeavours.”

Pavlovsky’s expanded role will see him oversee Shutterstock’s sales and operations team, in addition to continuing to oversee the company’s product, marketing, and technology teams.

“We are pleased that Stan is taking on this expanded role, which more fully leverages his experience managing the strategic and operational aspects of a technology-focused business,” added Oringer. “Im confident in Stans ability to lead our sales and operations teams as they continue to execute our platform and network strategy, and drive the continuous improvement of the customer and contributor experiences.”

Narrative I/O adds two to its board
Ryan Christensen and David Yaffe have joined the board of directors at Narrative I/O, a company which aims to simplify the buying and selling of online data.

Christensen is currently senior vice president of platform product at AppNexus’ Xandr. Before that, he held executive roles at AppNexus, including chief operating officer. He has also had a variety of product management, operations, business development and consulting roles at Zynga, Yahoo and other Silicon Valley technology firms.

“Im extremely excited to join the board at Narrative,” said Christensen. “Nick [Jordan] and the team have a clear and compelling vision for how enterprises can unlock the value of their data while enhancing the core data protection and privacy practices that consumers and business partners need.”

Yaffe was co-founder of Arbor and former chief operating officer at LiveRamp. Arbor was acquired by LiveRamp in 2016. also serves on the board of Jornaya.

“Im honoured to be a part of Narratives board,” said Yaffe. “Its rare to see a company with such a unique and new vision for how companies can extract value from data. Nick and the team have already made an incredible platform which turns that vision into reality.”

Harvard professor joins InMobi board
Mobile marketing and advertising platform provider InMobi has appointed Harvard professor Tarun Khanna as an independent director, becoming the company’s seventh director and second independent one.

Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School, where he has been studying the drivers of entrepreneurship in emerging markets as a means of economic and social development since 1993. Since 2010, he has served as the first director of what is now the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard.

Outside of Harvard, he serves on numerous for-profit and not-for-profit boards in the US and India, including AES and Bharat Financial Inclusion Limited. He is a co-founder of several technology-based entrepreneurial ventures in the developing world and, recently, co-founded a Bangalore-based incubator called Axilor.

“InMobi’s journey from being the first unicorn to becoming a successful global company to emerge out of India is an inspiration for any entrepreneur,” said Khanna. “InMobi is pushing the envelope on growth and innovation on multiple fronts. Its Unified Marketing Cloud continues to clock impressive growth in the US, China and Asia; TruFactor, its secure data platform business that enables telcos to transform their digital assets into strategic knowledge is seeing great traction in the US and Asia; and Glance, its AI-powered Screen Zero platform is the fastest growing content platform in India.

“I am very excited to be part of InMobi’s next phase of growth in powering artificial-intelligence driven, mobile-first experiences for enterprises and consumers.”

Connecthings adds two to sales team
James V. Linden has been hired as vice president of sales, while Alison Vacovec has joined as US sales director, at location-based marketing firm Connecthings.

Linden’s role is to promote the Connecthings’ one-stop contextual marketing platform to mobile application developers and publishers as well as digital marketing agencies and analytics solutions. He joins from Gummicube, where he headed up business development for their big data analytics offering. Before that, he lead Kochava’s US business development for several years.

Vacovec will aim to use her mobile experience to help with Connecthings US expansion. She was most recently director of sales, East at Kochava, where she was responsible for SaaS platform adoption of measurement platform and mobile data offering. She picked up that role after handling brand and agency sales at Celtra.

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InMobi filters both pre-bid and post-bid activity, including spoofing, on mobile applications. Concurrently, DoubleVerify is able to identify and restrict multiple types of in-app fraud, including “background ad activity, hidden ads, app misrepresentation and measurement manipulation.” Since its inception in 2008, DoubleVerify has been awarded a Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for the company’s anti-fraud software, specifically protecting against sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) in mobile app video and display advertising.

