Medialets Turns On Private Marketplace For Mobile Ads

Buying mobile ads across different apps and mobile sites is a highly inefficient process today. There are dozens of ad formats, about 85 percent of mobile ad inventory goes unsold, and it is difficult for advertisers to reach the scale they require. Mobile ads are ripe for a marketplace to make it more efficient, but publishers are wary of ad marketplaces, having seen how they pushed down average prices per impression on the desktop web. Today, Medialets is launching a private marketplace for mobile ads which attempts to address the problems of both mobile publishers and advertisers in a unique way.

To protect app and mobile web publishers from the brutal commoditization marketplaces tend to impose on prices, Medialets allows publishers to set pricing floors and even price their inventory differently for different advertisers. They can add whitelists of advertisers who can buy their mobile ad inventory and adjust those permissions per campaign. This allows them to block Chevy ads if they are running an exclusive Toyota sponsorship, for instance, or more generally control the quality of the advertisements which appear on their apps and mobile sites.

For advertisers and media buyers, they can manage their own whitelist of premium apps and mobile sites, pushing out their campaigns to multiple mobile publishers. The marketplace supports direct buys, guaranteed pricing, reserved pricing, and real time bidding. They can keep their mobile ad units in a central repository, deploy them to the mobile publishers on the marketplace, and measure their effectiveness.

The private marketplace is invite-only, and today launches with 40 publishers and top brands.