BlackBerry has accomplished a lot since it launched the BBM service 10 years back, and has been celebrating the anniversary over the past four weeks by highlighting its achievements, and touting strong momentum in mobile commerce. On Tuesday, the Canadian firm announced another major mobile commerce milestone it had achieved.
BlackBerry working to make BBM even better
BlackBerry is now receiving more than one billion ad requests on a daily basis from its users on the Android, iOS and BlackBerry apps, the company said in a blog post. Last July, the company launched its Native ads unit, and since then it has seen solid interest, not only in Sponsored Posts and Invites, but also in its Sponsored sticker packs. These come from brands looking to interact and engage with the consumers including e-commerce brands, the travel and automotive industry, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies or financial services firms.
BlackBerry is also experimenting with its new Video Ad format in the feed, and hopes that brands and media buyers looking to leverage existing 15/30 second video ad inventory in the second half of this year will show interest in it.
The Canadian company is also working to increase its fill rates and improve the performance of its ad units. This could be achieved either via direct sales team of the company based globally, regional resellers or through the indirect ad network partners and exchanges that include InMobi, Google’s AdMob, AdMarvel, Smaato, Axonix and AdFalcon.
“The next exciting step for us will be moving some of this direct supply to programmatic ads, which will take us to a whole new avenue in relation to increasing our demand,” the firm noted.
BBM very much alive
Addressing concerns that BBM is not losing steam, the Canadian firm said BBM is doing well. BlackBerry also cited several pieces of evidence to support its claim, saying one billion ad requests per day, combined with the company’s other recent updates such as the BBM Money instant pay, Pay Now integrated Ads units, PayPal money transfers within the BBM Chat, and new features like Private Chat, “should remind people that BBM is very much alive and thriving.”
Considering all these achievements, BBM appears to be poised well to take advantage of the growth opportunities in the social and commerce space as it has a large audience spread across Android, iPhone, Windows and BlackBerry.