“DV’s partnership with InMobi demonstrates our commitment to provide consistent, comprehensive quality coverage for global brand advertisers,” said Matt McLaughlin, COO at DoubleVerify. “With ad spend increasingly concentrated in mobile, it’s imperative that brands have transparency into the quality of mobile app inventory. We are proud of our partnership with InMobi, which expands the footprint of our fraud prevention capabilities and further distinguishes DV as the leader for mobile app verification.”

“InMobi is committed to providing transparency, building trust and delivering business results to our advertisers. This partnership, along with our support for DoubleVerify viewability, is a giant step toward that,” said Anne Frisbie, SVP, Global Programmatic and North America at InMobi. “InMobi is proud to partner with DoubleVerify in this critical battle against mobile app fraud. We strongly believe that only through open collaboration will the industry be able to eliminate fraud.”

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Check out our Dmexco 2018 tag for more coverage and videos from one of the digital marketing industrys biggest shows.

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The InMobi Exchange enables advertisers and agencies to buy both private marketplace and open exchange inventory via a single platform and is said to offer a reach of around 1.6bn users across approximately 22,000 apps.

InMobi promises four layers of security for partners using the exchange, claiming the removal of invalid ad traffic, guaranteed brand safety checks, audience verification, and viewability measurement.

“The buy side is suffering from a serious lack of trust and transparency in what is being sold to them programmatically, and fraud has been one of the main drivers,” said Abhay Singhal, co-founder and president of Advertising Cloud at InMobi. “InMobi has consistently outperformed on industry benchmarks and we work with only the highest quality app publishers to maintain a zero-tolerance policy towards fraud. This launch will accelerate our growth exponentially enabling us to capture 10-15 per cent of the programmatic market by 2020.”

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On the exchange, InMobi promises over 90 per cent viewability, 0.3 per cent invalid traffic (IVT), and two times higher audience verification scores than the industry average.

“In Asia-Pacific, the growth of programmatic hinges on three important pillars – in-app, mobile video with the overarching requirement of trust & transparency. The InMobi Exchange delivers on all three fronts,” said Abhay Singhal, co-founder and president of Advertising Cloud at InMobi. “Our commitment to mobile programmatic since 2012 has paid off significantly. As frontrunners in this space focused exclusively on the in-app business over the last decade, we are able to leverage our expertise in complex campaign delivery.  Also, our extensive network of data accounts for 1.6bn users, half of which resides in the APAC region. This launch will accelerate our growth exponentially enabling us to capture 10-15 per cent of the programmatic market by 2020.”

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There’s a lot of hype right now around in-app header bidding. Facebook announced in early June that they would offer in-app header bidding, while Google said in March they would start beta testing it through AdMob. They, of course, have now joined many others in offering in-app header beading (or at least in looking into it).

If header bidding is so successful in the browser world, then why not apply the same system to apps? After all, approximately 70 per cent of publishers in the U.S. now use header bidding on their websites.

Here’s the problem: in-app header bidding is a hack, and (surprise!) it’s not the best option out there. Yes, in-app header bidding is better than the waterfall-based status quo. But it’s not ideal. Unified auctions, however, are – for both publishers and advertisers.

Understanding the Status Quo
Before we go too far, let’s take a step back and consider what most app publishers use for monetization: waterfalls.

In a waterfall, publishers (or their mediation partners) have a predetermined list of ad networks/agencies/DSPs/etc. they turn to when inventory is ready to be filled, with the order usually determined by historical pricing. The publisher offers everything to the first player in the stack, and then they keep going down the list until all inventory is accounted for, or the opportunity times out.

There are a lot of problems with this setup, which many publishers know all too well. Historical pricing is unreliable and those further down the list don’t get to bid on top inventory even if they can pay top dollar for it, not to mention the whole process can be quite slow to complete. This all leads to diminishing ad returns and a poor user experience, among other issues. Out of this landscape, in-app header bidding has emerged as a potential savior and, for too many app publishers, this promise will go unrealized.

