Verve expands national sales team with additions in NY, LA and Boston

 New York, NY, May 8, 2013 – Verve Mobile, the leader in location powered mobile advertising, today announced that James Smith has joined the company as Chief Revenue Officer and will oversee all sales and marketing functions including advertising sales, sales planning and account management, creative services and marketing and communications.   James is based in Verve’s New York office.

James joins Verve from Warner Bros. Entertainment, where he was Chief Revenue Officer for its leading digital consumer properties Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes.  Prior to joining Flixster, James was Chief Revenue Officer at the Huffington Post.   At both The Huffington Post and Flixster, prior to its acquisition by Warner Bros., James built the sales and sales support functions from scratch and was responsible for building and scaling advertising revenue through his deep relationships on Madison Avenue.

Prior to joining The Huffington Post in 2006, James was the Senior Vice President, Key Accounts at AOL where he was responsible for developing and managing AOL’s relationships with its most important advertising partners and over $125M in annual revenue for AOL.

“I’m thrilled that James has agreed to join Verve in our mission to build the category-killer in location-based mobile advertising” says Tom MacIsaac, Verve’s Chief Executive Officer.  “Verve’s sales growth over the last two years has been extraordinary and we expect that this trend will accelerate under James’ leadership.”

“Verve is at the forefront of one of the most exciting trends in digital advertising, the convergence of mobile, location, and context; essentially bringing true one-to-one marketing to brands like never before,” says James Smith, Chief Revenue Officer.  “With the exceptional team already in place and the additions we are announcing today, Verve will be unequaled in its ability to present and deliver cutting edge mobile advertising products to our clients and partners.”

Verve is also announcing a major expansion of its national sales team, including the additions of:

• Neil Shapiro, as Vice President – East, based in New York.  Neil joins Verve from Shazam, where he managed the Eastern and Midwest regions.

• Jennifer Fine, as Executive Director – Southwest, based in Los Angeles.  Jennifer joins Verve from WHERE/PayPal Media where she held a similar role.

• Kara Jenkins, as Director – New England, based in Boston.  Kara joins Verve from WHERE/PayPal Media where she held a similar role.

In addition, Beau Davis has been promoted to VP Strategic Accounts, a new role in which he will manage select key advertiser accounts nationwide.  He will also continue to oversee Verve’s Midwest sales team.

About Verve

Verve Mobile is the pioneering leader in location-based mobile advertising. Our customers are national brand advertisers who want to engage consumers on their mobile devices with location-aware, data-driven and highly targeted marketing. We also serve premium publishers across the nation, delivering the platforms and services they need to power and monetize their mobile properties.  The Verve location-powered technology platform and the proprietary data it generates are revolutionizing mobile media and advertising. It enables consumer and content brands to reach their desired audiences on the go, out and about, and closer to the buying decision than ever before. Verve has offices in New York, NY, Chicago, Washington D.C. and San Diego, CA. For more information, visit http://www.vervemobile.com

Media Contact
Fiona Beitdashtoo
760-565-3245 | fiona@vervemobile.com

New York, NY, February 21, 2013 – Verve Mobile, the leader in location powered mobile advertising, announced today it has launched Place Insights™, the first mobile place-based audience targeting solution purpose-built to help brands reach their optimal audiences based on the characteristics of a user’s location.


“The big new data set mobile brings to the table is location – a data set that can be as important at inferring intent, demographics, audience profiles and other attributes as any we have seen to date in digital advertising,” said Tom MacIsaac, CEO of Verve.  “This revolutionary new product from Verve, which our extraordinary team of architects and data scientists has been working on for over a year, will be the premier mobile audience targeting solution for brands – it is that transformational.”

