Start-Up Watch COD: TapIt focuses on making Mobile perform for more marketers

The CW on Mobile is horribly outdated. Issues of Scale, CPM, and Creative Freedom have been well addressed. Really. But while tens of millions of Americans are now relying on their Mobile devices for access, most brands aren’t leveraging Mobile, or at least not very much.

So why is this? I think part of the reason is that a lot of the early Mobile selling focused on the whizbang things that were possible in some environments and on some devices. In my view, this resulted in a lot of passion for the potential of Mobile, but not a lot of IOs.

TapIt is a new Mobile ad network that is changing the dynamic of brand performance Mobile marketing by taking what it says is a more objectives-based approach to the space. Its management team has roots in the performance side of digital, which gives them a more objectives- and goals-centered perspective on what clients want and how they can leverage Mobile to deliver it.

I think few would disagree that Mobile lags in terms of attracting DR dollars. While they represent a significant majority of PC web dollars, the figure for online is lower. While DR is not the only business that TapIt is after, their focus significant attention on how they can better deliver against hard sales and lead gen metrics.

A big part of their message is to eradicate the perception that performance mobile marketing is simply delivering clicks to advertisers, rather than results. Their consultative, objectives-focused campaign development process empowers advertisers to gain insight and results on their campaigns.. Since performance is at the core of their history in online media, they say that this gives them an edge on helping companies interested in more than simply delivering impressions and soft metrics. Particularly transactional metrics. It’s hard to look at the MCommerce trends and disagree with the viability of this strategy

Rather than focusing on delivering and measuring performance on a cost per click, TapIt provides a broad range of automated optimization technology, including creatives, landing pages, ad placements and targeting optimization. TapIt says this creates more effective, manageable and measureable results towards advertisers desired KPI’s. Further, they offer extensive creative services to help translate specific business and performance objectives into more effective ad copy and creative. In fact a big part of their model is to design and field a range of executions and use performance measures to identify creative characteristics that deliver best. Then, throughout the campaign, their creative team is modifying the units to optimize performance. Instead of requiring brands and media teams to scramble to get new ads up, they handle it all.

For TapIt, interoperability is a central theme in their creative approach. We all know that the advent of iPhone has presented challenges for people who have traditionally focused on flash development. TapIt relies primarily on creating executions in HTML5. They are also fully integrated with most of the third party rich media partners for those that prefer to develop creative internally.

They have thousands of publisher direct inventory relationships, and focus primarily on well defined target segments. They have preexisting business relationships with most of the third party data providers, and can also integrate your first party data if desired. An interesting aspect of their targeting is to use pre-existing segments to glean insights about digital usage that inform creative and media selection from the outset of an effort. They also offer the option of managing to a CPA after an initial CPM/ CPC run.

TapIt is currently integrated with more than 30,000 apps and websites, and offers a publisher inventory solution that helps them sell inventory directly, while leveraging the technology and strengths of thier platform.

Hey, there are hundreds of options these days when you are thinking about Mobile. TapIt believes that they can succeed because they focus more on what the client wants first, rather than on the whizbang capabilities that are becoming possible on Mobile devices.

Customers first, shiny objects second.