Online advertising inspires pool of homegrown interactive applications

A heightened attempt by advertisers to move online in a bid to reach more audiences has birthed a need for the advertisers to interact with their audiences, and a pool of Kenyan techies have been working tirelessly to bring interaction between advertisers and their target audience in a rather simple and interactive way.

A computer technologist at Variance Company, Eric Oyugi, has taken the concept of interactive advertising to a new level. He has come up with a model of advertising known as in-text advertising that allows publishers to more effectively add value to their online content and advertisers to more effectively target relevant words and phrases that will drive traffic to their websites, Facebook pages or any other relevant landing page.

In addition, the solution can be used to display info commercials instead of real adverts. “These features make in-text advertising the best breed of online advertising thus offering value of money for the advertisers while giving a publisher a novel non-intrusive way of monetizing their online content,” Oyugi explains.

Income for the application is by charging an advertiser for every advert served across your network as a publisher. And for every advert served a publisher charges the advertiser gets at least ten per cent visitors and the adverts are served to them they can make a gross revenue of between $500 for 10,000 visitors per month.

The application has three portals that help an assigned administrator to monitor various settings to a computer system when hosted online. The portals include the service provider portal which monitors all ads served on all publishers’ networks. This the main portal controlled by our internal team, it’s also the place where the adverts are loaded so that they can be displayed on various web publishers’ page.

One can also use the publisher portal, which will monitor all ads served on a publisher’s network. This portal allows the publisher to have a transparent view of what is happening on the entire site on a central place without having to check by going through every web page on their site. The main purpose of this portal is to reduce dependency of the publisher on the service provider by having to ask every time which adverts are being served on their networks.

Through an advertiser’s portal one can monitor where adverts are served on various publisher networks. Through this portal an advertiser can assess which publisher’s network is displaying their advert the most and whether they are displaying them in the manner they would have wished to see them.
The application has been tested by Com-Score who conducted an extensive study and analyses of in-text advertising. The three months study examined end-users’ attitudes towards various forms of online advertising and towards in-text advertising in particular.

The study revealed that consumers view In-Text ads as one of the cleaner, less cluttering and more relevant ad formats. In-text display ads were ranked in the “middle of the pack” in terms of website trust and intrusiveness. Digital media is seeing exponential growth in Kenya as traditional media such as print and television struggle to earn advertisement revenues, forcing them to rebrand and relocate their business into digital form to remain relevant. Despite this shift to digital, many companies are still relying on traditional methods of advertising, as only two percent of the $550 million spent across the three major countries in East Africa for advertising last year, was spent on the digital media platform.

Over time, companies have been cashing in on the increased number of mobile phone subscribers to reach potential customers and increase market for their products. The rise in mobile phone service subscription, coupled with rapid uptake of smart phones, tablets and internet-enabled phones has handed marketers in the East African nation a new platform to advertise services.  Top on the list of companies turning to mobile phones to reach consumers are telecommunication firms, companies dealing in mobile phone ring tones and music, fast food restaurants and job recruitment firms.

While most of the firms send text-messages (SMS) to subscribers with direct descriptions about their products, others send texts with hyperlinks, which customers can use to access more information from the website. This interesting developments have come at a time when a new survey show that Kenyans’ shopping habits are increasingly becoming more influenced by their mobile phones. 

Global mobile ad network, InMobi claims that their research revealed that 65 percent of shoppers are influenced by their mobile phones when making a decision to buy groceries at a supermarket. The firm’s said such a trend presents an opportunity for local businesses looking to build their brands on a new platform apart from the traditional television and newspaper advertisements.