‘Leveraging the Mighty Mobile’

Mr. Parasar Sarma, Vice President & Head of Mobile at C1X Inc. initiated C1XMobile & launched the Android SDK for app developers which is solving lots of industry problems for both advertisers & publishers, prior to C1X inc, He was part of the founding team of goibibo where he co-created & lead the growth curve of Mobile Apps in goibibo & he also lead the customer acquisition in goibibo. With an indepth understaindg of mobile consumer,

Mr. Sarma is leading the Mobile product development & Business strategy for increasing their Global foot prints in Mobile advertising. In an exclusive interaction with SMEStreet, Mr Sarma explained about the industry trends and market opportunities.

Excerpts:

What are the key trends you witness in the mobile advertising domain? 

We saw a drastic shift of focus by almost all e-com & on demand services companies towards Mobile as their 70% traffic moved from desktop to Mobile in the last 2 years. As Customer acquisition through mobile mostly through Apps remains the primary objective, Channels like facebook & google were not enough in comparison to brands appetite. With this we saw evolution of Mobile inventory suppliers and performance marketing remains the primary enabler on this rise . We are still in the early stages of mobile advertising and a lot has to be explored in the future.

How Indian consumer behavior is evolving in the retail buying? What is the relevance of innovative solutions offered through mobile marketing?

India is now 300 million strong Mobile internet users & for brands to give users a best buying experience is the primary goal . Indian retail consumers on mobile are still very impulsive and discounts still overpower experience. As Apps remains the key channel for e-com players to engage users, we have seen users shuffling between multiple free apps according to his momentum of need which results in huge loss for ecom companies as uninstall ratio’s increases .With this, Mobile marketing becomes a key enabler to engage primary users & infact re-target users back to brands through many innovative mobile ad tech solutions. But we still don’t see much of intelligent audience data platforms coming into play which will change the current dynamics .

What are key market focus of your company?

We are a Silicon Valley start up & our Mobile offerings started less than a year ago. Our focus right now is to take our Mobile audience data platform to next level & add more demand partners in the pipeline. we have many apps using our SDK and they are quite happy with eCPM’s & fill rate . We are infact organically getting enquires of interested developers due to network effect. For advertisers we are extending the Mobile Audience platform which will change the way how marketers run mobile user acquisition campaign.  We are already working with all leading e-com companies  like MMT,goibibo,snapdeal, mobikwik cleartrip ,coupondunia etc within our platform .

What are the key flagship offerings from your side? 

We have a full scale App monetization platform for mobile app developers. We are android only at the moment but iOS SDK is also in the making. We are one stop shop for all developer’s needs. We are connected to a large demand players across globe and eCPM’s & Fill rate are one of the best, considering our in-house demand to complement this . Our data platform is not advertiser’s only platform,in fact,we also expose the data set  & recommendations to developers to  better app engagement features.

How do you foresee next six months in the market? 

As I mentioned earlier, the existing ways of customer acquisition on mobile will change with more data driven platforms coming into play. Audience buying will be the key driver and  brand’s KPI’s which are estimated mostly through performance marketing channels will tend to get better . We see C1XMobile playing an important role by driving a transparent & 1^st party data driven mobile marketing in the whole ecosystem.

What suggestions would you like to make for effective monetization of mobile application?

For developers the biggest concerns are higher eCPM’s & fill rates. Capitalizing the maximum revenue out of the ad inventory is the ultimate goal for any developer. We see a gap with app developers (mostly small & medium scale ) not using user’s behavioral data for better product engagement which will eventually increase their ad revenue . C1XMobile SDK not only solves this problem for the developers but we also connect developers to the largest demand platforms which guarantee higher ad revenues. We are in a very exciting phase of our journey and you can expect a lot of disruptive tech innovations in the future .