China’s Cheetah Mobile launches global ad platform for mobile apps and games

Cheetah Mobile, a mobile Internet company from China, has just launched a new global advertising platform designed to help marketers drive traffic and app installs. The announcement is a further development of its recent $58 million acquisition of mobile advertising company MobPartner.

The new ad platform marks the opportunity to provide brands, particularly with an international audience, to reach the right customers at the right time through various mobile ad formats, where audience targeting technology is absolutely critical. In Q1 of 2015, the company’s total global mobile installations surpassed 1.3 billion users, with over 440 million monthly active users as potential audience members in the ad network for brands.

Using contextual, offline, location, third-party, and other data can mean the difference between winning and losing with mobile ads. That’s a key finding of a new VB Insight report on mobile advertising published last week, “Brands and mobile advertising: How to win.”

Part of the challenge for brands is navigating the complexity of the mobile ad ecosystem. The number of calculations that go into which ads you see in Facebook or Draw Something is staggering, with easily 11 separate steps happening in milliseconds, and handoffs between ad networks, exchanges, demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, and data management platforms.

According to the report’s author, VB Insight analyst John Koetsier, “One of the most surprising things about the mobile ad ecosystem is that it’s like a giant pachinko game. Advertisers toss in $100 at the top, and after going through data management platforms, ad agencies, networks, and supply-side platforms, they’re lucky if $60 actually gets spent on actual placement of their ads.”

With nearly 1,000 ad networks adding to the immense complexity of this space, Koetsier added the best thing brands can do is to “go all-in on mobile by tying their internal systems to ad networks so that data is flowing both ways, helping ad networks find not just one-time clickers but long-term customers … and rewarding them based on that. That makes ad networks and advertisers true partners in mutual success.”

Brands and organizations that are relatively new to mobile advertising but want to enter it at scale should seek partners who can simplify this process for them as much as possible. Cheetah Mobile integrated mobile marketing services aim to do just that, potentially lessening the impact of the industry’s native complexity for brands.