Home grown mobile ad-tech company PLAYGROUND XYZ launched five months ago and off the back of rapid success with their products, has now raised capital to expand the business.
The company use their proprietary platform to author innovative new types of mobile ad formats with a goal to improve on a variety of poor metrics associated with most mobile ads.
With a bevy of leading local and international brands and publishers now using the tech, the results are in. Viewability scores as high as 90 per cent, Time in View of up to 15 seconds and Click Through Rates of over one per cent, all of which are over two times the average results seen from the standard mobile banner. User Acceptance scores have also improved by up to 33 per cent.
Following this strong performance and quick adoption of the platform the company has raised capital from a group of strategic investors including Mike Gregg and Charles Gibbon, technology capital veterans who are cornerstone investors in Wise Tech Global which floated earlier this month with a market cap of over $1 billion.
Gregg said, “We like the mobile advertising space – there is a real business problem there to be solved and we are very excited by the swift progress being made by the PLAYGROUND XYZ team.” The funding will be used for additional engineers and an accelerated overseas expansion.
Rob Hall, CEO of PLAYGROUND XYZ said, “We set out to solve some of the big challenges advertisers, publishers and users face with mobile advertising. We kept asking ourselves: if mobile ads suck, what would you do differently?
“The existing tech out there didn’t provide the flexibility to change things as dramatically as we wanted – so we built our own stack. It lets us create a new class of ads that work harder and perform better. To be able to walk into a client and say “we can double your metrics” is pretty powerful. We’re now out seeding this platform into publishers, brands and both media and creative agencies.”
“We have fun because it’s just absolute blank canvas stuff. If you want high Viewability we can build an ad format that delivers on that. If Video inventory is scarce, we can build a video product. The inspiration for a new product can come from anywhere: we were talking about regulatory copy being creatively difficult on mobile, so we’ll try and build a new product for solving that.”
While the performance of the new formats is key, it hasn’t been the only driving force behind the growth.
Hall said, “We just listened to the pain points everyone had and tried to address those.
“Things like no heavy technical integration required, no forcing you to buy the inventory through us, no locking you into our creative services, just harder working new ad products that you can use to supercharge your mobile advertising.”
