Vungle Premium is a programmatic private market for brands seeking mobile audiences

Vungle has become a leader in mobile in-app video advertising. Now it wants to make itself more valuable to its customers with Vungle Premium, a programmatic private marketplace that allows brands to reach their target audience in the world’s top apps, as those apps peak in their popularity.

That helps generate more revenue for mobile app makers and get better exposure for the brands as they follow consumers into the huge mobile apps market and the $30 billion mobile game market. Vungle Premium enables brand advertisers to catch an app while it’s hot and climbing up the charts. Those brands can insert advertising campaigns into the apps and scale them up as the popularity grows. Vungle’s video ad technology is used in apps that generate billions of views a month.

Vungle Premium comes with two specific tools: the Vungle Score and the Vungle Billboard. They offer brands a target audience, better engagement, and the ability to scale campaigns to fresh consumers as apps climb up the charts.

“Advertisers miss great opportunities to run video campaigns during an app’s peak popularity, due to a challenging combination of short app life-cycles and long brand planning cycles,” said Zain Jaffer, CEO and co-founder of Vungle, in a statement. “Adding to those challenges, poor audience data makes it difficult to target the right audiences. Now, by combining first- and third-party data into a proprietary algorithm with analysis from in-house mobile advertising experts, Vungle Premium automatically identifies the top-performing apps among the 12,000 that Vungle powers daily.”

The Vungle Score is an app-quality indicator, conceived as a proprietary algorithm that combines a diverse pool of sources. Vungle Score showcases past and real-time app performance data, including reach, volume, and conversion. Vungle said this provides brands with a reliable and predictive metric for surfacing high-quality apps based on popularity and performance. Users can access Vungle’s top apps, ranked by the Vungle Score, within the Vungle Billboard.

The Vungle Billboard is a dynamic dashboard that adds top apps as they rise in popularity and removes apps as their usage dwindles. Vungle users can access Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings data in the dashboard, which also enables media buyers to filter the list of apps by age and gender to reach the most relevant demographic for their brand. Brands and agencies are welcome to curate their own personalized list of desirable apps in order to target the right audience and optimize for success over time.

As Vungle refreshes the Billboard with the latest hit apps, Vungle identifies new opportunities relevant to a brand. For both brands and media buyers, Vungle Billboard is supposed to be a one-stop solution to access the premium inventory that delivers buyers the most for their deployed budget.

Essence — a digital agency that promotes Google, Viber, and Method — is the first client to access Vungle Premium.

“Our goal is to reach an engaged audience at scale and help drive adoption of our client’s products. We hand select top scoring apps from the Vungle Billboard and optimize according to performance and app reach. It’s important to move with our audience in real time and stay relevant as new apps enter the marketplace,” said Jolie Giuffre, mobile planning director at Essence, in a statement.

Vungle was founded in 2012, and it competes with rivals like AdColony, Yahoo’s Flurry, Unity Technologies, and Supersonic. Vungle has raised $25 million to date from investors, including Google Ventures, AOL, SoftTech VC, and Tim Draper.