Well (Ad) Adapted

“There’s an app for that.” It’s hard to remember a time before you could find an icon on your phone to make just about every aspect of life a little easier. But if there’s one thing that makes you want to revert back to a landline, newspaper and phone book — it’s an annoying banner ad.

That’s where Ad Adapted comes in. A 2015 member of The Brandery, Ad Adapted helps to keep mobile users engaged through relevant ads that make engaging with the content seamless and user-friendly. They do this by visually matching the design of the app and better connecting the content to the ad served. In order to create this experience, the mobile platform connects advertisers to developers in order to give apps the same type of integrated advertising that you would normally only find in more popular apps.

“When ads look like they are part of the app, you get much higher click-through rates than you do with generic banner ads,” says Ad Adapted Co-Founder Molly McFarland. “Our clients are the advertisers and our partners are the app developers.”

Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a member of the Cincinnati-based accelerator The Brandery Class of 2015, Ad Adapted was co-founded by McFarland and Mike Pedersen, who wanted to change up the ad game a bit when they noticed that only apps such as Facebook were able to create ads that mattered to consumers.

“We had heard about The Brandery from our investors,” says McFarland. “[We] wanted to scale up quickly, and they have a great reputation for helping companies do that.”

While Ad Adapted was already a later-stage company working with The Brandery, they were able to focus more on mentorship, their next round of funding, how to position themselves in the industry and negotiating with larger clients.

One of the biggest accomplishments for the team at Ad Adapted was their work with Jimmy Dean. The company wanted to reach mobile moms while they were planning meals and heading out to the grocery store. Rather than creating ads with standard “Jimmy Dean” banners, they were able to use the company’s logo and create customized ads that were relevant content in grocery list and lifestyle apps.

As a result, Ad Adapted helped Jimmy Dean’s mobile benchmark increase by 20 percent and drive more than 100,000 engagements (the number of users who actually engaged with the ad). Most importantly, McFarland says, Ad Adapted led to Jimmy Dean products being added to users’ grocery lists more than 21,000 times.

Whether you’re a publisher or advertiser, Ad Adapted wants to work with new partners. “The AdAdapted platform automates the native advertising model for advertisers that want to reach mobile app users,” according to their site. “With AdAdapted, advertisers can launch scalable, trackable, custom branded campaigns across a wide variety of apps without duplicating efforts with each publisher. We create impactful, authentic experiences with your brand—commanding the highest awareness, engagement and click thru rates in the market.”

To learn more about Ad Adapted, click here or follow their blog. You can also like them on Facebook.