Verve is already the trusted partner to many Fortune 500 brands because of its unparalleled array of location targeting solutions, of which the Place Insights™ product is the newest addition.  “Location is the most valuable input in audience targeting in mobile, and as the location expert, Verve has built the premier place-based audience targeting platform available today.  We have pre-built the 17 top audience segments that are most in demand by marketers.  We can also craft custom segments for brands to match their specific audience profiles or run more broadly targeted campaigns and show brands the segments in which they best perform.”  MacIsaac said.


“We have divided the world into hexagonal micro-grids (hex-grids) as small as a city block and then associated large amounts of data with each grid so that we understand what’s there and what that can tell us about users who are in those hex-grids.” said Chris Nicotra, CTO of Verve.  “We ingest, store and make sense of massive amounts of demographic, transactional, commercial, social and other data types that allow us to understand the audience that is likely to be in a hex grid at a certain time.  For example, if a suburban shopping center occupies a certain hex-grid we can understand the demographics of nearby neighborhoods, the mix of commercial establishments, and other data that will tell us a lot about a user in that grid.  And, over time, as we see a unique user in multiple grids we can develop an anonymous profile of a user based on their place-based attributes. ”


Verve has distinguished itself as the leader in location-based mobile advertising by providing brands with a broad array of solutions that leverage location data to power their mobile marketing.  See the recent “State of the Market: Location-Based Mobile Advertising Report” for a review of some of those strategies.


“Location powered mobile advertising isn’t about single point solutions like geo-fencing, place-based audience targeting, 3^rd party data targeting, or deep local market targeting – it’s about having all of these tools, and more, available to help brands achieve their mobile marketing goals.” MacIsaac said.  “At Verve, our goal is to develop multi-faceted solutions for brands that leverage both Verve proprietary data and technologies but also pull in value from our many data partners and find the location powered solutions and strategies that work best for particular brands.”


For more information on Place Insights™, please refer to Verve’s white paper here.


About Verve
Verve Mobile is the pioneering leader in location-based mobile advertising. Our customers are national brand advertisers who want to engage consumers on their mobile devices with location-aware, data-driven and highly targeted marketing. We also serve premium publishers across the nation, delivering the platforms and services they need to power and monetize their mobile properties.  The Verve location powered technology platform and the proprietary data it generates are revolutionizing mobile media and advertising. It enables consumer and content brands to reach their desired audiences on the go, out and about, and closer to the buying decision than ever before. Verve has offices in New York, NY, Washington DC and San Diego, CA. For more information, visit www.vervemobile.com

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Location is a big deal. For the history of digital advertising we’ve basically been targeting on a few things, like content, cookie data and search. The big new data set mobile brings to the table is location – a data set that can be as important at inferring intent, demographics, audience segments and other attributes as any we have seen to date. And it brings genuine value to end users – helping them find products and services where and when they want them – a key attribute of the most valuable advertising mediums.

There is a lot of energy and excitement around location targeting in mobile – from agencies and brands that see the enormous potential and from technology companies that are building the next-generation platforms for harvesting and leveraging this data for marketing and advertising.
But there’s one very significant problem that is holding mobile location targeting back – the market has been flooded with bad location data. And many are turning a blind eye to this fact because to acknowledge it would be contrary to their business interests.

There are many sources for actionable mobile location data. The device can share GPS level data (provided the user has opted in to share location with an app or web site). This GPS data is typically represented by latitude and longitude coordinates (lat/long) and is generally very accurate. The network can share data derived from cell tower triangulation which is also quite accurate. There is also user-supplied location data (e.g. when a user provides his zip code when registering for a site or service). Another method of deriving location is IP address analysis, which can range from very accurate to completely inaccurate. An IP lookup can resolve to a terrestrial wifi network (like an airport or coffee shop), most of which are well indexed to location. But an IP lookup can also resolve to a carrier IP address and carrier IPs vary widely in accuracy. Many carrier IP locations are accurate to the metro or zip level, but many resolve to “backhaul” addresses – which are the locations where the carrier aggregates mobile data for transport over fiber trunks in the telecommunication infrastructure — which are generally inaccurate.

