Deliver video, banner and native ads to your target audience at the right time and place

Pocketmath aggregates all mobile real-time bidding (RTB) inventory into one self-serve platform. With RTB, Pocketmath is able to bid on individual impressions on apps and mobile web, within 100 milliseconds, dynamically pricing each impression to optimize your ad spend. Pocketmath helps advertise across thousands of the hottest mobile apps, games, and popular mobile websites to millions of smartphone and tablet users: all in real-time.

Kevin William David interviewed Hannah Sooyeon Jeon, Product Marketing Manager at Pocketmath to know more.

Hi Hannah, So tell us about Pocketmath?

Imagine a place where brands, app developers and businesses come together to connect to their audiences. Pocketmath uses proprietary technology to become that place.

We’re basically a mobile demand side advertising platform that’s integrated with a large number of renowned inventory partners. More than any of our competitors, we can target a wide range of mobile users. In fact, even when I was still at Amobee, I already heard that Pocketmath is the world’s fastest mobile DSP with a large mobile inventory volume.

Now, that I’m a part of Pocketmath, I had the pleasure of witnessing its growth, from platform to technology. It continuously evolves to meet user needs — growing mobile inventory, improving targeting methodology, creating advanced ad type supports, and fortifying safety guards in collaboration with leading industry solution partners.

Tell me more about the problem are you trying to solve?

Our company mission is ‘Reinventing Advertising”. We aim to help people by providing more accurate and relevant targeting solutions at scale, so much so that you can reach out to the right person, at the right time, right place, and with the right message.

This simple yet familiar mantra is what all marketers are aiming for. However, complications arise with industry concerns such as viewability, brand safety, and ad fraud. All these disturb the “three rights”, as well as ad quality and experiences for audiences, publishers and advertisers.

We are trying to fix this so you will earn relevant conversions and measure ROI better. It benefits not only advertisers and publishers but also to the entire advertising ecosystem.

How is Pocketmath different from what already exists in the market?

There are a lot of strong players in this industry such as Adelphic and SiteScout.

“What sets Pocketmath apart is how we place our users and their mobile audience’s ad experience above everything else. That’s why we’ve created a simple and intuitive UI that makes navigation a breeze on our transparent platform and solutions.”, says Nuno Jonet, the company’s Head of Product.

More than that, our platform is built using our own technology, unlike some players who don’t. That means they lack technical ability, reporting and fee transparency.

Our customers love our unbeatable number of mobile inventory partners which yield large volume of impressions on your target audience.

Pocketmath is also an agile business that continuously meets changing mobile user trends. More than providing contextually accurate targeting methods, we also offer advanced ad types such as native ads and reward video ads which resonate well with today’s mobile users.

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Pocketmath?

Great question. You know that’s another thing that makes Pocketmath unique. We don’t have a minimum spend or commit, and it is self-service. That’s why Pocketmath is used by all sorts of customers — individuals, corporations, app developers, and even ad networks themselves.

How are your customers using Pocketmath? Could you share a few different use cases?

• Some customers love using Pocketmath because they can geofence ad delivery at country, city, postal code, and GPS coordinates.
• Others use our “List” targeting feature to target specific publishers where their consumers frequently go. They can choose preferred publishers that matter to their consumers via our “Explore” page that showcase our rich database of exchanges and publishers.
• We also have advanced customers who leverage our API to customize their user experience and automate processes. Without being constrained by our UI and reporting features, they customize their technology to meet needs such as automating campaign operations, custom optimization, or dealing with multiple DSP vendors.
• Then, there are savvy customers who can’t get enough of our “Rules” as it enables automatic advertising campaign workflow managements and smart optimization. For instance, they can optimize publisher performance by monitoring, adjusting, and pausing whichever don’t hit their campaign targets in real-time.

Have there been unique use cases for Pocketmath that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

We have a DSP as a Service use case: rich media creative tech players use Pocketmath to reinforce their service offering (Zapp), and publishers with a large footprint enables ad sales directly from their platforms (Singapore customer)

There’s also an OOH company that puts ads in screens at shopping malls, which are followed by hyperlocal targeting to reinforce message (Australian customer)

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

It was not an easy first four years for the company or the team. But we just kept our product moving, our customers satisfied, and kept the overall business afloat for the first few years. Fortunately, we managed to work our way to an eight-digit revenue during that time until we bootstrapped by necessity.

Our co-founder, Casey Grooms, tells us how he “hustled for four years making all the connections, crashed all the networking events and parties, and got the business.”

In 2014, we got our first outside funding of $10M from Rakuten Ventures that helped us scale up and focus on global growth.

Today, we work with several partners to serve close to 40 million mobile ad impressions daily to our global customers.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

The tough part is managing the massive volume of ad requests that kept growing, year on year. That’s why it was a big milestone for us when we finally reached a reliable level of scalability. After that, what became essential to reassure our clients and partners, was the amount of vetting capabilities that we built to monitor and maintain a standard level of ad quality.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

It’s hard to single out just one integration. All our partner integrations have been crucial to our growth. We could talk about how integration with GeoEdge and TheMediaTrust reinforced our efforts to ensure ad quality, it’s been great to have an independent confirmation of the results coming from our own ad quality tools.

Or we could talk about how our long relationship with MoPub and Rubicon has been so critical to the advertisers that come looking for good quality media on our platform.

The ability to use Lotame data was a very big milestone for advertisers looking to use 3rd party audience data. All the effort put into certifying and ensuring smooth operations with rich media tag providers and tracking platforms, such as Celtra or Adjust, also made a huge cumulative impact.

Before we end, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

As mentioned earlier, Pocketmath is built on proprietary technology. That said, we have created a robust suite of tools to provide solid support for both front end as well as back end — from intuitive UI to protective capabilities.

Of course, almost nothing that we do would be possible without a solid infrastructure — we’re very proud users of Amazon Web Services, and we routinely pioneer their technologies like Kinesis or Aurora. New Relic has also been our most valuable tool in analyzing our real-time operations data and inspecting the massive amounts of information generated in processing billions of requests per day.

If you are interested in our product, download Pocketmath’s Playbook for the Mobile Marketing Beginner! Click here!

Originally published at siftery.com.