RingRing Media on success in mobile advertising and the importance of accounting

RingRing Media is one of the companies I would have loved to catch up with over MWC, but never had the chance. Yesterday, it announced it has quadrupled it’s mobile search spend following good campaign results. We had a post-MWC brief with RingRing about what it does in the mobile advertising space, and what is required to achieve a good level of success.

We talked to Ben Tatton-Brown, Managing Director and Harry Dewhirst, Media Director. They explained that RingRing operates, essentially, from two revenue streams. The first is as a mobile advertising planning and buying agency. The second is through it’s platform, a revenue optimization engine that optimises ads in real-time.

Planning and buying: RingRing deals with a broad range of clients and brands, including handset manufacturers, football clubs and gaming companies. Just before MWC, RingRing announced it had booked 4 million dollars for it’s clients, becoming AdMob and Yahoos largest spending agency in Europe. I had brushed past this news when it was initially released, but Harry explained that Account Management is actually RingRing’s largest team. As a complete service it goes from negotiating rates with advertisers, setting up and running the campaigns, and reporting on their performance. A huge amount of time and effort goes into campaign tracking and management, reporting on performance, removing campaigns that don’t work, etc.

Revenue Optimisation Engine: This learning system, created from the ground up by RingRing, is an ad optimisation platform. For agencies who wish to advertise, the platform connects to multiple ad networks - and then optimises on the fly. Any single ad is routed to the best stream for it, based on information collected from the history and performance of each ad network for each publisher. So, for example, the engine might learn that ads from Verizon perform better at 3 o’clock in the afternoon on a Thursday. From then on, it would take that info into account when placing Verizon ads. The engine is connected to about 10 networks and 30 publishers and is currently doing about 6 million ad impressions a day, across about 80 territories

What we think?

Ben said something that really tickled me: “One of the reasons we are so successful is because the market is so fragmented. There are so many buying points, and we cut through that to get the best placement.” That’s got to be the first time I’ve heard anyone talk about mobile web fragmentation in a positive light. He makes a good point though. As long as the mobile Internet remains so convoluted, there will be great opportunities for ad network aggregating services like this and the recently announced (and very similar) Ochre.

Looking at the future, RingRing predicts that spend will continue to rise, especially in emerging markets. It seems likely that some traditional agencies will start pushing into the mobile ad space. With the spread of smartphones, mobile advertising is becoming much more trackable and controllable, and therefore more attractive to outside agencies.