Unlocking Mobile In-App Potential: Q&A with Magnite

With mobile in-app advertising poised for significant growth in 2025,* staying ahead means embracing new opportunities while navigating evolving privacy and identity standards.

We sat down with Evan Gehring, Head of DV+ Channel Partnerships at Magnite, who shared how his team is enhancing in-app supply and shaping the future of programmatic advertising through innovative solutions.

Let’s dive right in.

Can you tell us about yourself, your role at Magnite, and what you’re responsible for?

Evan Gehring: I lead our DV+ Channel Partnerships team here at Magnite. My team is responsible for managing our indirect supply partners. We work with tech companies like Unity that enhance inventory access through collaboration with direct publishers. We help to optimize their integrations on DV+, our supply-side platform (SSP) for all channels outside connected TV (CTV). That entails ensuring that the supply is enriched with all of the data demand-side platforms (DSPs) and buyers are looking for and curating their supply into our sold deals and packages.

What tools does Magnite provide to help advertisers effectively engage users within mobile apps?

Gehring: At Magnite, we have incredibly strong partnerships with brand buyers, agencies, and holdcos, as well as a variety of offerings that help make our mobile app supply as valuable as possible to these partners. We support app-specific fields and signals within our requests and various formats within in-app environments, such as interstitials, native ads, and rewarded video.

One of our largest value propositions to buyers is our omnichannel exchange, with premium supply partners across all screens and environments. We also have a wide variety of data and enrichment offerings that span across those environments, including in-app, to help our buyers reach their target audiences and drive outcomes across all the places their users consume media.

Unity: Making mobile app inventory more valuable through enriched data and diverse ad formats is key to driving better results for everyone involved. At Unity, we count on SSPs like Magnite to connect publishers’ premium inventory with advertisers looking to reach engaged audiences. It’s all about working together to create the best possible outcomes on both sides.

How is Magnite working to facilitate more direct paths between buyers and sellers for mobile app supply?

Gehring: We’ve recently launched a Direct Placements program in order to help buyers better identify unique supply through channel partners —trusted facilitators of direct publisher connections— who have historically been labeled intermediaries, which signal resold supply. This works very well in a mobile app software development kit (SDK) environment where SDK providers have unique access to mobile app supply that we don’t see within existing direct seats today.

In this program, we integrate this supply directly into our publisher partners’ seats on DV+ to provide greater transparency and control to app developers and allow them to capture the unique demand we provide via our Auction Packages and Curated Marketplaces.

Unity: That makes sense. Direct supply paths surface unique inventory, while private marketplaces (PMPs) and programmatic guaranteed (PG) deals provide customized, premium access at scale. By combining both approaches, publishers gain transparency and control, while buyers get tailored solutions that meet their strategic goals. It’s a win-win. Speaking of transparency and control, that’s becoming even more critical in a world shifting away from cookies.

How does Magnite perceive the shift towards first-party data and a cookieless world, and what identity solutions and opportunities does Magnite offer brands to adapt to these changes in programmatic advertising?

Gehring: At Magnite, we believe the future of user identity will involve several solutions that both buyers and sellers can use together. We’ve developed tools and features to support all the ways we think identity will be used moving forward. Our Magnite Access products help publishers utilize their own data, create audience groups based on behavior and interests, securely share data while protecting privacy, and support various alternative ID methods.

By offering these options, we aim to enable better and more meaningful transactions between buyers and sellers in a world without cookies.

Fill in the blank. “When it comes to mobile marketing, bet on ________.”

Gehring: Unique supply and demand paths, audience data enrichment, and Magnite’s suite of product offerings!

Unity: Thank you for joining us and giving us your insight into the evolving world of mobile app advertising. We appreciate your time and look forward to sharing more industry perspectives!

Want to learn more about Unity’s programmatic solutions? Click here.

* Source: eMarketer, Mobile Advertising 2024