How mobile advertising actually works, written for people who do not work in it. No jargon left undefined, no acronym left standing on its own.
Mobile advertising has an unusual amount of vocabulary for an industry that mostly does one thing: show a message to somebody using their phone, and charge for it. Much of that vocabulary exists because a dozen companies sit between the advertiser and the phone, and each one named its own part of the process.
This section unpicks that. Every piece here assumes you know nothing about the field and are not embarrassed about it — which is the correct posture, because a lot of the jargon is a thin wrapper around a simple idea.
Terms that come up constantly, in one line each:
| Term | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| Playable ad | A small interactive demo that runs as an ad. The viewer plays rather than watches. |
| Ad network | A company that collects ad space from apps and sells it to advertisers. AppLovin and Unity are two. |
| Impression | One showing of one ad to one person. The unit most buying is priced against. |
| CTR | Click-through rate. Of the people shown the ad, the share who tapped it. |
| IPM | Installs per thousand impressions. How many app installs a thousand showings produced. |
| Creative | The ad itself — the file, the images, the thing a person sees. Not the campaign around it. |
| MRAID | The rulebook letting one ad file behave correctly inside many different apps. |
Where the acronyms come from
Most of them name a way of counting or a way of paying, because those are the two things the parties in a transaction must agree on precisely. When a term looks impenetrable, asking which of the two it is usually cracks it.
