Mobile advertising has ‘a case of the sniffles’ as brands figure out relevance: Pubmatic boss

Brands are struggling to find the right “recipe of relevance” in their mobile advertising, the president of Pubmatic, a programmatic trading firm, has said.

Kirk McDonald, the former digital president of Time and now the New York-based global president of Pubmatic, said in conversation with Mumbrella Asia that the travails of mobile advertising to win over consumers is “just a cycle we’re going through” as an emerging industry.

Mobile advertising, he said, “has not found the right recipe of relevance required by advertisers to engage in a conversation about the intelligent use of data or location ID to make ads as relevant as they need to be.”

“It’s just cycle we’re going through as we learn. It’s been test and learn from the start, and innovation comes through that,” he said, commenting on the way the mobile industry has evolved.