How mobile app publishers in APAC can unlock growing brand spend 

Ninety-two percent of the world’s population now accesses the internet through mobile phones, making mobile the preferred digital media platform and leading to its rapid adoption across a variety of industry verticals. The continuous shift of users towards digital media has also led to increased digital advertising to reach customers across multiple devices. 

A recent Forrester study commissioned by PubMatic found that advertisers are adding programmatic in-app advertising in their client’s media plans, with the mobile in-app channel capturing the most digital advertising spend today. Importantly, branding-led advertising objectives are now capturing a larger share of marketing budgets.

As more buyers embrace a mobile-first approach and increase spend on mobile in-app brand advertising, publishers in APAC must prepare themselves to capture global brand spend. 

Emerging Opportunities: Delivering Brand Outcomes 

For years, advertisers have used traditional channels, such as print and TV, to build their brands while relying on digital channels to achieve short-term performance goals. But as people spend more time on digital channels – advertisers are following to drive business goals, including branding objectives. 

Brands understand that sustained growth requires both short-term, revenue-generating marketing objectives as well as long-term, brand-building objectives such as boosting brand affinity and increasing customer lifetime value (LTV). 

Why Branding Ads Are Good for Mobile App Publishers 

Digital brand ads do what traditional advertising was built to do – be memorable, change opinions, and stay with users long after they see the ad. Unlike direct response or performance ads, brand ads require no action from the user, which means publishers can benefit from ad revenue without users having to navigate away from their app.

With no action required from the user, the brand ad experience is less disruptive than performance ads, making for a better overall user experience—a crucial benefit for gaming apps in particular. A less disruptive experience also means that users spend more time with an app, improving customer retention and improving their LTV. More benefits to be unveiled in PubMatic’s latest report The Brand Opportunity Playbook: How mobile app publishers in APAC can unlock global brand spend. 

Key Monetization Challenges for Mobile Publishers in APAC

While monetization opportunities in mobile in-app are growing, publishers in APAC have several challenges to contend with before they can capture global brand spend. 

Some key challenges include:

Changing user expectations: The value of users is rising. As preferences evolve, publishers will need a deeper understanding of their users, their tolerance level of ad serving and which ad formats will be least disruptive to their experience. 

Privacy regulations and targeting: As more industry giants make moves to protect user privacy, app developers are increasingly required to comply with new practices to remain on app stores. 

Standardized ad formats: As the market for mobile and in-app advertising scales, using ad formats that meet Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standards is critical to capturing global spend. Conversely, not adhering to these standards can result in a publisher’s ad revenue taking a serious hit.

Reliability of monetization SDKs: Integrating with the wrong SDK can cause irreparable damage to a publisher’s hard work and reputation. Unreliable SDKs can not only lead to revenue loss but also put apps at risk of being removed from the App Store or Google Play.

Keeping up with compliance and best practices: Aside from privacy, app developers are increasingly required to comply with industry standards to keep up with buyer preferences and demand. This includes best practices such as IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement SDK (OMSDK) and the more recent app-ads.txt – the app equivalent of ads.txt.

How Can Mobile App Publishers Capture Brand Spend? 

To access global brand demand, it is important for publishers to work with an SSP partner that has strong relationships and access to key media buyers in the desired markets. 

While many SSPs can seem similar, there are huge differences in the value they add. A key example of this is the number of demand-side platforms (DSP) and other demand-side connections they offer. Many DSPs, agencies, and buyers now have preferred SSP partnerships that enable supply path optimization (SPO). Under an SPO deal, an SSP becomes the preferred choice for advertisers to spend their budgets, opening up access to their portfolio of publishers.

In tandem with the right SSP partner, mobile publishers in APAC will also need to cover their bases and ensure their formats and practices are up to global standards to capture brand spend, being OMSDK compliant is one of which. Global buyers are looking for app inventories that are measurable. For publishers, being Open Measurement SDK (OMSDK) compliant can go a long way in achieving this.

For more information, and detailed best practice for mobile app publishers, download PubMatic’s latest report The Brand Opportunity Playbook: How mobile app publishers in APAC can unlock global brand spend. Publishers can find insights into these opportunities, including:

• An overview of the trends driving in-app advertising and brand spend
• Key challenges and opportunities for app publishers today
• Actionable tips on how mobile publishers in APAC can capture global brand spend
• How to select the right SSP Partner 
• Insights into how a leading casual games mobile app leveraged PubMatic’s solutions to exponentially increase its revenue

Download the report here today to learn more about how PubMatic’s solutions can improve your app monetization strategy.