Mobile RTB ad
exchange Smaato today announced the hiring of Ajitpal Pannu as their new senior vice president of product strategy. Pannu told RTM Daily that his primary goal at Smaato will be moving the company
towards a leadership role in mobile RTB.
According to the release, Pannu brings 12 years' worth of digital ad and ad monetization tech experience to Smaato. In an earlier statement, Ragnar Kruse, CEO of Smaato, said, "Mr. Pannu's extensive knowledge and experience in RTB and Display monetization products for both Supply and Demand will be an enormous asset to Smaato."
Pannu said that he will be working closely with publishers of all sizes, but also with individual app developers. "We cater to both of them," he said. Pannu is also anticipating increased interest in direct programmatic, so he will work with including it as an offering.
After working at OpenX, Adify, and DoubleClick, Pannu is familiar with the benefits and challenges of RTB in the mobile space. "I think the most important [difference] in mobile [compared to display] is the ability to tap into local advertising dollars," he said. "The cookie did not gives us the granularity or accuracy needed to create geofencing."
However, mobile RTB hasn't caught on quite like display, and Pannu believes that's because mobile is still maturing. Typically, those in the mobile RTB space will say that the missing cookie is the biggest challege, but Pannu offered a fresh challenege: the lack of "rules and guidelines and discipline around the tech."
While there is no polished precedent for how to act in the mobile RTB space, Pannu spoke of it as less of a challenge and more of an opportunity. "How do you put all of this (data, full transparency)…and offer it as a platform? It's part of the maturation. Some sort of consolidation needs to happen," he concluded.