browse news about other mobile games. These software “connectors,” to use Ojjeh’s term, enable EA or other advertisers to hit Bob with an ad at the moment when he’s most likely to respond.
“At the end of the day, advertisers could care less about the channel, they just want to reach the right audience,” says Ojjeh. “And to reach the right audience, you need to understand what they are doing. Being able to understand that you’re an online gamer by day and a console gamer at night puts you at the center of a certain universe, which is what EA wants and what an advertiser wants.”
In its own announcement today, EA said the nPario technology will allow advertisers to understand and fine-tune how their campaigns are performing across EA’s whole network. “One of the biggest challenges for marketers is comprehensively evaluating and learning from their investments across disparate audiences, platforms, and content,” Elizabeth Harz, senior vice president of EA’s Global Media Sales team, said in the announcement. “Our insights suite is the solution. For the first time, our partners will have actionable insights as a result of their marketing communications to key audiences across all of our content and all of [our] platforms.”
Though it’s only 10 months old and has raised only a small amount of friends-and-family financing, Ojjeh’s 11-employee startup (whose R&D team is based in Redmond) has built up a remarkable amount of momentum. That’s in part because its customers understand the company’s Yahoo pedigree, Ojjeh says. With most software startups, he says, “Customers want to know if they are going to be your guinea pig. But we are in a unique position. We have a technology that has been proven with the largest, most complex portal in the world.”
Ojjeh says the EA deal is crucial for the company because it will allow nPario to show off the power of its cross-platform connectors. “We have other very large customers, you could argue even larger than EA, but obviously we’re very excited about EA, mainly because of the multi-platform, multi-channel brand that EA has,” he says. “Having our technology be exercised by somebody who is the number one iPhone game publisher, the number two Facebook app company, not to mention console games and so many other things, is extremely exciting.”
