• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, June 19, 2013

Premium mobile ad exchange Nexage today announced three transparency upgrades geared towards both the buy and sell side. In an interview with RTM Daily, Victor Milligan, chief marketing officer of Nexage, said that while transparency is an issue in any medium, it's "extraordinarily important to the programmatic markets."

Two of the upgrades - aggregate reporting and advertiser-level performance measurements - are focused on the publishers. Milligan said that the advertiser reporting is part of the larger issue of brand safety and brand affiliation. "This gives the publisher exposure to whose actually advertising on their site," he said.

The third upgrade, focused on the buyer, is the addition of session depth indicators. This will allow buyers to know what sequence they are bidding on (i.e. how deep into the app or Web site the user is, how many ads they've already seen, how long they've been there, etc.). Milligan said, "It gives them business signals as to what the true value of that impression is. Earlier in the count the higher the value, lower in the count the lower." While this upgrade was geared towards the buyer, Milligan noted that the publishers have access to the data as well.

Milligan believes that the topic of transparency is slightly different in mobile beacuse of the "trajectory and evolution" it has gone through. "Part of the difference is where mobile came from," he theorized. "It started as more of a performance platform; business transparency was not a critical requirement." He commented how premium publishers are now past the stage of wondering whether or not they should go into mobile, and have become "more aggressive" in their approach to the market.

However, did Nexage increase transparency because they felt like they had to, or was it something they wanted to do? Milligan said that because Nexage is a premium exchange, they weren't reluctant to open some extra doors. "In the premium space, our customers expect more, are smarter, and will make their business decisions based on trust."