In our 5 minutes with profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry. This week, CEO Sephi Shapira introduces mobile advertising platform MassiveImpact.
What does MassiveImpact do?
We guarantee advertisers will profitably promote their products on mobile devices. This means two things; first we only work with advertisers that want to sell their products on mobile devices, we don’t work with advertisers that just want their ad to be seen or clicked on. Second, we only get paid when an actual product or service is sold, we don’t get paid for ad views or ad clicks.
What are MassiveImpact’s main goals?
Our goal is to enable every mobile advertiser to profitably sell their products on mobile devices. Ad networks today sell clicks or installs, while many advertisers are interested in generating sales, in other words what the ad networks are selling is not what the advertisers are buying. We bridge the gap; we sell what the advertiser is buying.
Where do you see yourself in three years’ time?
“I have a controversial perspective on the Smartphone device; I believe it will be replaced by wearable devices faster than most people think”
I see us maintaining our leadership in pure performance mobile advertising as other companies join into this category. As m-commerce becomes a pivotal part of any business with a digital presence, we see the current pay per click model migrating into a pay per sale model. In three years we see this model becoming an industry standard.
What aspect of mobile is most exciting to you right now?
I have a controversial perspective on the Smartphone device; I believe it will be replaced by wearable devices faster than most people think. There is no need for a keyboard or dial pad when I can simply tell my phone to “call mom” or “text sis I’ll be late”. This puts away the need for a screen and the phone can be simply worn unseen. The tablet is a glimpse in the direction for browsing. Google glass is another step down the road. I am excited about how such devices will change user experience and the mobile ecosystem.
In addition, I am excited about the monetization potential of mobile inventory. One of the goals that we’ve set for MassiveImpact is to change the way mobile publishers monetize their traffic, handing the control over their traffic back to them. Middlemen make millions from mobile ads while publishers struggle to make a dime. MassiveImpact’s unique approach to mobile monetization cuts out middlemen, improving the productivity of the value chain and increasing the publishers’ bottom line.
What’s the most critical issue that will hit mobile within the next 12 months?
The critical issue with mobile is security and privacy. The ad funded nature of mobile coupled with the personal device and m-commerce, creates a risky situation. Companies collect private data and, at the same time, have a user’s billing information. The industry must adopt standards keeping informative data masked while protecting a user’s personal information. There should always be tools available for installation by users to manage privacy based on their personal preferences.
Apart from your own, which mobile companies are the ones to watch in the year ahead?
I am keeping a close watch on social media players like Google, Twitter and Facebook, waiting to see when they finally take advantage of the massive amounts of user data they posses and start serving individualized ads. This would potentially drive the biggest change in mobile advertising in the coming year.
This being said, user targeting is still in its infancy for most Internet giants. For them, the technological ability to match individual ads to a specific user is simply not there and is a major condition for these companies to actually grow their business.
Sephi Shapira is CEO of MassiveImpact – you can follow them on Twitter here.
mefminute 
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