In November 2011, Smaato Inc., a mobile advertising and ad optimizing company, significantly upgraded its Smaato Open Mobile Advertising (SOMA) platform with vital improvements in RTB, parallel ad requests, rich media and geo-location targeting. Smaato is the largest mobile Sell Side Platform (SSP) and is energetically pioneering the push for mobile RTB on a global level with its vast reach of serving ads in 230+ countries and territories.

StrikeAd, a mobile advertising specialist that provides media agencies with the expertise to better leverage their mobile budgets, and Fiksu, a mobile marketing technology company that helps mobile app brands on iOS and Android platforms achieve their business goals faster and more cost-effectively, joined Smaato's 70+ mobile ad networks and ad revenue sources connected to SOMA. For all mobile RTB becomes available, according to the OpenRTB mobile 2.0 standard.

OpenRTB mobile is a sub-committee of OpenRTB, a consortium of digital media companies dedicated to accelerating the growth of the real-time bidding (RTB) marketplace, by providing open industry standards for communication between mobile ad inventory buyers and sellers.

"OpenRTB mobile members, like Fiksu and Smaato, will help the mobile advertising ecosystem become more efficient and benefit both mobile advertisers and mobile publishers", said Micah Adler, Fiksu Founder and CEO, adding: "By combining Smaato's strategic publisher relationships and massive inventory base with Fiksu's industry leading data set and bidding algorithms, our partnership can provide unprecedented levels of performance for the global mobile marketing ecosystem."

Alex Rahaman, CEO of StrikeAd, emphasizes: "Brands and agencies now know that mobile is essential to engage with consumers. As a result, we see a surge in demand for more intelligent and targeted access to high quality ad inventory."

The pioneering partnerships enable advertisers to have unprecedented access to Smaato's high quality advertising inventory in the US, Europe and Asia. With Smaato's extensive range of RTB enabled inventory, more control and choices where to place ads targeted are given, so that brands can optimize their advertising for better ROI and consumer engagement.

Ragnar Kruse, CEO and Co-Founder of Smaato Inc. stated: "RTB is benefiting Smaato's app developers and mobile publishers with enhanced control and maximized pricing. Our SOMA platform is already processing huge volumes of ad requests optimized in real-time. Now with Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) and other new players, RTB will enhance the relevance for mobile users as well as data analysis in our publisher dashboards."

The main features of Smaato's SOMA platform are the real time optimization of publishers' ad impressions on a global scale; rich media (including video) and enriched ad requests with audience data (i.e. gender, age, location) plus device and carrier targeting.

RTB with automated media buying processes leads to fair pricing and an efficient market. Mobile publishers and app developers benefit by being able to monetize their inventory with more control over the potential advertiser relevance and pricing.

Better data, improved targeting technology, and real-time bidding allow advertisers to buy based upon actual audience characteristics rather than just ad spaces. This higher transparency for the advertiser leads to reallocation of significant budgets in new channels and to higher eCPMs for the publisher.

Mobile advertising will top $5.3 billion in 2012 globally, according to Nick Lane, Chief Analyst of mobileSQUARED. He asserts: "Creating an open bidding interface between inventory suppliers and bidders will add strong growth and drive greater innovation, cooperation and profitability for the entire ecosystem. We estimate an open RTB standard supported by pioneers like Smaato will accelerate adoption of real-time bidding auctions by a great factor."

The more RTB is evolving in the online advertising space, the more media buyers are looking to expand the automated buying processes to mobile inventory. Smaato values better targeting data available in real-time as a great step forward to drive mobile into the advertising mainstream.

By MediaBUZZ