The crème of the crop in location data targeting is device-level GPS lat/long data. Highly targeted mobile advertising campaigns that are focused on targeting people in an area the size of a city block or a shopping center or a big box store require this precise lat/long data (and potentially wifi data). The problem is that lat/long data is very scarce. Most industry experts consistently estimate that about 5-10% of mobile ad impressions have lat/long from users who have opted in to share location with an app or site. This makes sense. Most apps and many of the largest mobile consumer apps – like internet radio or game apps — aren’t allowed by Apple to ask for location. One of the rules for app store approval is that, if the developer of an app has built in a feature that asks the user for location, he must have a good reason for doing so – location-based apps like Foursquare, mapping apps or local media properties sites/apps that are providing geo-aware weather, sports scores or movie times are good examples of apps that can ask for location and with which users tend to share location.

Yet, some exchanges and networks claim 70, 80 or even 100 percent lat/long impressions. How can this be? One more time – 5 to 10% of all mobile impressions have lat/long but a given exchange may claim 80% lat/long? The answer is some people are making up lat/longs. This is the dirty little secret of location-based advertising. About 12 months ago, some publishers figured out that location was the one attribute that really moved the needle in the exchanges and the “inferred” (read “made up”) lat/long was born. If buyers are paying a premium for lat/long location data and it’s the only thing that can give a publisher’s mobile impressions a price boost, manipulators will find a way. And they have. In 12 months’ time, the number of lat/long impressions in exchanges has grown from the industry average 5-10% to the current 70-80%. Even though, generally speaking, lower quality, rather than premium impressions, end up in exchanges, so one would expect that premium lat/long impressions would be used by publishers and their location specialist partners and fewer (not more) lat/long impressions would be making it into the exchanges.

The methods being used to generate “inferred” lat/longs fall into two primary categories (although there are more): “centroids” or “randomized” lat/ longs. Centroids are lat/long coordinates that are generated by software programs that automatically pick the center of a geographic region as a substitute for either no location data – many corrupt lat/longs are dead center in the middle of the country – or for lesser-quality location data – they are in the middle of a state, DMA, city or zip. Randomized lat/longs are generated by software programs that randomly choose lat/longs within a region. This is a really big problem for the evolution of the highly granular location targeting that has so much potential and has marketers so excited. If a marketer is targeting a particular store location, mall or office building, a particular neighborhood or city block or an audience segment that is based on inferences drawn from the context of a user’s location, then bogus location coordinates are almost certainly targeting the wrong place and the wrong people and driving down performance. Garbage in, garbage out.

So what to do about it? At Verve, our roots are in building mobile tools for publishers and we work with many of the largest premium content publishers in the US providing them with a mobile publishing, web and app platform that powers their mobile content distribution. So, for about a third of the publishers we work with, we are the first party technology platform – we know with 100% certainty what location the GPS chip in the device is generating. Also, most of these properties are location-aware, giving users good reason to opt in to sharing location. Further, for the publishers we work with who aren’t on our publishing platform, we work with most of them directly, through first party business development relationships. If we see data that our systems detect as suspect we call them up and rectify the situation — either they send us good data or we don’t work with them. When we do venture into the mobile exchanges we leverage our unique proprietary technology that allows us to recognize and parse ad impressions with genuine location data from those with false location data and cherry pick verified impressions. We work with publishers with over 108M US unique users and see almost 10 billion impressions monthly and we have more verified lat/long impressions than anyone in mobile. And when we use DMA, city, zip, user supplied or IP targeted location data – which can be valuable under the right circumstances and can help advertisers achieve scale in this emerging technology arena — we don’t hide the ball and call it something else. All of these things – cultivating inventory partners with higher than average true lat/long data, working directly with partner publishers so we can have confidence in the data being received and developing proprietary technology and models that allow us to identify and reject “inferred” lat/longs – are important in making sure we can operate our business on legitimate location data and advance location targeting in mobile. But we are also working on a broader solution that could become an industry model – a system that scores every impression for the likely accuracy of its location data and estimates the likely original source (e.g. ‘this centroid is likely derived from this zip code’) so even if the problem of “inferred” lat/longs continues we can provide a measure of transparency.

