By PressOK CEO Ryan Morel's own admission, new advertising tool PlacePlay is not yet finalised, but it already represents an intriguing prospect.

The idea is to engage players in titles by, amongst other things, offering them local daily tournaments to participate in.

Once they're involved, ads tapped into their local area can then be pushed in their direction, ensuring they're both relevant for the player and targeted for the advertiser.

We caught up with Morel for his take on why he thinks it's about time advertising was afforded a sense of direction.

Pocket Gamer: What has driven a publisher to get involved in the business of mobile advertising?

Ryan Morel: There's two parts to this. First, we have always believed that where a person plays a mobile game should matter and with the influx of location aware devices and mass market adoption of mobile games, we're finally at that point.

Second, location data is valuable, especially when it's collected from a large number of users over time and combined with social data - either via Facebook or census level demographic data. Very simply, we saw this as a unique opportunity and went for it.

Mobile advertising has a reputation for appealing to big national or worldwide backers. Do you think local advertising has been overlooked until now?

I don't think it's been overlooked, the market just hasn't been ready - but we think it's getting closer to that point.

It's important to note that location based advertising doesn't just mean local businesses - but it can be another tool for national advertisers and brands to segment and reach the most appropriate audience at the most appropriate time.

Is Starbucks, or any coffee shop, going to be interested in advertising to people who are around one of their locations between 7-10 am? Definitely, and what better way to do that than in the medium that is most used on mobile.

How will PlacePlay's location bent be incorporated into games that employ the SDK?

PlacePlay is an enhancement, or enablement, platform intended to add a location layer to any type of game.

For example, Joybits is providing its users in Doodle God with the ability to leave and pick up hints that other players have left at places around them. Other partners are using PlacePlay Tournaments, which is what we released to public beta last week.

We'll 'productise' some features like Tournaments to simplify the value proposition, but the platform was designed and built to handle a variety of implementations.

Much of PlacePlay seems to revolve around engaging players in these local tournaments. If they don't take off, does the ad model fall apart?

No, not at all. First, PlacePlay Tournaments is just one of the PlacePlay feature sets - we already support virtual objects and goods, virtual currency etc., but we didn't think they were at a point where we could support them in an open beta release at the level they'd require.

Second, PlacePlay is intended to provide engagement plus revenue, but if users choose not to utilize the PlacePlay specific features like Tournaments, the developer still has the ability to access and display the ad inventory we provide.

In order to display that ad inventory, a game needs to have some location relevant features like PlacePlay, players don't necessarily need to use them.

The tournaments themselves use push notifications to keep players up to date. Is there a risk players who find them annoying will simply switch them off?

We don't think that's likely in our case. Users who select to participate in PlacePlay Tournaments, by default, want to win - either for the victory itself, or a virtual or real reward, so the push notification helps them meet their goal.

We closely track this stuff and will adjust the push notifications based on real behaviour to minimise this fatigue, if it does indeed occur.

I should add that we are using Urban Airship's push notification tech - they know this market better than anyone and we'll continue to look to their team for recommendations on how to improve our service and minimise and consumer friction.

What ad networks does PlacePlay tap into?

We're not releasing that info at the moment, but we're aggregating as many as we can find to make sure that our fill rates are as high as possible. High eCPM's are great and all, but not at the expense of low fill rates.

How does PlacePlay determine which ads are most relevant to each game?

Given that we're just starting out, we aren't quite there yet. Over time, as ad inventory increases along with our knowledge of the user base we'll be able to get really smart about the who, what, and when - based on location, demographic or social, and engagement data.

Any other projects outside publishing on the go?

Right now, we're focused on PlacePlay, but we are always thinking about interesting solutions for the problems developers face.
Thanks to Ryan for his time.

You can find out more about PlacePlay on the tool's website.