What are your biggest opportunities & challenges for the next 12-24 months?
The biggest opportunity for S4M is bringing a proven mobile solution to the US market that provides agencies and brands with a tool to fully track and measure mobile campaign performance from any source in a transparent manner. There is certainly a need in the US market to address mobile, while keeping fraud detection, viewability and attribution across web and apps in mind.
The challenges S4M faces in the US is market saturation and a crowded marketplace. Mixed in with this dynamic is confusion on what each company does and the needs they serve. In order to thrive, we aim to bring clear solutions that cut through the noise and make sense to marketers.
What keeps your clients up at night?
In a nutshell: wasted ad dollars. Marketers are nervous about their spend and not fully knowing where their mobile campaigns are running. In addition, they are also worried about delivering on the KPI or ROI they promised to stakeholders.
What’s the hardest thing to educate clients about?
The technology is hard to wrap your head around, yet we need to explain facets of it to get buy-in from our clients. Attribution is especially difficult as there are so many moving parts and formulas that arrive at the results. Explaining to marketers how technology can address their specific business challenges or cases is also hard since it’s specific to each marketer and may even vary greatly by campaigns.
What are some unmet needs in the marketing technology landscape?
I think attribution, viewability/fraud detection, and audience delivery in mobile – particularly in app – is far from solved here. For example, Apple’s new IOS is blocking ads on the browser and advertisers are nervous. However, the reality is that the majority of mobile behavior is app-based. This gives you an idea of how nascent the mobile ad industry is. S4M is on a good path to help address these unmet needs.
How do you see mobile advertising changing over the next year?
I see mobile advertising being delivered in more compelling user friendly formats, like native, and in much better context. Additionally, I think we will see better standards established around these new formats. The promise of HTML 5 will be realized and I think things like audience delivery, viewable impressions and fraud detection will be better addressed over the next year.
–Brian Cronin is GM, North America at S4M
