Chasing the general trend of people spending more and more time on their phones, video ad network BrightRoll announces today their expansion into mobile video advertising, attempting to expand inventory and lower CPM costs. Advertisers and third party buyers can now buy mobile pre-roll ads through BRX, BrightRoll’s video ad buying platform. BrightRoll is one of the largest video ad networks, serving 65,489 views in August according to comScore. What’s interesting in this latest development is that rather than only placing video ads before video content (which is scarce outside of YouTube), BrightRoll is basically doing the same thing as it does online and serving up ads in front of any content on your phone, whether it be video, audio, games or apps. Says BrightRoll CEO Tod Sacerdoti, “While we’ll bring the same value to mobile that we bring to online in terms of research, optimization and targeting, the sheer increase in scale that mobile inventory represents will fundamentally improve the results we’re able to deliver to our clients.” While the move into mobile ad inventory marks a big jump in terms of audience and reach, BrightRoll plans to continue offering the same analytics and interactive capabilities of the web ads. However applying the same web tropes to mobile is a challenge when you consider the fact that people might be reluctant to view video ads on the go. One key benefit in the inclusion of mobile inventory is the ability to now target audiences based on mobile specific data like geo-location and type of mobile device, a boon for local advertisers. Brightroll current has 15 million in VC funding, lead by True Ventures. CrunchBase InformationBrightRollInformation provided by CrunchBase 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8Authors: Alexia Tsotsis