Why In-App Heading Bidding Seems Great – But Isn’t
With header bidding as it’s implemented in browsers, a call goes out to all potential advertisers as soon as the webpage is opened. This call is simultaneous and everyone bids in real time. The best bid wins. It’s as simple as that. No wonder so many are pining to bring this to mobile apps.

So what goes wrong? The problem is that in-app header bidding only involves some – not all – of the advertisers looking to bid on available inventory, and typically the programmatic players. This presents a few key problems.

For one, not only does this typically not replace the waterfall, it can actually exacerbate its issues. Today, the results of the simultaneous call instituted by in-app header bidding are often fed into a waterfall. This means that all of the pitfalls of waterfalls are still very much present. Plus, it can make things even worse when the time needed to conduct the simultaneous call comes on top of waterfall’s time constraints.

It’s important to note the opportunity costs here as well. In most in-app header bidding setups, those involved in the simultaneous call get first look at all inventory – without being charged extra for the honor. Considering that advertisers can be willing to pay up to 100 per cent more than normal for the first impression, giving away access for free is a huge missed opportunity from a monetization perspective.

Unified Auctions: The Way Forward
So, if waterfalls suck and in-app header bidding isn’t much better, than what can publishers do? The answer is the unified auction.

In comparison to in-app header bidding as it exists today, unified auctions bring the full promise of header bidding to the in-app environment. With a unified auction, all available inventory is up for grabs at once and anyone can bid on it. After mere milliseconds, a publisher knows who is bidding on inventory – and that they’re getting the best price possible from advertisers.

It’s easy to see the benefits here for publishers, as they always get the best price for their inventory without sacrificing their user experience. What’s not to love?

Unified auctions benefit advertisers and ad networks too. They gain much more control and transparency over the bidding and placement processes, and they’re never relegated to inopportune waterfall stack placements.

So, why haven’t unified auctions taken off? Well, anyone who benefits from the status quo – especially large, legacy players currently dominating the in-app ad space and those frequently on top of waterfalls – have a lot to lose. But, the benefits of unified auctions for everyone are too great to ignore. It’s time to embrace unified auctions and bring the real, lasting benefits of header bidding to the in-app environment.

Andrew Gerhart is vice president of publisher platforms at InMobi.

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With the acquisition, InMobi has created the ‘industry’s first mediation platform with unified programmatic auction for mobile in-app publishers’ – with an aim of enhancing monetisation for publishers around the world, as well as enhancing the InMobi Exchange.

“This acquisition fits in perfectly with our global strategy to bring best-in-class technology for premium publishers and driving mobile programmatic video revenues to them,” said Abhay Singhal, co-founder and CRO at InMobi. “Our combined entities will double our headcount in the US while establishing a product and tech hub for InMobi in Los Angeles, a hotspot of innovation for media and video content.

“We are two profitable companies combining forces in North America and this will further cement our leadership position in video advertising, enabling us to continue investing heavily.”

Together, InMobi and Aerserv boast over 90 per cent viewability and more than 70 per cent video completion rate. AerServ also brings over 75 demand side platforms, exchanges, and agencies from around the world to the table.

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The partnership gives marketers and brands access to InMobi’s global mobile consumer profiles and aims to enable marketers to leverage a more in-depth set of audience insights – such as age, gender, and household composition – both on the InMobi network and the InMobi exchange at ‘unparalleled scale and granularity’.

Through the combination of these insights, across the two platforms, the pair hope to offer unique audience segments that enable brands to reach the right audience – ‘maximising the value’ of their clients’ buying investments.

“From a data science perspective, machine learning models are only as good as the underlying data that supports them. This partnership builds on this key principle and the end result is huge win for clients,” said Ian Anderson, principal research scientist at InMobi.

Tom Laband, CEO and co-founder of Adsquare, added: “Leveraging mobile data enables moment marketing and holistic audience modelling, leading to more effective campaigns and a more personalised ad experience for end users.”

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