Adelphic Mobile
Mobile Advertising Platform brand positioning + Identity
Brief as received
After exits to Nokia and Apple, we have started a new mobile advertising platform. It’s a “mobile first” demand-side platform unlike anything anyone has seen.
The technology is so new, we’re having trouble explaining it to the advertising world, getting meetings and traction with brands.
Design a brand as unique as our technology in a way marketers can understand.
Research & Insights
17 Media Directors at large agencies via online survey and select interviews.
They were clear - didn't care about the technology. Cared about their time and thought most all “ad-tech meetings” were a waste of it.
“Tell me how this is relevant to the CMO of McDonalds” and then I’ll spend time with it. Till then, “I don’t really care.”
The decision makers for “mobile demand-side platforms” were actually 24-29 year old media planners. They wanted learning about new partners to be “worth it.” They only had so much time in the day and valued going home before 10 pm. Anything that makes it harder or adds work with little upside, “doesn’t work.”
Re-framed brief
Create a brand for 24-29 year old advertising professionals that is welcoming, sophisticated and benefits based.
Sharpened audience definition
24-29 year old media planners.
More likely to be women. More likely to live in cities.
(Future audience consideration, advanced mobile markets in Asia - China + Japan)
Problem identified
It’s a “sea of sameness” and there is no “Pepsi challenge” - You can’t prove anything.
Planners are picking Mobile Advertising Platform partners based on personal relationships and quality of brand presentations (does it look real?).
Insight that shed new light
“Devices don’t buy things, people do.”
Media Planners need customers, not phones.
They don't feel the technology - success is selling the connection to customers (worked for Nokia in the 1990’s)
Most brands in adtech space are inhuman and machine based.
Marketplace & cultural understanding
Adtech landscape is a sea of “machine brands” with bad names.
Very masculine and inhuman.
Many seemingly trying to be serious and grown-up to compensate for the fact it may have been started out of a dorm room 3 months ago.
Media Agency Planning is about audiences and people, not machines.
A new way of thinking about the product or brand
What did “the phone know” about people?
It’s not about the device, it’s about behavior - Human behavior.
Thats what Media Planners wanted to buy. Thats what media planners would make time for.
Work the brief inspired
“The Adelphic Tag”
A brand system that brought to life the technology graphically in a way Agency Media Planners and Brands can understand.
Designed to represent the simultaneous connection of brand and consumer in real time through the Adelphic product. Palette enabled a visual understanding of unique combinations of different brands connecting with different people. It is brightly colored, fun and human in a way that contrasts the grey, overly technical world of adtech.
Full company positioning, identity and brand marketing that featured people, not phones.. behavior not devices.
The web site, sales materials and communications all took an easy to understand approach of “connecting brands with people.”
Results
Googles Ventures invested.
Adelphic grew into an industry leader and was acquired by Viant in 2017.