Opera Mediaworks Launches Innovation Lab

SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 19, 2014) - As the mobile advertising industry prepares to meet the growing and evolving demands of consumers, mobile ad platform Opera Mediaworks, which serves 64 billion impressions and reaches 700 million global consumers monthly, today announced the launch of its Innovation Lab.

Unlike a traditional product team, whose primary role is to provide solutions to the problems that mobile marketers face today, the Opera Mediaworks Innovation Lab will focus solely on the needs of tomorrow. The Innovation Lab's goal is to create new products and solutions, leveraging technical innovation available at scale -- that will help marketers reach the next generation of mobile consumers in the most effective and engaging way.

"We've tasked the Innovation Lab team with understanding how consumers can and will be interacting with their mobile devices in the future -- and with finding the ways that brands can actively participate in that experience," says Scott Swanson, President, Global Advertising Sales.

In addition to making several acquisitions that added to Opera Mediaworks' roster of mobile talent, including apprupt in Germany and the U.S.-based mobile video ad platform AdColony, the company recruited from some of the best mobile tech firms and ad agencies to make up the 11 team members of the Innovation Lab.

"It was equally important for us to get people who understood both the realities of the demands that ad agencies face and how to communicate the hows and whys of these products," says Orr Orenstein, team leader and newly-minted Head of Innovation for Opera Mediaworks.

Orenstein, who was previously the CTO of Mobile Theory, the premium mobile ad network that Opera Software acquired in 2012, has 25 years of tech and mobile experience. He was a strong figure in both creating a strong directive for the Innovation Lab group and in vetting its potential members.

The Innovation Lab will put its energy into five distinct focus areas. They are:

1. Interactivity, via a suite of interactive products that utilize the native capabilities of mobile devices, such as the gyroscope, accelerometer, camera and voice recognition.

2. Receptivity, ensuring that ads are served not only to the right person, on the right device and place, but also at the right time -- in alignment with the user's physiological state, or mood.

3. Targeting, including a proprietary technology that detects the apps on a phone to determine that person's "digital DNA" and serve a highly-relevant ad based on interests and habits.

4. Location, where the creative and marketing message is dynamically updated based on location. For example: weather-related creative, map to the nearest store, or APR (Annual Percentage Rate) offers from the nearest car dealership.

5. Measurement will continue to be of utmost importance for mobile marketers; the Lab will find ways to improve cross-channel tracking and reporting of engagement metrics as well as understanding what's driving in-store traffic and mobile conversions.

In the coming months, the Innovation Lab will release a suite of new products intended to capture the full potential of mobile advertising. Debuts of these new products will be visible as the team takes to various cities with demo stations at breakfast events intended to give marketers an opportunity to interact with the new advertising products on devices, in person.

Readers will get an opportunity to "stump" the brainpower of the Innovation Labs team members by submitting questions about the mobile ecosystem through our #stumpthelab contest on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn from August 19 through August 26. More on this here: http://operamediaworks.com/blog/?p=309.

For more information about Innovation Lab, its products and team members, please visit: http://operamediaworks.com/innovation_lab/

About Opera Mediaworks

Opera Mediaworks powers the mobile ad economy through technology innovation, transparency and trust, to create vibrant marketplaces for publishers and advertisers across the globe. This enables advertisers to efficiently reach their target audience and publishers to improve their monetization. Opera Mediaworks operates the world's biggest brand-focused mobile ad network, serving 24 of the 25 top global brands. We also deliver the world's leading mobile ad server and monetization tools to 18 of the top 25 media companies worldwide. Our mission is to deliver relevance in the medium where it matters most -- on mobile devices.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, Opera Mediaworks has offices in New York, United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Russia, Ukraine and Norway. Learn more about Opera Mediaworks at www.operamediaworks.com.