Event Diary - IAB Mobile Symposium

InMobi regularly participates in and contributes to a series of events, meetups, and webinars across the globe, sharing best practices with partners and thought leaders. In this edition of the InMobi Event Diary, we are looking at the highlights and developments from InMobi’s participation in the 2017 IAB Mobile Symposium, where InMobi was the premier sponsor. Industry leaders and executives from the ecosystem came together to address how publishers and marketers should be building out their mobile strategies, measuring efficacy, and ensuring their mobile campaigns integrate well with the consumer experience. The sessions and town halls provided glimpses of the tools that modern marketers are utilizing to succeed in today’s mobile world.

InMobi was proud to be the premier sponsor of this year's IAB Mobile Symposium. Amongst those who attended included leading agency holding groups, DSP partners and leaders from the mobile app marketing space. The intention was to discuss the latest trends in mobile and engage in a frank discussion on the path forward in mobile.

InMobi kicked off the first town hall of the day moderated by Anne Frisbie, Senior Vice President, Global Brand and Programmatic at InMobi and Chris Kuist, Senior Vice President of Research and Impact at IAB.

InMobi’s Anne Frisbie delivered an insightful speech about the need to improve industry standards. She also spoke about the increased popularity of video-based ads on mobile, and InMobi's approach to "Doing Mobile Video Right" so as to provide a superior experience to consumers. This strategy underlined the need to provide complete transparency in the buying process, through programmatic buying, with 3rd party verification at an impression level.

Anne also talked about the importance of brands to align with the right technology stack deliberately built for connected devices, to ensure the consumer video experience is buffer free and that there is no trade-off between viewability and media effectiveness. She then elaborated on how to measure mobile brand safety metrics such as AVOC (Audible and Visible on Completion) and IVT (Invalid Traffic) as well as new benchmarks in the market such as the Moat Video Score.

During this open town hall conversation, Anne addressed some of the concerns brought up by the audience regarding measurement of their cross-platform buys. Source of such concerns stemmed from not being able to gain clear data signals around in-app campaigns using browser-based VPAID technology. These limitations had resulted in the buyers deciding to eliminate mobile apps from their buy, due to a lack of independent in-app viewability measurement metrics.

Anne went into great detail on how InMobi was focusing on a VAST-based solution to provide a buffer-free video experience for consumers. The VAST based solution would enable InMobi to provide an interactive experience to users without suffering a drop in completion rates. InMobi's innovative mobile video ad solution could also be verified independently by IAS and Moat as well as traded programmatically, across platforms such as Adobe and The Trade Desk.

All attendees were given gifts of clip-on fisheye lenses to take incredible wide-angle smartphone photos to highlight InMobi’s industry leading in-app viewability suite with IAS and Moat.

The InMobi team had a great time talking to attendees and managed to get some great photos from behind the scenes. Multiple agency buyers joined the InMobi team after the session to discuss how they could improve their in-app video metrics, as in-app video buying is becoming a larger part of their overall marketing mix. Industry feedback from the approach adopted by InMobi was in agreement that VAST technology is the optimal buffer free experience for consumers on connected devices.

There is now starting to be industry alignment that VAST technology can not only provide the best consumer experience but also provide an optimal measurement platform for brands to maximize their media effectiveness, without a trade off in interactivity and in-app viewability.