Location targeting in mobile has enormous promise. With the increasing penetration of smartphones, increasing user migration from online to mobile consumption, the increasing development of location aware apps and the increasing comfort by consumers with sharing location, we will see steady growth in high-quality, location-aware ad impressions sufficient to make this promise a reality. The lack of transparency in location data only sets us back.

(In online exchanges cookies provide the data points that act as the value drivers for impressions (a user who has visited a car site is an ‘auto intender’ and that information is stored in a cookie and that impression commands a high price for an auto marketer), but in the mobile world where we have a fragmented technology landscape with multiple devices, operating systems etc, the third party cookie state is very limited. So in mobile exchanges mobile marketers typically bid on IAB content category (I want someone reading business or mom content), or device type (I want people on high end phones) or location (I want people in lower Manhattan).

The Key Executives Mega Conference is the largest annual local media event attracting over 500 decision makers from local media companies in the U.S. and Canada. The conference is hosted jointly by the Inland Press Association, Local Media Association and Southern Newspaper Publishers Association and runs through February 20th.

For more information about #2013MegaConf check out the program.

How is Verve like Joe Flacco? We are cool, we like to lead, perform in the clutch, and we have found that the Super Bowl allows us to elevate our game to the next level, all in the service of some of the best brands in the world. Of course, when Joe announced that he was headed to Disney World, the Verve research team was inspired to head back to the labs, appropriately in Ravens-country, to study the longitudinal impact of television advertising on mobile campaigns.

While Nielsen has reported that 38 percent of consumers have a “second screen” they are interacting with while watching TV, there has been little research performed on the interaction between TV campaigns and mobile advertising effectiveness, until now.

Our analysis looked at how Super Bowl advertisements run by ten advertisers on our platform had affected campaign performance compared to the rest of the advertisers on our platform.

The effect on mobile ad performance during TV viewing hours was striking. During Super Bowl Sunday, advertisers that ran broadcast and mobile ads saw 6% performance improvement relative to our general pool of advertisers day over day. More dramatically, there was a long-term effect to Super Bowl ads interactions with mobile advertising.

As this chart indicates, campaign performance improved, on average, 18.3% for the six days following the Super Bowl when comparing Super Bowl advertisers to the rest of the Verve advertising population. This performance improvement peaked on the following Thursday, with a CTR gain of 28%.

A simple takeaway from this is that mobile advertising is a very effective element in the media mix for Super Bowl advertisers. The improvement in the effectiveness of mobile advertising creates measurable, sustained value to accompany more traditional Super Bowl advertisements run on TV, online or print.

More broadly, this study (Super Bowl Public 20130219 BWH) underlines the bigger opportunity to incorporate TV and mobile advertising together in a compelling manner for a more impact-driven marketing strategy. TV advertisers can use mobile advertising to extend the influence of their spots by engaging consumers with second screen messages not just during the TV spot, but also long afterwards.

Mobile advertising and TV form a partnership of MVP status! Let the Super Bowl puns continue.

And just because… the Ray Lewis dance.

As marketers continue to explore mobile marketing, location needs to be at the forefront of their strategy because it brings genuine value to end users. Additionally, quality location data can help brands reach consumers near their real world locations and drive foot traffic to stores more effectively traditional media resources.

To read the full eMarketer report, please click here.

New York, NY, February 13, 2013 – Verve Mobile, the leader in location powered mobile advertising, announced today it has closed its Series C financing led by Nokia Growth Partners a global growth stage venture firm focused on mobile technology, services and media with participation from new investor Qualcomm Incorporated, acting through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures (QCOM), and Series B lead investor BlueRun Ventures.

