Smaato Powers Ahead with Record Growth

Smaato, the leading mobile ad optimization platform, continues its momentum and record growth as the company powers into 2012 setting Smaato on track to earn title as the undisputed global leader in mobile advertising.

Record Growth and Momentum

2011 proved to be a record year for Smaato with the mobile advertising leader reporting over 200% growth, adding offices in Singapore, New York, London, Jakarta and Mumbai.

Smaato also expanded its global platform to include an additional 44,000 app developers and publishers and 28 new ad networks, bringing Smaato’s mobile advertising customer base to over 50,000 developers and publishers and over 80 ad networks, enabling Smaato to extend campaigns to over 230 countries worldwide. Smaato also achieved record volumes, managing over 190 billion ad requests in Q4 with total traffic increasing by over 50% from December to January 2012.

“Reaching record growth numbers in 2011, Smaato continues to push the mobile advertising envelope on performance and scale,” said Ragnar Kruse, co-founder and CEO of Smaato. “At Smaato, we are the one-stop shop for fast-growing publishers to optimize international advertising revenues. Our global reach, pioneering technology and local market expertise makes us an ideal partner to help app developers navigate through the complexity, paving the way for those looking to harness mobile advertising’s true value.”

First Mobile Advertising Global Price Index

In a landmark move, Smaato unveils the industry’s first price index. The Smaato Global Price Index aims to serve as a global rate card for mobile advertising.

Powered by extensive analytics and a robust pricing engine, the Smaato Global Price Index offers real- world metrics on where to focus monetization efforts, helping app developers and advertisers to better navigate the mobile advertising landscape and better strategically develop, plan and rollout their campaigns.

For advertisers that means targeting the most relevant potential customers and for app developers it translates to achieving the highest Average Revenue per User (ARPU).

The table is a preliminary snapshot of Smaato’s Global Price Index, which represents a percentage of the eCPC average per country by ad network, using the U.S. as a baseline of 100 for the overall index.

For instance some markets, like in the case of Indonesia and Egypt, represent amazing value for advertisers. While for publishers and app developers, markets like South Africa and Western Europe offer high revenue-generating opportunities, which many companies often neglect. Smaato helps its customers determine which markets offer the highest returns.

“Mobile advertising doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, it can be incredibly effective. Our reach, multiple relationships with ad networks, deep analytics and robust pricing engine gives us unique insight on pricing from region to region. With the launch of our new index we aim to take the complexity away and help developers, publishers and advertisers to determine the best performing regions at the best price so they can execute the most effective campaigns with the greatest returns,” added Kruse.

The fuller report will be made available on a quarterly basis with the first being ready for download in early April 2012.

New Real-Time Bidding Capabilities and Smaato SDK for Windows Phone

Smaato also announces its latest technology enhancements to leading mobile advertising optimization platform SOMA (Smaato’s Open Mobile Advertising platform) with the introduction of new Real-Time Bidding capabilities and the launch of the new Smaato SDK for Windows Phone.

With Smaato’s new added RTB capabilities and extensive range of RTB-enabled inventory, mobile advertising can now be purchased and served on the fly. Instead of reserving prepaid advertising space, advertisers can now bid on each ad impression as it is served with the impression going to the highest bidder. As a result, publishers can provide even more control and choice over ad targeting so brands and developers can optimize their advertising and achieve better ROI and engagement.

“Mobile is an essential channel for engaging today’s consumers, and at Turn, we are seeing increasing demand from our agency and enterprise customers for our cross-channel capabilities,” said Mark Balabanian, Senior Director, Business Development, Turn, Inc. “With Smaato’s real-time bidding capabilities, we will be able to provide our customers with high-quality mobile inventory for their global campaigns.”

Smaato is also establishing new quality measures for SOMA by introducing new algorithms, more extensive analytics and real-time reporting to improve traffic performance in order to deliver even higher eCPMs, fill rates, and ultimately more revenues for app developers and premium publishers.

As part of continuing to offer the widest range of mobile advertising SDKs in the industry, Smaato is also launching its latest Smaato SDK for Windows Phone.

The new SDK is free to download and provides an array of features such as full support for Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, support for display banners and text ads, location based advertising, socio- demographic and contextual targeting and more.

Smaato will be attending this year’s Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona, Spain from Feb. 27th to March 1st and will be located on Booth #7C38 – App Planet – Hall 7.