Paris, 2nd February, 2010 – Sofialys, the leading French mobile advertising specialist, has just added to the frenetic activity recently witnessed on the mobile ad sector frenzy by today announcing that it has successfully raised several million Euros of fresh capital from the German investor Creathor Venture. This news will certainly boost the launch of ADITIC, Sofialys’ brand new online mobile ad marketplace, which enables agencies and advertisers to identify audiences and serve campaigns on the growing inventory of mobile operators and publishers. Gert Köhler, CEO at Creathor Venture says, "We firmly believe in the strong potential of mobile advertising and see Sofialys as one of the most promising players on the market today. We have been impressed by the professionalism and expertise of the Sofialys team and are extremely excited at the prospect of being part of such an innovative and exciting project within the high growth sector of mobile advertising.” This new round of investment will allow Sofialys to continue its international expansion and strengthen its management team.
According to Julien Oudart, VP Sales & Marketing at Sofialys, “The advent of Smartphones and the iPhone in particular, has dramatically changed the agencies’ and advertisers’ appetite for mobile advertising. However, while everybody remains convinced that mobile phones offer unique ways of engaging with consumers, neither brands nor agencies seem truly happy with the performances offered by existing ad networks. We firmly believe that ADITIC is about to change all this and we welcome the boost given to us by VC Creathor”.
Negotiations are underway with a number of mobile operators to use ADITIC as an electronic sales channel for on portal traffic, and VIP access will be granted to a limited number of agencies and brands, enabling them to choose which operator or publisher site/application their campaign is served on.
The advantages of the ADITIC offer are threefold:
- It gives mobile operators the opportunity to monetise all or part of their inventory electronically and therefore accelerate their sales rate;
- It allows publishers to offer a range of innovative mobile web and smartphone application ad formats (for iPhone, Gphone and Blackberry) and to go one step further in terms of audience qualification through user profile, location, country, handset and context-based targeting;
- It provides high-performance and consequently generates higher ROI to agencies and advertisers through the access to premium inventories such as operators’ portals and qualified publisher services.
Julien Oudart concludes, “What we are witnessing today is a mobile operator world characterised by a qualified audience and click-through-rates of over 5% combined with ad networks that have been good at monetising some of their publishers’ inventory but which are ultimately failing to deliver sufficient results to brands; ADITIC aims to bridge this gap. We have presented ADITIC to a number of operators, agencies and brands and they are all very excited by the concept. We will start running the service in several countries from this month.”