The capital will be used to further develop and expand Verve’s proprietary mobile location-based advertising and publishing products and to grow its marketing and sales capabilities.

“Verve’s focus is combining big data, location-based services (LBS) and ad technologies to make mobile advertising work better for advertisers and publishers,” says Tom MacIsaac, Verve Mobile CEO.  “Nokia and Qualcomm are global leaders in mobile technology innovation and have important insights, assets, initiatives and relationships that can help Verve maintain its lead in location powered mobile advertising.”

John Gardner of Nokia Growth Partners has joined Verve’s Board in connection with the financing, and Quinn Li of Qualcomm Ventures has become a Board Observer.

About Verve

Verve Mobile is the pioneering leader in location-based mobile advertising. Our customers are national brand advertisers who want to engage consumers on their mobile devices with location-aware, data-driven and highly targeted marketing. We also serve premium publishers across the nation, delivering the platforms and services they need to power and monetize their mobile properties.  The Verve location-powered technology platform and the proprietary data it generates are revolutionizing mobile media and advertising. It enables consumer and content brands to reach their desired audiences on the go, out and about, and closer to the buying decision than ever before. Verve has offices in New York, NY, Washington D.C. and San Diego, CA. For more information, visit www.vervemobile.com

I’m excited to share with you Verve Mobile’s inaugural “Location Powered Mobile Advertising Report”. This report highlights key insights from over 2,500 mobile campaigns run across our location-based mobile ad platform in 2012. 

Going forward, we will publish our Location Powered Mobile Advertising Report on a regular, quarterly basis. 

A little background on Verve

Verve leverages location data to help major brand advertisers achieve their mobile marketing goals.  We work with premium publishers so that advertisers only appear in contextually relevant, brand-safe environments.  We typically collaborate with brands on complex, location data-driven executions that leverage dynamic rich media and pull location related information and/or product information into the user experience.

Therefore, this report is a very good representation of the state of the market in premium location powered mobile advertising, but it does not reflect the lower-end standard banner or direct response mobile advertising market.  Verve is the trusted partner for so many premier brands simply because we have the most sophisticated location-based advertising platform in the business and the most experience — we have been doing this since 2005!   We can execute a wide range of mobile solutions that leverage location technology and location data (unlike some of the point solutions that have emerged more recently) because we have more high quality location data than anyone in mobile and we have more experience leveraging that data to make mobile work smarter for brands.  

Location is a big deal. 

For the history of digital advertising we’ve basically been targeting on a few things, like content and cookie data.  The big new data set mobile brings to the table is location  – a data set that can be as important at inferring intent, demographics, audience segments and other attributes as any we have seen to date in digital advertising. And it brings genuine value to end users – helping them find products and services where and when they want them – a key attribute of the most valuable advertising mediums.

Verve can leverage location data to help brands reach consumers near their real world locations and drive foot traffic.  But what about reaching people who aren’t currently nearby, but live or work nearby?  We can do that too.  Or to retarget people who have recently been at or near a store or location?  Yup, that too.  What about reaching your desired audience wherever they may be?  Yes, we can target only the users you want to reach — like soccer moms or business travelers or outdoor enthusiasts — through our proprietary audience segments built based on data associated with user locations.  And we can use location data to reach people based on particular demographics or transactional histories by incorporating with third party data providers.  All of this is possible and it’s the “sweet spot” of mobile advertising.

We hope this report gives you a glimpse into the impressive possibilities of location powered mobile marketing.

Tom MacIsaac
CEO, Verve Mobile

Key findings of Verve’s inaugural Location Powered Mobile Advertising Report include:

• The primary location targeting strategies being deployed by premium brands
• Location targeting provides 2x lift on CTR performance versus other mobile targeting strategies
• Retail and restaurant led categories leveraging location targeting
• Premium inventory performs up to 3x better than exchange-based inventory on location targeted campaigns
• Location targeting case studies and best practices

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