JumpTap : Insights On Mobile Search
More news and analysis around today’s funding announcement from white-label mobile search and advertising company JumpTap.
The company has closed a new round of funding in excess of $26 million, a shot in the arm that Dan Olschwang, JumpTap CEO, tells me allows JumpTap to fine-tune its how it applies search technology and algorithms to improve mobile search and advertising targeting. (Thanks again to Julie Ginches for arranging the pre-briefing yesterday with Dan and Paran Johar, JumpTap CMO.)
At a different level, the investment is a confirmation of the increasing importance of mobile search in the scheme of things (interface to all things digital on mobile) and the central role of white-label providers in the competitive landscape. As Paran pointed in this post and again during our discussion: One of JumpTap’s key differentiators is its close relationship with carriers. “Whether it is demographic or location, whatever data sets they [carriers] want to pass to us enriches our targeting capabilities.”
Moving forward, Paran tells me JumpTap is putting more emphasis on the “flip-side” of this value proposition, allowing publishers and developers to monetize their inventory to a higher CPM. Expect more reach out, more education and more efforts to get the publishers in front of JumpTap’s advertisers. Smart move if we consider the interest of minority shareholder and major advertising/marketing company WPP. Leveraging JumpTap’s advertisers is a natural next step and the recent Pinch deal (covered here) is just the start.
How is this going to come together to help publishers monetize their inventory to a higher level? Dan walked me through an example of contextual targeting on ESPN. A sports content channel, so sports-related advertising is a perfect fit, right? Wrong.
“We’ve based our solution on search technology. We don’t rely only on the tags on the publisher side. When we place an ad on ESPN, we know it’s ESPN, but we also know it’s in the NHL section. We know this is the Bruin’s page, and we know which specific player the users [viewing the content] is interested in. We know if he’s interested in the scores or in last season’s stories. Now, how we do it? We can do this because our search technology includes crawlers and spiders, and we actually read the page that this individual is looking at and distill keywords out of that, as opposed to other ad networks that just rely on the fact that this is a sports site.”
Below are some excerpts of my conversation with Dan and Paran. You might also want to check out this post at MoCoNews, where Tricia Duryee reports on her catch-up call with Paran.
Read the entire post on Peggy’s blog MSearchGroove HERE.
