Adhere Ad Server is a very powerful tool that specializes in serving ads for mobile advertising. Adhere is the first open-source ad server in the market. The Adhere Ad Server started from the popular
OpenX server for online ads.
Mobile telephony and the associated data services have enabled several advertising channels. For example, SMS advertising, MMS advertising, mobile web advertising, advertising in audio calls, advertising in video calls, idle screen advertising … etc.
The stakeholders in mobile advertising are:
- Advertisers and their agents
- Operators, mobile content providers, and mobile websites
- The Adhere administrator
The Adhere admin is responsible for configuring the system parameters. He’s also responsible for creating advertisers and operators. Finally the admin operates and monitors the system.
In Adhere, an advertiser may have multiple campaigns. Each campaign may consist of multiple ads. Adhere supports a
variety of ad formats to serve different mobile advertising channels. Campaigns and ads may be
targeted in order to be more effective.
Each campaign has a budget, specified as the number of impressions to be served. In addition, the advertiser may specify a daily limit on the impressions served for a campaign. A campaign also has a priority associated with it. Adhere offers three priority levels: Exclusive, High, and Low.
The ad server uses the budget and priority parameters in order to fairly serve all campaigns without starving any of them.
Operators (in Adhere terminology, the term includes mobile operators, mobile ad networks, content providers, and mobile application developers and publishers) consume ads. An operator who has an account on Adhere Ad Server may request an ad of a specific format from the ad server using a
Web Service API. An operator subscribes to specific ad formats and may only request ads of the formats it is subscribed to. The ad server authorizes the operator’s request before serving the ad.
An advertiser may select to limit her campaigns and ads to specific operators only. Similarly, an operator may specify a limited set of advertiser from which to request ads.
The Adhere Ad Server generates statistics of the ads served. The statistics may be classified and/or filtered by advertiser or by operator and can be broken down by location and/or device type. The Ad Server enables both the CPM revenue model as well as the PPC revenues model. The statistics generated track both impressions served and click throughs.
Ad Formats. Adhere Ad Server serves ads of the following formats:
- SMS text ads (ASCII and Unicode supported)
- SMS picture ads
- Mobile web text ads
- Mobile web banner ads
- Picture ads
- Audio ads
- Video ads
All ads served by the ad server comply with the Mobile Marketing Association’s (MMA) recommendations for format and size.
Targeting. Adhere Ad Server offers a comprehensive set of ad targeting and selection criteria. These criteria include:
- Time of day
- Day of week
- Ad language: English and Arabic currently supported
- Maximum ad size
- Recipient’s mobile number or number prefix
- Recipient’s age
- Recipient’s gender
- Recipient’s purchasing power
- Recipient’s location
- Recipient’s handset type
- Keywords describing the recipient’s interests