Given the state of things in online advertising, where certain publishers and ad networks have done their part to erode some trust among advertisers, one ad seller is sticking its neck out.
Jun Group, which sells video advertising across various social games and mobile apps, has recently rolled out Clarity—a marketing slogan/product offering that's essentially the company’s form of the money-back guarantee. Jun is promising buyers that it won’t deliver any pop under ads, autoplay videos, bogus views or ads on undesirable places (like say, ghost sites).
In other words, Jun is swearing that it won’t do any of the bad or unscrupulous stuff lots of other big online ad networks and vendors are accused of. And if Jun screws up, advertisers will get their money back.
“Networks talk about being transparent all the time,” said Mitchell Reichgut, Jun’s founder and CEO. “We’re making a promise with Clarity. We stand behind every single ad we deliver. “
Besides promising clients that nothing bad will happen with their ads, Jun’s new pledge (100 percent viewable, 100 percent opt-in, 100 percent guaranteed) is tied to the release of a new analytics product. Advertisers will be able to look up where every one of their ads is running or has run, and will also be able to steer their budgets toward preferred sites and tactics, according to Reichgut. Not the sort of transparency and control most expect from ad networks.
“It’s sad that this is radical,” said Reichgut. “But too often, ad networks will say, ‘We’ll show you some of where your ads will run, but we can’t show you the rest of it,' which is actually where the bulk of the campaign will happen. But it's a fantasy. And then you end up in bad places. We know that won’t happen because we don’t buy that way. We’ve built our network by hand.”
Jun’s video network has been built largely by incentivized views in social games (i.e. gamers are rewarded with points, lives and the like for viewing ads). Some of Jun’s biggest sources of inventory are Zynga, EA’s social games and the increasingly popular gaming site King.com.
More recently, the company has monetized mobile apps with full-screen video ads, which, according to Reichgut, are more appealing to brands and publishers than mobile banners. “Mobile is now 50 percent of our business.”
The company expects to bring in between $10 and $50 million in revenue this year, said Reichgut. Previous advertisers include McDonald’s, Dove, Corona, Samsung and Fiat.
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