Dan Laughlin wants to merge the heavy firepower of Madison Avenue, Fortune 500 advertisers with the world of mobile app developers.
If he succeeds, he will become an incredibly wealthy individual. More importantly, he will have established his name as somebody who brought the two unlikely bedfellows into the same fold.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1513474,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"marketing,mobile,","session":"D"}']Laughlin left Flurry in March, where he was senior director of business development. He announced Thursday he was officially joining HyprMX.
HIs previous employer, Flurry, is a mobile analytics and advertising standout which was just bought by Yahoo this week in a cash-and-stock deal for around $250 million.
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Exact details on that buyout haven’t been disclosed.
“The big brands are now cool with mobile,” said Laughlin. “And mobile realizes they should be running brand advertisements themselves and not sending clients to the App Store.”
HyprMX is an ad company that specializes in deploying video ads with an emphasis on Fortune 500 clients and is based in the Big Apple. In addition, the startup has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago.
Laughlin’s new gig means he will task himself to increase the synergy between Madison Avenue and the mobile app developers themselves. And opening the wallets.
“Brands are willing to pay more per view for video ads than the gaming companies are,” he said. “Mobile publishers are starting to see this.”
Before he joined Flurry, Laughlin was at Microsoft, where he worked closely with app developers and gamers, especially in Japan and China, two of the world’s biggest gaming markets. Laughlin said mobile video ads are becoming the increasing venue of choice for advertisers.
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“U.S. mobile brand spending is doubling every year,” he said.
As it stands now, the vast majority of mobile advertising is for apps themselves, and games. Ford, GM, Delta, ConEd, and PG&E, and the billions of dollars in their ad budgets, are more comfortable entering the mobile app domain now that everybody’s doing it.
The mobile ad market, and the third-party mobile analytic outfits that help marketers target their ads, is wide-open and ripe for the taking. The sector grew 105 percent in 2013 to a total of $17.9 billion, and research firm eMarketer expects that tally to grow to over $30 billion by the end of 2014.
Out of that, Google and Facebook account for two thirds of the mobile ad spend.
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“It’s crazy that the vast majority of mobile advertising drives users away from their experience to app stores,” Laughlin said.
Laughlin spoke to VentureBeat Thursday, where he was speaking at the Casual Connect conference in San Francisco. His chat? “Monetization in 2014 – Respect Your Game while Profiting from Brand Dollars and Mature Tech.”
“We can create a more premium experience for developers and gamers alike by helping the industry shift to brand ads,” he said.
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