Startup Moasis is offering advertisers a new way to run location-targeted ads, one that could hopefully make the process more accessible to both ad agencies and small businesses.
Location is a big buzzwords right now, but co-founder and CEO Ryan Golden tells me that most mobile ad companies are approaching the market from an engineering perspective, while Moasis is taking a marketer’s point of view. (Golden, for example, has founded or co-founded several marketing companies, and he also worked at global agency Tribal DDB.) The company, he says, sits at the intersection of “two roads — the data road and the delivery road.”
Although Moasis has already been running campaigns for early advertisers, it’s officially launching its Geo-Grid Display Platform today. As the name implies, the heart of the platform is a grid-based approached to ad targeting — markets are divided into grids, then advertisers can select the grids where they want their ads to be shown. Golden says this offers advertisers the control they need to target ads as narrowly or as broadly as they like, whether they’re aiming for a couple of blocks, a neighborhood, a city, or an entire region.
Golden and his team demonstrated the platform for me, creating a “localizement” in minutes, selecting the grids that they want to target, adding other rules like the time of day that they want the campaign to run, then entering the amount they’re willing to bid for each impression. And as advertisers see what’s working, they can also alter their campaign in real-time.
Moasis isn’t trying to compete with mobile ad networks, Golden says, and instead wants to partner with them to distribute location-targeted ads. (The company also announced partnership with app development platform Appcelerator.) Theoretically, these ads don’t even have to be limited to mobile phones, but could run on things like transit signage and digital billboards.
The company is self-funded.
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
