GoMo interview with Moshe Vaknin, Founder & CEO of mobile advertiser Toda!Cell

We first encountered Toda!Cell last week, when it announced a $1 million investment from AfterDox. Bena covered the news back then, but we got interested enough to do a follow-up interview. I got the chance to chat with Toda!Cell Founder & CEO, Moshe Vaknin.

Tell me about the investment from AfterDox. What interested them in you?

They gave us that money to push our product into the marketplace. We launched only a few months ago, but AfterDox like our approach to mobile advertising. We provide what we like to call “100% transparency”. We work very closely with advertisers to increase their efficiency. We don’t look only at the CTR level. Our main objective is to properly use technology to increase the ROI for advertisers

What kind of mobile advertising do you do?

Currently we focus only on display. We believe that display on the mobile is critical. More important than the position of the ad is the targeting. When you load a mobile web page, you cannot help but see an ad. The important part is the see the right ad.

So how does the Toda!Cell offering work?

Take someone who wants to advertise on-line betting, and is willing to pay two dollars for every registered user. CTR is not enough for this - that’s the publisher part of the job. What we can offer is to constantly monitor on which publisher that advertisers ad is performing well. We can tell them 3 or 5 publishers that are seeing good hits for them. That way they can streamline their media spend. They can spend the money in the right places, rather than throwing their money to blind networks.

So you serve ads to multiple publishers through your network?

We work closely with publishers and advertisers. When we invite a publisher to join Toda!Cell, we don’t just say “join our network!” and leave it at that. We carefully map their entire inventory of ads. So we end up with in depth knowledge of the publishers inventory - down to what percentage of ads is served to each gender.

The reason we do that is for our advertisers. One advertisers might want to target mainly females. One advertiser might want to target the over-30s. So we can send their ads to the best publisher.

You need good metrics to do that. How do you collect user data?

We collect data in two ways. One way is to get it from the publisher, if the publisher collects data. Some publishers ask their users to provide gender information, age and other parameters. We also apply our own technology, what we call the “Click and Tell” consult. We spend a few months with the publisher, and work through click-and-tell scenarios with their inventory together. So we take what information the publisher has, and fill in the rest by observing how their audience interacts with advertisements. If you have a lot of success with football ads, for example, you can assume that about 80% of that is from male users. By adding up a lot of bits of click-and-tell data like that over a few months, you can build up a good picture of the behaviour and preferences of the users for that publisher.

We can then do a very good match between an advertiser and the publisher. So we can get good CTR for the publisher, and good ROI for the advertiser. But most importantly we want to get repeat advertisers for the publisher. We want advertisers to come back again. If an advertiser commits a few thousand to begin with, once that has run out we ask them to commit for six months. We believe that once you create a good match between an advertiser and a publisher, you get good efficiency and good ROI. And that leads to better value for inventory, and return business.

When it comes to the actual publishing, do you hand the ads over to publishers, or do you have your own platform?

We have our own network, which we serve ads on through different publishers.

How many publisher are on that network?

So far, 10 publishers. We’re quite selective who we work with. The objective is to have 200 nice sized publishers within 2 years. Our intention is not to just cover the entire inventory for a publisher - we want to be premium. Our objective is to cover the top 30-35% of a publishers inventory. By doing that, we can create a premium network that is optimised for both publishers and advertisers. We want to serve a smaller number of ads with a select group of publishers.

You’re avoiding carriers completely. You don’t want to do on-portal advertising at all. So what kind of publishers do you target?

We love mobile social networks. We love them a lot. We also like to publish on music sites and the like, but we think social networks are the future of off-portal. We do not believe in the future of on-portal. We believe that in a year or two, off-portal will be the clear leader in mobile Internet. On off-portal you don’t have the limitations that carriers try to put in place. An open market and an open platform is what we want.

Would you say that off-portal isn’t ready yet?

This is our prediction. In two years, off-portal will account for 40% or 50% of the market. It is already about 28% in the UK, and around 15% in the US. In 2 to 4 years, we expect it to be around 50-50. And social networks are responsible for a big chunk of that growth.

What countries do you mostly target?

50% of our traffic is from the USA, and about 20% would be Europe. There are other countries, but the US and Europe would be our main targets. Not just because we strongly believe in the off-portal market in those areas, but also because they have better monetisation potential for publishers.

There are a lot of companies out there who target advertisements by publisher, and a lot of companies who do display advertising. Why should someone advertise with you?

Our main differentiation is efficiency. We create high efficiency for advertisers. Our engine never stops optimising the flow of ads - if a publisher stops being effective with a certain ad, we stop publishing through them.

What we think?

That was an interesting interview, and I think Toda!Cell have potential. But they are facing stiff competition. Ring Ring Media, to name but one, has an extremely similar offering and they’ve been doing this a lot longer. Not just that, but Toda!Cells insistence on remaining off-portal could work in the long run. But if off-portal isn’t as great a success as Toda!Cell believes, you can be sure those principles will be compromised to ensure profitability. Finally, there are many who believe that display is not the future of mobile advertising. It might have a place on mobile web capable smartphones, but there are many more mobile disciplines than just display.

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