Phew! Another crazy year for us at InMobi just went by. It’s been 5 such crazy years since I joined this place, and while I have donned several roles in the past here, I must confess that steering the product ship has been the most challenging yet rewarding stint so far.
The mobile advertising space continues to evolve at breakneck speed and demands agility, adeptness and endurance all at once -- not just to survive the pace of changes, but also to lead them from the front. Thankfully, these are the very strengths that form the core of every InMobian’s DNA and allow us to shape the course of the mobile ecosystem as an independent voice of authority. In short, building products at InMobi is like running a marathon at the speed of a sprint!
In 2014, InMobi consolidated its position as an undoubted product & technology thought leader in mobile advertising. Our focus has been to provide the most meaningful & compelling user experiences on mobile - through a powerful combination of Yin (Art) (showing ads that consumers love) and Yang(Science) (making it relevant by leveraging our deep user understanding for powerful targeting & optimization).
Proud to share a quick summary of the kick-ass products we rolled out in 2014 for app developers and brand/agency clients:
2014 - For global app developers (across UA and Monetization)
- Jan 2014: We announced the launch of the world’s most advanced and scalable Native Advertising Platform allowing developers & publishers to render ads that seamlessly merged with their app’s environment and enhanced their user experience.
- Feb 2014: Announced the launch of our Video Ads platform, that continue to deliver the best performance and quality for our performance advertisers.
- April 2014: We brought native advertising to the masses, by opening up our native ads platform to self-serve publishers - a week before Facebook announced FAN! 😉
- May 2014: We launched the world’s largest Native Ads Exchange in partnership with Rubicon Project that allows marketers to buy native ads programmatically across mobile apps.
- July 2014: Launched a complete game monetization suite including native interstitials, video and rewarded video formats that help developers monetize users based on the gamer’s emotional state. We also launched the industry’s first Playable Ads format in partnership with Voxel.
- Oct 2014: We gave a sneak preview of our upcoming product called Appographic Targeting, that allows app developers to promote apps to users based on their unique app and game preferences.
- Dec 2014: Announced the Mobile Tracking & Attribution Partnership (MTAP) program between InMobi and carefully selected independent mobile attribution platforms to provide advertisers the best-in-class solutions for independent, secure and accurate attribution.
2014 - For our brand & agency clients
- Jan 2014: Launched an interactive Video Ads Platform to enable emotive story-telling for brand advertisers, replete with 4 different formats -interactive canvas, smart ads, video continuum and form capture.
- Aug 2014 : Announced our partnership with Factual to provide geo-derived audience targeting capability to InMobi’s brand advertisers.
- Oct 2014 : In a first-of-its-kind move, we took the bold step of offering Guaranteed Outcomes to ensure brands meet their KPIs with each and every ad impression.
- Oct 2014 : InMobi partnered with geo-location technology provider Digital Element, to leverage “accurate and hyperlocal” IP geo-location data for enhanced ad targeting.
- Nov 2014 : We launched the InMobi Audience Platform for advertisers in Australia to tap into mobile audience data to enable them to optimise budgets more efficiently and gain deeper insights to their target audience whilst minimising wastage.
- Dec 2014 : Opened up InMobi audience personas on the InMobi exchange, allowing programmatic buyers to buy audience segments constructed using 120 user signals from the more than 1 trillion consumer interactions collected through the InMobi SDK.
Needless to say, it has been an exhausting year but we feel damn proud of what we’ve achieved. As we retire into the eve of the new year, my team & I are proud and confident that we will continue to make giant strides towards our destiny and go after bigger, hairier and even more audacious goals in 2015. Watch this space !!
Wishing everyone a wonderful & prosperous new year!
