Tapjoy Says Its New nGen Platform Can Deliver The Right Mobile Ads At The Right Moment

Mobile advertising company Tapjoy is launching a new platform today that it calls nGen, and CEO Steve Wadsworth told me it reflects a broader transformation at the company.

“In a lot of ways, it’s a new company,” said Wadsworth, who took over at the end of 2012. “We’ve been rebuilding the senior management team … We have done a lot of things to build the company back up to get this product out the door. It all comes together in a much more comprehensive solution for app monetization for publishers.”

Apparently, the in-game offers that Tapjoy is known (and criticized) for will still be a part of the product, but nGen is a broader platform for mobile ads. The goal, the company says, is to enable publishers to show “the right ad to the right user at the right moment.”

So nGen can deliver a variety of different ads, ranging from full-screen interstitials to a promotional message from the publisher. Those ads are tied to events in the app, and they can be aimed at specific user groups, as well as tested and updated dynamically.

For example, Keith Pichelman, CEO of game developer Concrete Software, said that his team only included “a handful of ads here and there” in their title PBA Bowling Challenge, because “we didn’t want to scare the users away.” One of the difficulties, he said, was the fact that if Concrete wanted to test or tweak an ad, an engineer would have to code it in and update the app.

With nGen, on the other hand, you can update the ads without new code, so Pichelman said he felt comfortable experimenting with different options and ideas (you can see a couple of those ads in the screenshots of the PBA app above), ultimately resulting in a 130 percent increase in average revenue per daily user.

Chief Product Officer Jeff Drobick (who joined Tapjoy last year) said one of the goals for nGen was to create something broad enough that developers no longer need to integrate with “too many SDKs to get this whole solution stack” and instead treat Tapjoy as “a single partner that can do more.” He also suggested that this will help as Tapjoy continues expanding to non-gaming apps.

Tapjoy says nGen went into alpha testing in the third quarter of last year, and is now entering general availability.