Chat with Michael Chang Co-Founder of Mobile Ad Funded Gaming enabler Greystripe
I feel quite guilty as I had passed Greystripe off as a yet another boring in game mobile advertising company with little competitive advantage and value.
But I got payback today when I shared water with Greystripe’s Michael Chang. I forgave him for being slightly late and then he surprised me by demonstrating that Greystripe is not only an ad network – it is also a distribution platform.
The company is an interconnection agent for publishers, advertisers, content providers and gaming sites.
What does it do?
Greystripe – ad wraps content.
Greystripe – distributes the content
Greystripe – works with mobile advertising companies to target ads to the games
Greystripe – gives publishers a mobile portal for free which it then users to continue to distribute the mobile games.
Yikes – that is pretty impressive. But I was concerned about the actual advert. I asked Michael about how the ads were served and free ads usually mean poor quality ones.
How shocked I was when I had a live demo. The ads were simply cool – they didn’t flash or annoy they popped up before the game and didn’t play or show. They just appeared with a menu tap to vote/ engage or skip.
I have to get a screenshot of this because it was very very clean. I haven’t seen an example of in game advertising like this before. It was actually quite classy. But not discreet – I mean visual enough for it to know it is an advert. A full page advert targeted and clean looking.
At this point, I grabbed the phone out of Michael’s hand incase he was kidding me. Then I realised this was an ODP. So that is the value add. Greystripe caches the adverts on the ODF so they down load fast and it can then tailor the user interface and experience and trigger adverts.
Nice.
Although, I thought to myself is there enough ad inventory to make this work? Will the ads be relevant and repetitive or what?
So then, Michael gave me a huge overview of the ad space for mobile gaming. Now, I understand why Yahoo! know Greystripe (where I got the initial introduction). Me, being me – I thought Yahoo! was going to buy Greystripe! But actually Yahoo! is an advertiser partner and buys ads on the GreyStripe distribution network.
Well. Unkasoft remain my favour mobile gaming company because they ran a free GoMo News advertising campaign for us during Mobile World Congress – but Greystripe is pretty damn good.
The innovation with the distribution is spot on and a differentiator for the company vs other providers and it makes Greystripe more lucrative to the advertising market too as the audience is the same so the target market spot on for brands.
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