Source: THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS | View Online Article

Anuj Kumar, Co-Founder of mobile media company Affle and rich media and video advertising platform Ripple says the mobile ad industry is currently witnessing unprecedented momentum and optimism. Here are his top five predictions for what would help drive much greater industry growth in 2014.

1) Programmatic with Punch: Programmatic buying and selling has been one of the biggest growth areas for mobile advertising in 2013. With greater growth in mobile internet

consumption and thus significantly greater inventory availability, publishers would continue to see this as a significant driver to enhance yield. However, the knock-out punch for

programmatic would come in through integration of third party DMP type data, social graph data, carrier data & context data to make Programmatically procured mobile inventory

much richer and targeted vs. how mobile display advertising is today. Watch out thus for much greater business getting allocated to Technology led ad networks, DSP�s, Trading desks etc.

2) Paid Social marries Display: The consumer time spent on social continues to grow with increasing options like Instagram, Path, Pinterest, Snapchat, Wechat, Tumblr and more

beyond the old war horses – Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn. Also social is growing to become a completely mobile phenomenon with only a small and shrinking support role being played

by the PC. With social networks embracing advertising successfully (FB, Twitter and now Instagram) the amount of mobile advertising options available to an advertisers are growing manifold. However, watch out for two key developments which should make this business much larger and help create a singular Paid Social and Mobile display marketplace.

a. Launch of Facebook exchange for mobile and Twitter launching its own programmatic platform after the Mopub acquisition integration. These would be big game changers for mobile ads as with these moves significantly larger volumes of super targeted mobile ad inventory would become available to advertisers.

b. Rich Media on social: This would provide for a big boost for brand advertisers to better leverage social and mobile. We have seen signs of this becoming an industry growth driver in 2013 and expect this to be a significant contributor in industry growth in 2014.

3) Rich Media gets richer: Rich Media has been a big driver to get top brands to adopt mobile advertising in 2013. Rich media capabilities have also grown significantly, helped by growing smartphones functionalities and easier availability of public content & context APIs which make rich media ads have a greater real time context. However, the biggest growth for rich media would come in through greater adoption and usage of rich media authoring platforms which make building of these ad units much more scalable and cost efficient. Also expect to see more solutions blending the audience intelligence of Programmatic with the Engagements/Creative execution capabilities of Rich Media to create the true marriage of the Math Men & Mad Men thus making mobile ads more meaningful.

4) From premium Publishers to premium Data: We have long lived in an era where media teams and advertisers have felt more comfortable with publisher led buying instead of audience buying on digital media. This has happened due to publisher driven sales efforts and limited availability of audience data. I expect this to change significantly with availability of much richer user data and adoption of programmatic helping shift ad dollars in favor of audience buying vs. publisher buying. Given the stage of the digital ad market in India, this trend will start to be felt in 2014 with much greater impact happening over a longer period.

5) Ads become content: The lines between advertising and content when blurred make advertising more impactful. We have already seen it starting to happen on traditional media where advertisers are allocating greater budgets on branded content/in program placements etc. Mobile advertising till now has had defined boundaries between advertising and content. We expect these lines to blur thus creating a much larger marketplace for native ads. We need to look no further than the Facebook newsfeed ads to estimate how dramatically this could alter the industry and create ad opportunities with greater social context and much higher impact.