Chicago, Illinois, March 19, 2015: Affinity, India’s leading digital media solutions provider, today unveiled a proprietary, first of its kind mobile ad unit called M-Canvas at ad:tech New Delhi. The new ad unit provides a canvas for brands to create immersive story telling experiences to communicate with today’s “connected generation”.

M-Canvas consists of 2 elements – Initiator and Impactor. The ‘Initiator’ is a thumb-sized overlay, which appears at the bottom left corner of web pages. Engagement with the initiator brings up the Impactor, a full screen ad, which is designed to deliver a cohesive story telling experience. The initiator works as a prelude for a user to engage with a brand’s message. The full screen Impactor can include a variety of short form content – trailers, intro videos, posters, coupons, games, microsites, store locators, social share functionality and various native mobile functions like making calls, sending texts and emails, downloading apps, add to calendars, reminders and more.

According to Lavin Punjabi, President, Affinity, advertisers in India still view mobile advertising as an afterthought instead of a strategic medium. Mobile banners are too small, ineffective, attract a lot of accidental taps, and mainly used for lead generation or direct response ads. We felt the need for creating a mobile ad unit that not only offers advertisers an immersive story-telling ad experience but also serves beautiful ads and earns higher CPMs for publishers in the mobile ecosystem.

“Managing both – branding and performance campaigns for advertisers and agencies,we gathered insights on challenges like banner blindness, creative size limitations, view ability and accidental taps, faced in mobile advertising and consequently designedM-Canvas. It’s not just another ad unit, it’s an ad experience. For brands and media buyers it’s an end-to-end solution, which includes Ideation,Design, Ad Serving and Distribution on premium content websites,” said Mr. Punjabi.

M-Canvas’ rich ad experiences can be accurately targeted to various audiences and content channels and it guarantees visibility in brand safe environments. The ad unit garners between 5-10x more engagement as compared to standard mobile banners. It also comes with advanced analytics like engagement rates (after eliminating accidental clicks), video completion rates, time spent, and custom event tracking.

"Achieving ad engagement, content engagement and audience engagement together on a mobile device remains a holy grail for advertisers. This is the first time for any media solution provider to offer a combination of all three in a mobile ad unit in India. M-Canvas is designed to put consumers at the center of an ad experience and facilitate brand advocacy,” said Dharika Merchant, Senior Director – Advertiser Business Development, Affinity.

For content websites, M-Canvas adds a new revenue stream for publishers. It uses 20% lesser real estate as compared to the smallest mobile banner and can yield up to 4x revenue, as per the beta-launch test results. It’s a responsive unit built on HTML 5, which allows it to serve on most smart phones and tablets. Given that user experience is key, the built-in ad exposure functionality limits the number of times a user is exposed to initiators throughout the day. Additionally, yield is maximized by adaptive ad serving – where ads are delivered to individual users based on their interactions like engagement rates, close rates, and brand preferences.

Affinity at the initial stages has achieved encouraging results with leading Indian brands all of which are currently using M-Canvas on Affinity’s premium distribution on Top Comscore sites in India. At launch, there are dozens of new customizable ad experiences available, each designed to target specific marketing/advertising goals — and the catalogue is constantly growing to support new features and functionality. At launch M-Canvas is available for India traffic only on mobile web.

About Affinity:
Founded in 2006, we are world's leading contextual Ad Network. We build innovative advertising media and monetization solutions for Advertisers & Publishers. Our advertising media and monetization solutions are delivered via Affinity's Global Pay-Per-Click (PPC) & Display Advertising Networks. Both these networks help 100,000+ Advertisers reach out to their target audience by delivering over 50 Billion ad impressions each month.This is achieved through exclusive contextual ad distribution via our network of 10,000+ premium publishers and syndication channels from across North America, Western Europe, Middle East, South-East Asia, India and Australia. For more information, visit www.affinity.com.