Doing so could secure more media dollars flowing through both businesses. Consider this: Liftoff delivers two billion engaging ads each day across more than 500,000 mobile apps in more than 140 countries. Vungle, on the other hand, has over 100,000 direct SDK integrations across leading mobile app publishers and 15,000 individual content creators across its influencer marketing platform, in addition to other services across user acquisition, creative technologies, and content analytics.

“The main objective of the merged entity is to reduce the marginal cost of production,” said Tom Triscari, a programmatic economist at consulting firm Lemonade Projects. When ad impressions are the gizmo that comes off the production line, the idea is to increase production through fewer fixed costs and also realize a reduction in variable cost (server clusters, data processing, etc). This means the marginal cost is reduced, so the merged entity can now lower its price to be more competitive and still earn a respectable profit margin.”

It’s a move straight from the vertical integration playbook with both Liftoff and Vungle seeking some efficiency benefits from operating across both the demand and supply side of in-app ad spending. Liftoff covers the dollars flowing from media buyers in so far as it helps those with mobile apps identify, grow and retain their audiences through user acquisition and retargeting campaigns. On the flipside, Vungle connects advertisers with mobile app publishers who want to monetize their apps. Now, those businesses can tackle the myriad of problems around in-app advertising, from creative to measurement, from different angles, said Liftoff co-founder and CEO Mark Ellis.

One of those problems is tracking — specifically, the way advertisers track users is being upended by the biggest owners of online media — when it comes to apps and sites on Apple devices. Both Liftoff and Vungle are in rude health despite the disruption, said Ellis. In fact, Apple’s changes have pushed media dollars into their businesses, rather than sucked it from them, he added. It’s still early days, however, and the business is braced for a loss of individual-level addressable media on those devices moving forward. In fact, the way Ellis sees it, the future will require businesses like Liftoff and Vungle to take a more portfolio-based approach to identify those audiences. This means leveraging three or four key approaches, from contextual to first-party IDs, in tandem.

“Our strategy is to take advantage of data that our customers impart to us to be able to do what we do as well as the data we collect ourselves,” said Ellis. …read more

Source:: Digiday