Posts Tagged ‘AppsSavvy’

This morning appssavvy announced that it has raised $3.1 million in its Series A round of funding. This round was led by TRUE Ventures and includes an investment from Scott Kurnit, Founder of About.com. appssavvy is a direct sales team for social media applications. The company helps developers monetize their applications by providing brands with major sponsorship opportunities.

Rather than leveraging traditional banner advertising, appssavvy brands entire applications making the brand an integral part of the application experience. Back in May I posted an interview with Chris Cunningham in which Chris said that some of his developers were seeing CPMs as high as $12, far greater than the average CPMs currently being seen on Facebook and other social networks.

The company has been operating for about a year and continues to sign substantial agreements. Last month I posted a video of a panel at Social Ad Summit about social ad networks, in which Chris Cunningham was also a participant. Definitely check out the video to hear his thoughts as well as the ideas of other thought leaders in this space.

appssavvy has worked with a number of large application developers including 42 Friends, Bantr, Flixster, FrozenBear, MesmoTV, Playfish, and SGN. The company also has built relationships with a wide array of large brands including adidas, Clorox, FOX, GOOD, Kohl’s, MGM, Oakley, and Sony Electronics and Pictures. With this round of funding appssavvy has illustrated its desire to create a long-term business out of monetizing social applications.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Today, Appssavvy announced a new dashboard for media buyers which enables them to manage all of their advertising campaigns across the Facebook networks. The application ties directly into Sometrics to provide media buyers with up to the minute demographic profiles for each application. Want to buy ads on an application with 75 percent male in the age group 18-24? Grab an ad on the Total Sports Fan application.

The backend also provides media buyers with a way to track all of their active campaigns currently active on the network. The combination of Sometrics data with AppsSavvy’s platform will enable media buyers to have immediate access to demographic targeted campaigns. This is the first ad network that I’m aware of to provide robust back-end services to the advertiser.

I’m guessing that this will spark a trend of other ad networks releasing similar offerings. The key here is how this partnership leverages the power of Sometrics. Just last month Sometrics announced their social ad platform which empowers the developer to choose how they would like to optimize the display of advertisements based on demographic information.

This is an early step toward the optimization of advertisements on social platform applications. While the platforms continue to be plagued with poor advertisements, these new solutions will most definitely help improve the quality over time.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Chris Cunningham of AppsSavvy. AppsSavvy is a company based out of New York which focuses on building monetization opportunities for social application developers and building custom branded experiences for companies. They do this by connecting brands with the application developers that have the proper demographics to match up with the client’s campaign.

They have successfully executed campaigns for movie companies, TBS, Adidas and a number of other large organizations. The company is heavily focused on providing sales support for the developers that don’t have the resources to reach out to brands on their own. I have spoken on a number of panels where I emphasized that the best ROI for application developers will come from reaching out directly to brands rather than relying on the traditional CPM model that most developers are currently relying on.

AppsSavvy is surprisingly the only company which is currently focused on providing branded campaigns for clients. As Chris says during my interview with him, there is currently limitless inventory on Facebook and not all of it is being filled. Companies that are focused on continuously building distribution won’t win in the long run because there are already plenty of distribution channels.

This goes back to the developer dilemma that I spoke about on Wednesday. Chris and the AppsSavvy teaming are helping developers that build valuable applications connect with brands and they have continued to see growth since their company launched. Listen to my podcast with Chris to learn more. I forgot to mention one other thing: Chris and his team are currently seeing average CPMs of $8-$12!