SINGAPORE: Postr is a New Zealand start-up whose app gives rewards to users in exchange for their Android devices hosting banner ads, and the company's founder and CEO hopes the concept will make people love advertising again.

Speaking in Singapore, where he is now based as Postr seeks to expand across Southeast Asia, Milan Reinartz told Mumbrella Asia that giving users value exchange when viewing ads could help to make them regard ads more favourably.

"Many people don't like advertising, even those in agencies, so what I am quite proud of is making display advertising more enjoyable – to make it great again. Or even make them love it again," he said.

"The opt-in model does make people more positively biased towards advertising because it's not something that has been forced upon you like on a news site."

Founded in 2014, Postr's business model involves Android users agreeing to download its app so that personalised ads appear on the lock screen of their mobile device in return for benefits, such as extra data from their telecoms provider.

In fact, the company has only recently inked a deal with Hutchison 3 Indonesia (H3I) and local systems integrator company AQN to offer sponsored internet data. H3I has around 55.5m subscribers in Indonesia, although the offer is limited to its Android user base who use the Postr app.

"In developing markets, we can see that people are very keen on getting the free data. We usually see that the higher the data on offer, the higher the app retention. It does very much depend on the state of the telco plans," Reinartz said of Postr's expansion plans in the region.

"There are vast Android audiences, such as in the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. Because this penetration is very high and mobile budgets are growing, these are great markets for our business model," he added.

Data sourced from Mumbrella Asia, Telecompaper; additional content by WARC staff