INTERVIEW: InMobi on the link between ads and payment

The app market has given developers the chance to expand into new global markets. But that's an extremely complex process for small teams sitting in a single geography.

SmartPay is a one time set-up, with a single point of integration that gives these developers access to multiple countries and billing systems (and a secure checkout experience for consumers) through advertising.

The service offers direct-to-carrier billing to start, but is expanding to all forms of mobile payment methods including credit cards, PayPal, and local mobile wallets by the end of the year. At launch, InMobi claimed the service could reach to over one billion consumers in seven countries, including the US, UK, Germany, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Malaysia.

InMobi has no doubt that consumers are ready for more mobile payment. In March, it published a report on how the public view m-commerce. It found 58 per cent of UK mobile web users have purchased digital or physical goods on their mobile device, and estimated that 16 million people in the UK are willing to buy stuff via their phones.

Rob Jonas, MD of InMobi EMEA, believes there's a natural fit between mobile advertising and mobile payments, mainly because of their complexity and global reach.

He says: "If you think about things from the developer angle, you need to take care of four areas. First there's the creative stuff – the build. Then there's deployment/discovery, and then analytics and monetisation. Clearly we're not about to get involved in building apps, but all the others we can help with.

"Right now, the issue is monetisation. The origins of the ad business go back to a time when most advertising was for mobile content. Now, the content part is easy, but for a company wanting to take their content business into new territories the barrier is payment.

"But being a global ad network means being in the business of building global platforms, so it's not a big stretch for us to plug in payments."

The other compelling feature of the system, says Jonas, is its ability to track users' habits, from any initial ad impression through to the in-app purchases that follow.

This plays into one of the long-term ambitions of the world's more advanced mobile ad networks – to move on from an raw pay-per-click model to something more sophisticated and long-term.

Jonas explains: "Once you click through on an ad that's an acquisition piece, but when you add a payments component you're then in a position to move on from a simple click model to one based on the lifetime value of a customer."

Away from payments, InMobi is working hard to evolve mobile advertising beyond the banner and into richer forms of interaction, especially those that tap into the native features of the device.

It recently completed a campaign with a car manufacturer that used the accelerometer to let the consumer lift the phone above his/her head to see the sun roof of the car in question.

Jonas is also excited at the potential of HTML5 apps to meld mobile campaigns more closely with campaigns run on other media. It's why InMobi bought the web app specialist Sprout in the summer.

He says: "Sprout helps us to work with different sorts of customers, with more agencies and brands. I see HTML5 as replacing the branded apps to an extent. Branded native apps will always be made, but with a web app you can integrate with wider campaigns really easily. And that's what a lot of brands want to do."

Finally, there's voice. Jonas believes there's untapped advertising potential in the original comms medium of the phone.

"Since Siri came along, there's a sudden interest in voice again," he says. "I'm not certain how that will go, but there has to be something in it for advertisers. It's going to be interesting."

* InMobi is sponsoring the ME Meet-Up in Paris on December 6th. Click here for more details.