Amobee and Cooliris are getting together to offer 3D immersive ad campaigns on mobile devices, with Amobee implementing Cooliris' Immersive 3D technology into its mobile ad campaigns.
To hear Amobee CEO Trevor Healy tell it, the technology developed by Cooliris was too good to pass up. "The great thing about this ad unit is the cool factor is very high on it," he says. "It looks beautiful."
The technology, which looks particularly slick on the tablet form factor, will work pretty much the same on any device, regardless of whether it's optimized for 3D, and it will support iOS, Android and HTML5. The 3D ads will be served using Cooliris' new standalone immersive 3D ads business unit, Adjitsu.
While Apple does have the capability of doing 3D-type ads, Healy says what Amobee is offering with Cooliris will work better, with faster rendering and graphics displayed. Amobee also works on multiple platforms, so rather than being confined to iOS, advertisers can reach a broader audience.
"I would be so bold as to say when you think about advertising, the Apple model doesn't work because it's a closed-loop model," he says. Big advertisers doing global campaigns want to reach the SMS user in the Philippines as well as the Android user in France, the iPhone in the United States and the BlackBerry in the U.K.
Amobee is a bit of a different beast in the mobile ad ecosystem because it buys inventory from the ad networks like AdMob, Millennial Media, Jumptap and others and has ties to mobile carriers around the globe, which Healy says allows it to do better targeting.
So in a week that started with a big M&A deal, what's in store for Amobee? Healy, who just joined the company from Telefonica Europe about a month ago, says everyone is always looking for a return, but right now, Amobee is growing four times this year over last year. As a result, he's not thinking about exit strategies but about building valuation.
Motorola is among Amobee's strategic investors, so he was pleased to hear of Google's decision to buy Motorola Mobility as that means Google will become an investor in Amobee. Amobee is both a customer of Google's ad network and Google is a customer of Amobee, so from his perspective, there's a huge level of synergy.