Measuring Mobile: Google Ventures Invests

It's difficult to convince businesses that your field or channel or platform or company is one in which they should invest their hard-won resources if you dont have good data to explain why you believe that.

Such is the plight that mobile advertising faces. Everyone gets that mobile is happening. That it is the present and, in all likelihood, the future. They even get that in light of that insight, mobile advertising makes sense.

What they do not get is who is providing the best means of generating impact with that advertising. And they dont get it because credible, reliable and comparable data have not been available.

One would think that given the numbers of very large enterprises dependent on income from this opportunity, such data would have been generated early and often. But data, like most other aspects of human endeavor, is fraught with disagreement, jealousy, self-interest and, not infrequently, irrationality.

This manifests itself in myriad ways, but in essence, creates situations in which competitors believe it is better to have no resource at all rather than agree to one that may cede advantage to a competitor.

However, the market - and demand for better information - has become sufficiently robust that participants can no longer getting away with telling anecdotal stories involving hand gestures reminiscent of their grandfathers' fishing tales. Which is why Google, dependent as it is on internet advertising revenue, has invested in a small-ish company that may have created the baseline measurement system. Whether others will accede to this wisdom is unclear. But the value of the need is now greater than the value of not providing it, which is usually a sign worth acknowledging. JL

Jeff Roberts reports in GigaOm:

The growth of the mobile advertising industry has been hampered by a lack of marketing data about smartphone users. Adelphic, a company that says it uses 30 signals to collect customer information, announced a major new investment s more consumers use smartphones to help them shop, advertisers are growing worried about how they will reach those customers. Unlike web sites, which allow brands to target specific users, mobile phones are a relative black hole when it comes to gathering consumer data.

This situation has led a start-up named Adelphic to offers tools that let marketers identify people, not just devices. Founded by two veterans of a mobile ad network used by Apple, Adelphic claims to use 30 different “signals” to recognize patterns and information about a given smartphone user.

On Tuesday, the company got a big boost with the announcement of a new $10 million investment led by Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of the search giant. The funding appears to reflect the widespread desire for an solution to the mobile ad conundrum.

“It’s hard for brands to find people,” said co-founder Jennifer Lum, explaining the issue in a phone interview. “It’s hard to describe and package up the mobile industry to sell to audiences.”

Adelphic’s “30 signal” solution sounds intriguing, but does it work? On regular websites, advertisers can easily gather signals through cookies that record information about a user. This task is much harder on smartphones, which collect far fewer cookies.

Lum offered few details but did say that Adelphic uses “inference algorithms” to blend a variety of data that let advertisers know if a smartphone customer had responded to previous offers. The “30 signals” are mostly a mystery, but a good guess is that they represent some combination of browsing history, log-ins, location data and more.

In any case, the $10 million could indicate that Adelphic is on to something. Lum says the company has provided analytics for 20 billion mobile ads since October.

For the mobile ad industry, the success of Adelphic’s tools could introduce more liquidity to the market as a result of advertisers gaining more confidence in the ability to reach given customer segments. The technology also lets marketers have a better chance to optimize their campaigns on the fly — using the analytics to tell if an ad campaign is working and change it if it is not.

Tuesday’s announcement will also lead to Rich Miner of Google Ventures joining Adelphic’s board. Original investors Matrix Partners, who helped put in $2 million in March, also participated in the $10 million investment.