We’ve covered Adtile a decent amount in recent months, and we think that the company is heading in an exciting direction – which is just one of the reasons we use their ad platform on ArcticStartup.
With the recently announced $4.5 million (€3.3 million) Series A from private investors, the company aims to build an “app store” for what we think may be the way we will see ads in the future.
The world is quickly overflowing with sensors. Whether they are your accelerometers and GPS sensors in your phone or perhaps something from the internet of things movement such as beacons.
This gives way for new ways of displaying ads and engaging with the end user, such as Motion Ads, where you can for example ask the user to shake the phone in order to get a discount. Unfortunately not many companies are using this functionality to full extent and if they wanted to – the costs of setting something like this up would be quite extensive. You have to take multiple things in to account like dynamic user flows, interactions, animations, sensor activations and sequences to mention few.
This is where Adtile comes in. They want to enable any brand or perhaps a marketing agency to purchase pre-designed and pre-coded Adtile Motion ads through their smart ad store. Basically the goal is to do for ads what Apple did for applications.
To do that, the company is not focusing on the advertiser or the publisher, which is what most advertising companies worry about. As Nils Forsblom, the CEO of Adtile comments – We have a core philosophy of putting the end users first: “If we get people engaged, it will completely resonate back to the advertisers and publishers as great results. Therefore, we really focus on asking the right questions in the process, “What does the end user really want?”, “Does this add any value?” “How does it make people feel?”. We ask all these questions when creating something new. We make sure our intention is extremely focused. We truly care how people feel.”
So in essence, it lets Adtile developers to create unique Motion Ad interactions, that can later be used by brands and agencies by just incorporating design and storytelling to the flow. So instead of spending a lot of money and time on developing new HTML5 sensor enabled ads, they can simply get them from the store. Adtile has created very specific human interface design and developer guidelines for quality and constraint purposes. Obviously you have to be an Adtile platform member to get advantage of their smart ad store, developer guides and ad creation tools.
Of course at the heart of all of this is the ability to make ads that utilize all sensors and also external data such as weather, traffic, flights, restaurant menu’s, etc.
To date the company has been functioning through white label solutions and licensing. This new move is a way to become big in this space, however as we know building market places is always a challenge, so it remains to be seen how Adtile will be able to attract a sufficient number of developers and users to it.
