The Mobile Marketing Solution That Drives Engagement and Results: Verve

Verve Velocity™ is a proprietary location-powered platform uniting data, analytics, audiences, and creative to launch campaigns and scale proven mobile strategies. 

When the iPhone first arrived on the scene in 2007, mobile was a faint blip in the global advertising ecosystem. A decade later, global mobile ad spending is expected to hit an impressive $142.78 billion in 2017 (eMarketer Worldwide Mobile Ad Spending Report, 2017). Location-powered advertising is an important part of the equation and is expected to account for $32.4 billion in ad spend in the U.S. by 2021 (BIA Kelsey Industry Watch 2017). 

As brands begin to fully embrace location-powered advertising, myriad mobile marketing companies are quickly emerging to meet the demand. One of the more prominent players, however, has been refining its unique approach to using location data to shape mobile ad experiences since 2005. Headquartered in Carlsbad, CA, Verve was founded in the early pre-iPhone days of mobile with the goal of creating a dynamic location-powered mobile marketing platform to help advertisers, large and small, utilize the power of connecting with consumers on their devices in real time.

Movement Science and the Moments that Matter

Where people go tells you a lot about who they are. The many data signals generated by mobile devices enable observant marketers to understand the people using them — where they go, what they want, and what they will respond to best. Marketers now have an opportunity to construct a real world, 360° view of the consumer based on location. While there’s a lot of location data available, however, most of it is sourced from ad exchanges and most of that data, as much as 80%, is inaccurate. 

This is where Verve has a unique advantage. Verve’s location data is first-party, sourced from its SDK and from direct back-end and server-to-server integrations with its publisher partners’ mobile apps. Every day, Verve’s data scientists uncover rich consumer insights by analyzing billions of device and location data points. The company has developed a system, refined over a decade of engineering effort, that allows it to quickly and accurately determine a device’s location, to map that against a continually curated database of tens of millions of Points of Interest (POIs), and to understand the characteristics of the user of that device. Verve calls this process Movement Science and uses it to create the best mobile marketing experiences possible. 

Verve Velocity™: An End-to-End Mobile Marketing Platform

Verve Velocity™ is a proprietary location-powered platform that unites data, analytics, audiences, and creative to launch campaigns and scale proven mobile strategies. Verve Kinetic™ is the data element, a patented suite of location intelligence capabilities that collects, verifies, analyzes, and refines the first party location data the platform gathers and matches it to millions of POIs. The resulting insights inform Verve Activate™ a collection of 75+ unique audience segments that can be further enhanced and customized with third party data or a brand’s own CRM data. Verve Foundry™, Verve’s in-house creative studio, produces custom ad experiences designed to engage these audience segments and entice them to act. Verve Momentum™ analyzes the performance of these experiences to measure results and inform future strategies, enabling each campaign to perform more successfully than the last. The Verve Velocity™ platform brings the power of Kinetic, Momentum, Activate, and Foundry together so brands, advertisers, agencies, resellers, and publishers can better serve their clients and customers. 

Future Forward

Verve has made and continues to make key investments in mobile technologies — e.g. push notifications, beacons, and a variety of proximity solutions that will enable it to harvest location signals and behavioral insights from the burgeoning Internet of Things. The company looks forward to continuing to enrich its data and the data provided to its customers, developing a 360° view of the consumer that bridges the gap between the digital and physical worlds as the boundaries between the two elide. And, of course, to using that data to create new types of innovative ad experiences that these new platforms and fast-changing consumer behaviors and expectations call for.

Making Mobile Magic 

Tom Kenney, CEO: Since founding Verve in 2005, Kenney has focused on the power of location intelligence and mobile to provide advertisers with inventive solutions to amplify their mobile marketing strategies. Resulting from his pioneering efforts, Verve has become one of the most powerful mobile technology platforms in the marketing industry, driving foot traffic and sales for modern marketers in the US and abroad. 

Prior to Verve, Kenney spent five years with Blue Run Ventures, an early stage global venture capital fund, and the previous two years with Nokia Oy, overseeing investments in mobile Internet technologies. Early in his career, he held various leadership roles in the telecommunications industry. Kenney holds an MBA from George Mason University and serves on the global board of directors of the Mobile Marketing Association.

“Harnessing the power of location-context mobile data, we believe that mobile advertising is more than a message; it is an experience that connects consumers with the brands, publishers, and moments they value.”