Mobile Ad Serving

I’ve seen a lot of AdMob [admob.com] ads in iPhone applications over the past two years. But recently I downloaded two free — i.e. ad supported — applications that appear to use a Google ad server (of course Google purchased AdMob but I don’t think it’s just a re-branding I think it’s a different service.)

I noticed this for two reasons. First; for the past few years I have been working in the mobile advertising space, so this stuff stands out. Second; the ads were odd.

Why odd? Well, as I mentioned these were ads in iPhone applications. Keep that in mind and take a look at the ads:

The issue, I think, with these ads is they are all for competitors. I can excuse the SingTel ad, I’m a Starhub customer but this is an add for enterprise services and the ad was served while I was on a WiFi network, so there is not much chance that Google could have determined my operator.

However, the ad for Android and the two ads for the Ovi store — which sells applications that work on Nokia handsets are not useful to me as a consumer and most likely a waste of the advertisers money. The odds that I am going to patronize either of these services from my iPhone is next to zero.

And there is little excuse for this. When I was working on requirements for a mobile advertising system the product team was adamant that it include basic relevance filtering. Now relevance filtering is complex and the simple business rule “the advertisement should be relevant and useful to the consumer” actually breaks down to a lot of technical requirements. The technical requirements of significance here are:

(Obviously there are a lot more details and other requirements that need to be clarified before you can actually implement this.) Here’s a use case that would prevent the issue of the Ovi banners being shown to me on my iPhone.

So now the Buyer (in this case Nokia or an agent acting on Nokia’s behalf to setup the ad campaign) has created a campaign level whitelist (i.e. all banners in the campaign will be filtered by this whitelist) which includes a filter of *nokia* that is case insensitive. This means that, based on the requirements enumerated above, that no ad request that includes a User-Agent string that does not includes the word nokia in it will be served any banner from this campaign. The effect? Ovi store ads will only be shown to users who are using Nokia handsets (or who’s requesting user agent does not include a User-Agent string or is using an incorrect User-Agent string that includes the word nokia.

Lets look at two use cases for requesting an ad. One where the requesting handset is Nokia N95 and one where it is an iPhone 3GS.

A few explanations/notes:

The looping nature of the Ad Request Processing Thread makes it hard to write an efficient and clear Use Case but I’m not getting paid to do this (any more) so I’m not going to spend the time to do the work to make it clearer.

This use case leaves out details of filters other than the Whilelist filter, such as Logged In/Logged Out Ad Queue selection, Ad Unit size, etc. for simplicity.

There would be multiple Ad Request Processors/Threads running, so when the first thread that retrieved the Ad Request and found the request was in the New state it pushed all the ads in it’s internal Recycle Ad Queue back onto the Active Ad Queue because those banners still need to be served and may be suitable for this Ad Request. The second time the Ad Request Processing Thread finds the Ad Request in the Unfulfilled state it does not empty it’s Recycle Ad Queue to avoid endlessly looping over the same unsuitable ad. (Writing this I think I need to think more about this—there could be a condition where a thread only ever sees Ad Requests in the Unfulfilled state and would therefore never empty its Recycle Ad Queue…)

I’ve included a lot of stuff that would actually go to other use cases and just be referenced as Include X Use Case, again I hope this makes it clearer (at least to the techies) what is happening.

Anyway… Here is what would happen when an Nokia N95 made a request:

This type of White- and Black- list filtering would prevent me from seeing ads for the Ovi store on my iPhone (assuming the people provisioning the ads or campaigns used, and used correctly, the filtering options mentioned above — but that’s a business problem not a technical one.)

The ad serving space is complicated but have been surprised to see a number of examples like this on my phone over the past few days. In fact most of the ads I receive in the applications that use the Google system over the AdMob system seem to fall into this category. I have notices a lack of relevant ads in general for Singapore in the Google Web system. On some sites I see very relevant ads; global companies doing brand building or selling online. But on a lot of sites, and I mean a lot I see the same ads for the same service—a Singapore specific company so at least the location filtering is working. Or I see public service ads (invariably for Kiva [kiva.org].) So either there are not enough relevant ads for Singapore or these local guys are spending a lot of money to spam everyone.

The people at Google are a lot smarter than me, so I wonder if there is something I am missing in all this? Were my product people wrong? Are the users who are creating the campaigns not using some feature of the Google system that would filter these ads from me? Am I completely nuts? Do I have too much time on my hands?