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The mobile app ecosystem has gone through a rather solid and steady growth since the launch of the Apple App Store seven years ago, and so did the products and marketing associated with it. Shortly after the launch of the App Store, a “land grab” playground arose, where lots of companies – especially gaming companies, such as Rovio or King – found success in a very short amount of time. Today, over 3 millions of apps are available to the end customers across the stores, which makes discoverability extremely hard. Mobile app developers need a really high value proposition to attract users to their products.

In mature markets such as US, current trends show that people use a decreasing amount of applications, but spend more time in those fewer apps. In other words, users dedicate less time to a limited amount of apps. Many studies and surveys back this phenomenon: in June 2015, Nielsen revealed that “70% of the time spent is done within the top 200 applications”.

Even as media buying continues its sea change from traditional direct order technology to programmatic, mobile advertisers struggle to unlock the potential of unified media buying at scale. Programmatic offers an alternative to the labor-intensive and inefficient process of manual direct buys, yet advertisers are finding publishers hesitant to get on board.

Mobile advertisers tapping into the programmatic opportunity should expect to see this resolved in the very near future, as penetration among publishers increases. In fact, programmatic ad spend grew to over $10 billion in the U.S. in 2014, and mobile’s share of all US digital ad spend will reach 72% by 2019, predicts eMarketer.

At the beginning of the month, our CEO and co-founder Tim Koschella had the opportunity to sit down with Korean IT media company Microsoftware for a passionate talk on the history of mobile advertising, the idiosyncrasies of the Korean market, the rise of programmatic and the future of the industry. Here is a carefully translated version of the interview. If you would like to brush up on your Korean, head here.

The Past of Mobile Advertising

The early 2000s marked the beginnings of online advertising in Korea. Portal sites and search engines such as Naver, Daum, and Google started to sell banner ads and the traffic was monetized through CPC ads. Korea had the particularity of having one portal site owning almost 75% percent of search queries. The so-called ‘adtech’ or ‘online advertising technology’ was not really necessary in this context.