In the world of mobile advertising, there’s always, it seems, a new, new thing, or put another way, a better mousetrap, around the corner. This morning, I met with German company nugg:ad (in German, the pronunciation is ‘nugget’, more or less), whose better mousetrap is a more sophisticated way for mobile web publishers selling their own inventory to track the sort of people visiting their sites, and thus, maximise the value of their inventory to brand advertisers, the sort of advertisers who measure the value of mobile advertising by more than the number of clicks, by serving up more relevant ads to each visitor to their site.
nugg:ad profiles visitors to its publisher clients’ sites by surveying a sample of them on their age group and interests, then comparing their browsing behaviour with that of everyone else visiting the site, using its predictive analytics engine – which has been doing the same thing for online advertising since 2006 – to determine the types of ads most likely to be of interest to each mobile user visiting the site. All this is done in an anonymised way, with due regard for the user’s privacy. Nugg:ad country manager, UK and Ireland, Ben Humphry, was keen to stress that the company holds the EuroPrise Privacy Seal.
There are around 200 targeting parameters available to advertisers, though nugg:ad advises using only a few in combination at any one time, otherwise barely any ads would be served.
Post-campaign, nugg:ad surveys a sample of visitors to its publisher clients’ sites on their next visit to the site to ask them questions relating to the brand whose ads they would have seen: Do you recognise this brand? Do you like this brand? Would you buy this brand? The same questions are also asked of a control group that has not been exposed to the advertising. 
This is all part of a drive, as Humphry explains it: “to get more brands using mobile as an advertising channel for brand awareness, not just seeing it as a direct response medium”.
The company launched in the UK in January, so has no UK deployments as yet, but it is working with two major publishers in Germany and the Netherlands. For publishers looking to sell their own inventory, rather than using the services of a premium ad network, its solution merits investigation.
David Murphy
Editor
