Jumptap puts mobile advertising in the control of consumers

As the field of mobile advertising ages and matures, a particular notion has been getting more and more attention. The idea is that consumers should have more control over what advertising they see on their devices. Massive mobile ad network Jumptap has today announced a new service it is calling “consumer intelligence”, which gives consumers more choice when it comes to the ads served to them over the Jumptap network. I interviewed Jumptap CMO Paran Johar to get an insight into the service.

What are you offering consumers here?

Other ad networks have been struggling with who to focus their efforts on – with operators, advertisers, publishers and others requiring attention. We’ve taken a different approach, and put the end-user right at centre of the ecosystem. The key point here is to allow them to manage their profile. We have three main things that we want the customer to be able to access through our system: full transparency, privacy and preferences. The mobile phone is a completely different medium. Because of its personal nature, users really don’t want to see the kind of “spam advertising” that would be acceptable in print, TV or internet. You need to do things differently on mobile. The consumer needs to have a huge degree of control over the ads they see, while being confident that it’s a completely confidential service.

What’s the user experience?

We wanted to keep this as simple as possible, as well as making it completely up to the user whether they want it or not. But it’s important to remember that you CAN’T opt out of advertising. No matter where you go, you’re going to encounter ads. On TV, in your newspaper, on billboards… and on your phone. No matter you go, you’ll see advertising. We’re attempting to ensure that the ads you see are actually relevant to you. So if you choose to opt in with us, we simply go through a set of interest groups that you check.

People are happy to provide demographic information when it comes to a social network – less so with an advertiser network. How do intend to overcome that?

The thing is that users already understand the concept of advertising paying for things. They know that TV commercials pay for the content they see on the TV, it pays for the actors and the creators. But it’ll be a much more natural process on our platform. If I’m in the market for a new car, for example, I genuinely WANT to get served ads that are relevant. I want to see lease offers for cars in the locality. There’s a value exchange there. And the better demographic information the user provides us with, the better the value exchange become. And I believe users understand that. Advertising is changing, and the concept of just buying impressions doesn’t really work anymore. On mobile, you have to make engagements.

Alcatel-Lucent announced a service similar to this recently, called Optism. As an infrastructure provider, it can offer a pretty heavy weight solution for advertisers. How would you convince an advertiser that they’re better off with Jumptap?

Many technology and infrastructure providers have technologies like this. They come into mobile advertising ecosystem because they see the advantage there, and know that there’s money to be made. Our advantage is that we haven’t just decided to jump into mobile – we’ve been doing this for a long time. We have 80% of the carrier business in the US. That doesn’t happen over night. There is a process one has to go through to sell in to the various players in the ecosystem, include carriers, publishers and advertisers.

Future plans for the service?

The first phase is just to provide a value exchange. It could evolve to other media in time… PC internet has promised advertising like this for years, but has never delivered. It didn’t need to, because people were happy to ignore spam ads on that less-personal medium. But the growth of advertising solutions like this could very easily prove that user-control works on any platform, and could empower advertising on the on-line web.

It’s important to know that we are a completely OPEN system. We work on any device, any platform, any operator. I have huge experience with advertising agencies, having run a few of them myself! I know what they want. They care about two main things: one is reaching the audience, the second is engaging their audience. They don’t care about devices, they just want to make sure the consumer is engaging.