The following interview is provided by TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company that connects buyers and sellers of business technology through meaningful relationships.
Gil Shoham, CEO of mobile advertising technology platform Supersonic, spoke with TechnologyAdvice host Clark Buckner about their recent Series B Funding, current trends in the mobile advertising space, and the role of big data.
Founded in 2009, the company originally carried the brand Supersonic Ads. They recently repositioned and rebranded as Supersonic, revealing a new website which they first announced at the 2014 Casual Connect. Supersonic currently has teams in San Francisco, New York, and London, but plans to expand soon into other markets.
Supersonic recently finalized Series B Funding with one of China’s largest venture capital firms, SAIF Partners. Supersonic sought $15 million in funding for two main reasons:
Expansion: This investment round was part of its expansion in the Asian-Pacific region. Supersonic sees huge potential in the Asian market. Consequently, they see the need to have a good team locally deployed there and expect to open offices in China, Japan, and India soon.
Investment: This round is also part of their investment in technology, and specifically in the Mobile Supply-Side-Platform (SSP) and audience targeting space.
Supersonic is currently building a mobile app supply-side-platform that helps developers work with multiple ad networks through interface integration. Its technology expansion aims to extract user data from the SSP and make it available to advertisers, both for user acquisition and branding.
Over years of working closely with developers, Supersonic believes that much more can be done than just the basic user-level targeting typically performed today. They are specifically looking at a few different layers of data and targeting such as:
App engagement: How can they extract more data from applications regarding in-app user engagement? Based on that, prediction models can be built to understand what kinds of apps would work well for specific users.
Integrating third-party data providers: How can collecting first-party and third-party data help increase user targeting? This marks an improved, additional targeting platform to provide for a better user experience.
Shoham believes this is an early stage in the industry, as there are many more solutions yet to be built in the audience-targeting space.
When asked about the role big data might have in mobile gaming over the next five years, Shoham stressed the importance of understanding the types of relevant data for certain types of transactions. This is especially crucial considering the huge amount of user data that needs to be collected and processed in real time.
Real-time bidding is part of this trend in big data, advertising, and gaming. Shoham explained that platforms today need bids from a large number of advertisers, which are growing all the time, with 200 to 300 advertisers bidding for every impression in real time.
To Shoham, such large-scale and ever-growing numbers meeting a seemingly ever-growing demand, combined with more and more pinpoint user data collected on mobile devices, can’t help but to expand advertising’s targeting capabilities in the near future.
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