Spotlight: Zapp360

Zapp360 Jon Mundy
Zapp360 commercial director, Jon Mundy

There is no shortage of companies trying to reinvent mobile advertising. Standard banners don’t work on mobile, so the argument goes; if you want to engage people on such a personal device, you have to come up with something different.

In Zapp360’s case, that something different is a scrolling ticker-tape-style text ad unit, which runs across the bottom of the screen. It can sit within a standard 320 x 50 banner, but it doesn’t have to, and as the firm’s commercial director Jon Mundy explains, in their view, it works best when it’s not in a banner, but appears as a full-width scrolling unit.

The company was founded by Jamie Estrin, who previously co-founded the digital agency, Profero, and Jerome Fitzgibbons, co-founder of online ad network, Collective Media. Having worked up the idea, the pair raised around $1m of angel funding at the beginning of last year, and started building the platform.

“We call it a right-time mobile advertising platform, says Mundy. “It’s an attempt to get to the heart of what works well on mobile – getting the right message to the right people at the right time. Advertisers are being presented with increasingly complicated technical solutions, when really, they just want to get their message out there quickly and efficiently.”

Zapp360 screenshotWhen you see a Zapp360 ad in the wild, there is something appealing about it. The ad consist of up to 140 characters that scroll across the screen twice in 30 seconds, after which the ad disappears. The scrolling text creates a sense of mystery and a desire to see what’s coming next. It also, whether the company realised this or not when they were developing the idea, taps into the current passion among advertisers for native ads – simple, text-based ads that appeal precisely because they don’t look like ads.

“Advertisers are comfortable with communicating with audiences in short bursts of text and no one is doing that on mobile display,” says Mundy before referencing the now-famous Oreo tweet when the Superbowl final was hit by a power outage and the company tweeted: “Power out? No problem… You can still dunk in the dark.”

“That was a brilliant piece of real-time marketing, but it struck us that it was also a missed opportunity,” says Mundy. “If they had taken that message and pushed it out to sports content via the exchanges, it would have had much greater reach beyond Twitter.”

Zapp’s platform launched at the end of last year, since when it had delivered over 100m ad impressions for 56 advertisers, maintaining an average clickthrough rate (CTR) of 1.8 per cent with no intelligent targeting, according to Mundy.

One campaign for Greggs in the north east of England generated a 6 per cent CTR, though Mundy insists that Zapp360 is not trading on the CTRs. The real appeal, he says, is the dynamic, real-time nature of the platform. That and the fact that it can deliver an unlimited volume of different messages and mobile-specific calls to action, such as tap to play video, launch calendar, share socially, or go to a web link. “It’s very easy to use and fully compliant with tracking technology,” says Mundy. “It can run through an MRaid-compliant ad unit so it can run on native app and mobile web.”

In the last couple of weeks, the platform has gone self-service, enabling advertisers to deploy and tweak campaigns quickly and easily, with the inventory coming from the ad exchanges – Zapp360 uses Nexage and The Rubicon Project, the ads running via their private marketplaces. Mundy says the company is also in conversation with a number of trading desks, and has had support from Quisma and Xaxis (Group M), Accuen (Omnicom), and Amnet (Aegis), who are feeding back on the platform in order to improve it. Publishers on board include IPC, Trinity Mirror, Northern and shell, TalkSport, and MTV UK.

The firm is also talking direct to brands. Asda, Greggs Phones4u and Pizza Hut have all deployed Zapp360 ads and are rebooking, says Mundy, primarily to drive awareness of individual offers with a view to driving footfall.

It’s a simple proposition then, but clearly, one that some brands at least seem to like.