Mobile Embrace’s 4th Screen Advertising has announced a partnership with MetService, giving the mobile advertising sales agency to publish client advertising across all the weather company’s mobile properties, including the mobile site, and the urban, rural, marine and snow weather apps.
This new deal follows on from the partnerships 4th Screen previously signed with Auto Trader NZ and BBC Worldwide, and further increases the reach of the company’s advertising network.
“As we grow our premium publisher network, we are reaching more than an estimated 2.5 million New Zealanders each month on app and mobile web platforms,” says Sarah Kavanagh, 4th Screen’s national sales manager.
According to Nielsen data, MetService receives about 66,000 daily unique visitors, making it an attractive prospect for advertisers and places it in a strong bargainging position when it comes to choosing advertising partners.
“We turned to Mobile Embrace’s 4th Screen Advertising because we wanted to utilise their expertise in the evolving mobile space,” explains MetService interactive manager Craig Delany. “As mobile experts, 4th Screen Advertising blends bespoke rich media creative with innovative made-for-mobile technology. This will enable MetService’s mobile audiences to experience ad content that is more relevant, more appropriate and more engaging.”
Previously, MetService has shown a willingness to give advertisers at least some level of creative freedom in terms of advertising on the site. One memorable example occurred in 2013, when Sky TV featured placed a series of shark fins around the map of New Zealand to promote Shark Week programming.
Kavanagh says that creativity is particularly important in mobile advertising, because brands are eager to cut through the cluttered market.
“The ability to connect more meaningfully with mobile users and target them more powerfully is imperative,” she says. “A scatter-gun approach that sees ad creative displayed on inappropriate mobile sites or apps that have no bearing on the consumer is not the best use of ad dollars … Brands need customised solutions. Mobile ad strategies that blend high-end creative with contextually relevant and premium content are much more likely to generate deeper levels of audience engagement and promote a more enriching mobile ad experience. This is why we use advanced audience and behavioural targeting techniques to ensure we target specific audience segments accessing our premium inventory.”
Recently, 4th Screen advertising released a series of four interactive mobile formats that were designed to give advertisers an alternative to the standard banner ad—and this type of innovation could prove important given that the latest IAB statistics showed ad spend on display advertising dipping from the previous year as advertisers now demand for more creative advertising executions.
