Can you tell us a little about your role?
I am the head of EMEA for xAd and therefore lead the region for our advertising business.
What information do you use to put the right ad in front of the right audience?
We believe location is a strategic imperative for marketers and an important signal to leverage via mobiles in the physical world. 90% of retail sales still happen in brick and mortar stores so location is paramount to influence behaviour and drive dialogue with consumers.
What’s your favourite example of innovative location marketing from the past year?
Although we have plenty of brand examples one of my favourites is the work we did with Oxfam.
How much of a concern are privacy issues and invasiveness in location marketing?
First and foremost, everything that we do at xAd is privacy compliant, obviously on the consumer side, but also on the advertiser and brand side. From a consumer standpoint, all location-based advertising on iOS or Android is either opt-in or opt-out, meaning, the consumer has the control. The bigger concern revolves around education, and making sure the consumers fully understand the value behind sharing location information and that has to do with relevancy.
Is there a disconnect between what consumers and industry want, and if so, what can be done about this?
Certainly in mobile we have been using cookie based strategies from the web in a cookiless environment like mobile which has caused a disconnect (or rather dumb ads on smartphones). Consumers don’t want to be barraged with irrelevant noise. We need to understand consumers better and deliver stuff that helps and not hinder.
How much of a threat is adblocking to location marketers and what can be done about it?
Adblocking is more of a wake up call for advertisers, than a threat. The reason adblocking has arisen (mostly on the web) is because intruding formats and clutter has impacted some consumers web browsing experiences. Therefore, adblocking right now is more of an immediate concern for desktop. For location-based marketers, the threat is a little more nuanced. The highest quality location is derived from apps, not mobile web, and so many location-based vendors who focus mostly on in-app are not impacted as much – since the majority of adblockers focus on web.
There are some adblockers that do claim to block in-app, but there are many hurdles that need to be jumped over for a consumer to install and use the technology properly. Thus, the barrier to entry being so high, the adoption of consumers has remained low. If you look in Apple’s app store, there isn’t a single adblocking app in the top 100 lists. In order to combat adblocking, it’s up to the industry as a whole to again make sure consumers are well educated to the value add. Advertising allows consumers to view unpaid content, and so the trade off for no advertising will ultimately be paywalls on all major publishers.
What’s your message to delegates attending this year’s Changing Media Summit?
We are entering a world of mass personalisation and probably the greatest flux in media we have ever seen. The question everyone must ask themselves is do they have the right tools and processes in place to adapt to the increasingly fast paced mobile consumer. Do I really have a mobile first approach (time spent on mobile is now greater than TV) and am I thinking about relevancy beyond the context of the site/app someone is in and more where they are and have been in the physical world.
Theo Theodorou is head of EMEA at xAd
This advertisement feature is paid for by xAd, which sponsors the Guardian Changing Media Summit.
