At Mobile Internet World a few weeks ago, I was particularly impressed by one member of a panel I had attended. Bob Walczak of Ringleader Digital appeared to be a “tell it like it is” kind of guy, and I found him extremely refreshing and entertaining.
Well apparently I was wrong. He appears to be more of a “Tell it like you want them to think it is” kind of guy.
Bob has publicly taken credit for a “new” technology they invented called “media stamp”. The weird thing is that it sounds exactly like the process we use to uniqely identify users for our analytics. This technology was discussed at a Mobile Monday panel I sat on back in April that Bob attended.
Since cookies and Javascript are rare on mobile browsers, we developed a way to create a unique fingerprint for users without them. Essentially we take all the information we receive from the carriers, all the information we have about the phone model and it’s capabilities, and other information derived from the actual browsing experience, to create this fingerprint.
We then provide each unique ID with a score from 1–100 which gets attached. The score is based on how sure we are of the uniqueness of the user, and how sure we are that we can identify them when they return.
While any claim that Bob makes that he can 100% identify unique users is false, we can still uniquely identify a very high percentage of unique users. This is why we give them a score.
In a press release yesterday, Ringleader made the following claim:
By “stamping” a mobile device, Ringleader Digital enables agencies and brands to identify unique visitors and track their clicks, impressions, and acquisitions across all browsing sessions, mobile sites, and wireless carriers. Media Stamp is the first technology to standardize these ad serving and analytic capabilities in mobile, which were previously only available for online advertising.
Sorry Bob, you were not the first, and you knew it.
“The potential of mobile advertising has been constrained because agencies and publishers have not had the real-time visibility or analytics required to validate the return on investment for mobile ad campaigns” said Bob Walczak, CEO of Ringleader Digital. “Media Stamp is reinventing mobile advertising by quickly gaining a strong understanding of user preferences and enabling mobile advertisers to provide targeted, relevant advertisements to growing and active mobile audiences.”
“Reinventing” is an appropriate term for what Ringleader has done, since we already invented it. Mobilytics is still the only “impartial” third-party ad tracking tool that can use this fingerprint to track “across” ad networks.
Conversion tracking capabilities from Media Stamp analyze how impressions/click results are connected to actions. Media Stamp can also associate the user’s behavior to each page that included a specific served ad – enabling publishers to identify all pages that contributed to a visitor’s conversion. Ringleader Digital is also expanding Media Stamp capabilities to enable real-time delivery of targeted ads by correlating behavioral and engagement patterns to deliver targeted and actionable advertisements.
While it is great to see them using this technology on the ad-serving side, we have been doing it with ad campaign tracking for over 6 months.
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