Julu Mobile Aims to Transform the Mobile Ads Experience

This is part of our coverage of the 2012 Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing. See our interviews and reports from the event here.

According to the team at Julu Mobile here at the GMIC G-Startup competition, online ad spending in China is at $9 billion – but mobile advertising spend occupies only eight percent of the pie. With more people spending more time on mobile, there is certainly a growing potential which Julu Mobile aims to tap into and transform the mobile monetization experience.

The Shanghai-based company wants to solve three key problems:

1. irrelevant mobile content
2. a lack of engagement with advertisements
3. most users do not trust or like mobile apps, trusting only recommendations from family and friends

They’re looking to bring desktop-like advertisements to mobile, providing more personalized and engaging mobile consumer interaction. There will be Julu technology in place to predict the interest and intent of users, and ads will be served to users through the Julu content network.

For instance, Julu detects that the user is a female, and loves to shop, and so an ad from an e-commerce site Taobao will be pulled from its content network and displayed for the user to see. This should create greater interactivity between the user and the advertisement (unlike with text-based ads) and increase the purchasing rates on smartphones.

The team is made up of technology experts with top-class backgrounds from Google, Microsoft, Starcite, and Tokbox, and claims to have a deep understanding of what Chinese want.