With Moasis, Advertisers Can Bid on Mobile Users By Location

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Ryan Golden and Jason Mascari — CEO and CPO of Moasis Global, respectively — think they have a solution to the local mobile advertising problem. Like many, they promise better ad targeting through sophisticated data — only they want to make the ad buying process itself more simple.

“If you give the users the ability to draw the boundaries, you get overlaps,” Golden says.

Solution: You don’t. Moasis lays a grid over an area, and allows advertisers can pick pieces of the grid, based on location or more complex definitions like type of business, local events, or behavioral aspects. Then, the system assigns a winner. Golden: “It’s like Google Adwords. But instead of bidding for keywords, you’re bidding for piece of land.”

Who do they hope will use the product? Wveryone from small businesses to massive marketers.

“We wanted to provide accessibility, so that’s offered to small businesses all the way up to the big agencies. They will use our tool in different ways,” Golden said during a demonstration of the product. “This is something that could be an affordable entry point for those SMBs to drive foot traffic to the location and hopefully trigger some impulse buys when the consumers are near the store. From the brand perspective, what agencies are getting excited about is the ability to custom target creative.”

Geo-Grid is an elegant solution. It looks beautiful and, more importantly, easy to use. Mascari says beta testers said it was as easy or easier to use than Google AdWords. This perhaps overstates the case, but the demonstration I saw looked relatively intuitive. The ease of use is a selling point, a back-end that allows virtually instant customization.

“You should be able to do real-time course correction regardless of the size of your business,” Golden says. “The consumers who are in the mobile space are unpredictable. They are constantly on the go.”

Of course, this only works if the data is strong and the system intelligently handles that different inputs. That’s another potential sticking point for Moasis and the Geo-Grid. The company is partnering with a number of data providers to provide users with the most options, but the reality is it could go either way.

Noah Davis is a senior editor at Street Fight.

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