Zeotap set to dominate mobile ads with better user data than Facebook, Google

The start-up is tying up with telcos across Asia and Europe to make their customer data available to mobile advertisers, reports Tech in Asia

Big brands spend only 5% to 10% of their ad budget on mobile media. This year’s Mary Meeker Internet trends report says consumers are spending six times more time on mobile compared to print, but print media gets more than twice the amount of ad spend from marketers. A survey of decision-makers in large corporations found that only 18% of them felt “very confident” about measuring the return on investment of their mobile ads.

A number of tech start-ups have sprouted to close this gap. They are trying to help brands target their mobile audiences and track campaigns better. The problem is the lack of quality data for targeting and tracking mobile consumers. Traditional tracking methods like cookies don’t work in mobile apps, so publishers know little about their audiences.
 

Mobile data firm Zeotap claims to have an answer to this. It is tying up with telcos across Asia and Europe to make their customer data available to mobile advertisers.
 

“They are sitting on a gold mine of user data, comparable – and, in some cases, superior – to what has been accumulated by Facebook or Google,” Projjol Banerjea, co-founder and chief product officer of Zeotap, tells Tech in Asia.
 

Most of the data with publishers and advertisers currently is based on generalizations and assumptions. The Berlin-headquartered company, with a tech development centre in Bengaluru, converts the telco data into a form that advertisers can use, by hiding or encrypting personally identifiable information.

Zeotap yesterday announced receiving $6.4 million in series A funding from Capnamic Ventures, Iris Capital, and angel investors. It will use the funding to ramp up its engineering team in Bengaluru and expand aggressively in the mobile-first markets of India and Southeast Asia.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.