Page 44 - AdNews magazine Jul-Aug 2021

Meet the Team
“The difference is how we do that. So as an ad network it would’ve predominantly been we have a set amount of publishers that we had single-handedly brought into our network, and then on the demand side, the demand would be driven by our sales people going to market and speaking to the likes of clients or directly to the agencies. So effec- tively, it was a closed system. All of our demand went onto all of our supply, and all of our supply was effectively only available to our demand. So in that capacity, everything was operating against insertion order, which a salesper- son would speak to a planner buyer at the agency to transact.
“With the growth of program- matic, it de-links the supply and demand. So effectively, the InMobi Exchange, which is our supply tech platform, is now connected to more than 300 DSPs globally, and with that comes 20,000+ advertis- ers that can buy from our Exchange via technical means. So they’re effectively buying from their DSP into our SSP, and as a consequence the amount of revenue generated per employee is significantly higher because they have direct access to our systems.”
As part of this reinvention, InMobi has been growing its pres- ence in Australia. The business now has nine people based across Sydney and Melbourne with an average retention rate of three-years.
O’Sullivan himself rejoined the business in April 2019 and previ- ously spent four years with InMobi in its New York, Dubai and Singapore offices.
In addition to educating the market on its updated technology, the team has been more focused on education around general changes happening in the adtech space. A particular focus has been the privacy updates sweeping the market, with O’Sullivan agreeing that while they will be significant, their true impact will take time to understand and respond to.
“Not a lot of people across the whole market would’ve been fully aware of the capabilities of being able to leverage the IDFA for tar- geting,” he says.
“From day one, inMobi has been about strong culture. It’s on the walls of most of the offices — it’s being entrepreneurial, passionate, taking ownership and being accountable.”
Richard O’Sullivan
“And consequently, when it’s taken away it’s also going to cause a lot of customers in the market to understand, ‘Well, how does it affect me?’ There are a lot of questions we’re getting asked by our agencies, our clients and our publishers, and that puts us in a thought leader capacity to work through and answer them.”
But O’Sullivan is aware the evolving landscape can be difficult for clients to understand.
“Right now the media market fragmented to a silly level, and as a consequence of that, if you’re a new planner buyer in the market, the reality is it’s the responsibility of someone in our position, not just to make sure the market is educated, but to do it in such a way that reflects they don’t have the resources or the time to understand everything from everyone,” he says.
“We also have to be mindful of the fact that it’s not like the agencies have 50% to do their job and 50% to listen to partners. So if we are going to a meeting we try to respect that fact, and if we can do a conference call instead of an in-person meeting, which takes half the time, we have to be reflective of how much work the agencies have, and in what way we want them to receive the communications we’re giving.”
InMobi itself has launched UnifID to help simplify and streamline identity resolution for mobile app publishers and developers. It’s also invested in other areas, such as in-game advertising and the launch of InMobi Audience Bidding, to allow it to tap into header bidding.
Looking ahead to the next 12 months, O’Sullivan says the 14-year old business will continue to adopt an entrepreneurial mentality and take risks on new ideas.
“From day one of their launch, at inMobi it’s always been about very strong culture,” says O’Sullivan.
“It’s on the walls of most of the offices — it’s around being entrepre- neurial, passionate and trying to effectively take ownership and be accountable.
“We do push a lot of autonomy into our teams. It’s a non-corporate environment, they get the chance to make mistakes, they get the chance to reach for the stars. That’s something that since coming back in 2019 we’ve really focused on making the team very aware of.”
Front: Valentina Lizzi, Matthew McGinley. Back: Aimee Jenkins, Nick Robinson