Grameenphone case study:
An interview with Kazi Islam

At MobiAD News, we usually look primarily at the business impact of mobile marketing and mobile services. But there is another trend, perhaps even more important, which is the critical role that mobile can play in reaching the billions of people in emerging regions that are not yet connected via internet.

This week Ferhan and Jim Cook had the pleasure of speaking with Kazi Islam, CEO of Grameenphone IT about the amazing projects they are working on in Bangladesh. In this interview, Kazi talks about his vision of how mobile can be used to address issues such as health and education in emerging nations, as well as the important role that mobile advertising will play.

Kazi will also be a keynote speaker at MLOVE, taking place June 23-25 in Berlin. more»

Interview with Xavier Perret
VP Advertising Solutions, Orange

Orange is one of the leading mobile operator groups in the world, and over the past several years they have been very active in the area of mobile advertising and marketing.

We recently met with Xavier Perret, VP of Advertising Solutions at Orange, who talked about Orange’s mobile advertising strategy and explained how their fundamental approach is based on segmentation-segmentation-segmentation. more»

InMobi is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing global mobile ad networks.

The company was founded just 3 years ago by three Indian entrepreneurs. It is now active in over 35 markets and processes over 7.5 billion ad requests per month.

Growing a company this quickly in a market that is evolving as fast as mobile advertising is not an easy task. We spoke recently with Naveen Tewari, CEO and founder of InMobi about InMobi’s 2-stage strategy for growth, as well as the key changes that he sees coming to the global mobile advertising market. more»

Vodafone was one of the first major mobile operators to commit serious resources to mobile advertising.

The industry has grown and changed a lot since then, and Vodafone’s strategy has also evolved, culminating with some major announcements recently about applications, network services, and Vodafone 360.

We took the opportunity of these announcements to visit Vodafone’s new offices in London to get some further detail on these plans as well as an update on Vodafone’s overall strategy towards mobile advertising and marketing. more»

Have you ever wished that you could really understand how people used the internet today, how they interact with various media, and what impact the trends we see today will have in the future?

For the past 15 years, the Center for the Digital Future at USC has been studying exactly these issues. In this interview, we talk with Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center on a range of topics, including the evolving media habits of teenagers and the emerging “new rules” for advertising and marketing. more»

Social Networks are rapidly becoming one of the major destinations for mobile and online internet browsing, and a big question today is will the social networks be able to monetize their traffic.

BuzzCity is an interesting combination: it runs one of the largest social networks (mygamma), but it also has a very large mobile ad network for revenue generation.

KF Lai is the founder and CEO of BuzzCity. In this interview, he gives some insight into the synergies he has found from running both a social network and an ad network. more»

Blyk launched their youth-oriented, ad-funded MVNO into the UK market just over a year ago with much fanfare. Since then it has generated a lot of discussion in the industry about the viability and potential success of the “Blyk Model”.

As a year has now passed, we took the opportunity to talk with Shaun Gregory, CEO of Blyk UK, to hear about their first year of operation, what they’ve learned, and to get some insight into the new products that Blyk is working on. more»

For most companies, the centerpiece of their mobile advertising strategy will be a mobile internet site. And before brands will invest the kind of money that is being spent on online, it’s clear that good systems will need to be in place to measure the effectiveness of these mobile investments.

Mobile Analytics is the art and science of understanding as much as possible about the visitors to a mobile site. Analytics is very well developed for online sites, but has been slower to develop for the mobile internet.

In this interview, we talk with Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Bango. He talks about the current state of mobile analytics, what factors have held it back, and how earlier work in setting up a mobile payments system is now enabling Bango to address the mobile analytics issue. more»

BMW is one of the world’s most recognizable brands, and is very actively engaged with mobile marketing. In the first part of this article, we interviewed Marc Mielau, Innovation Manager for Mobile Marketing at BMW. He explained the workings of BMW’s Marketing Innovation Department, and talked about the Mobile Marketing Circle which coordinates across departments.

In this second part of the interview, Marc shows us some of the mobile marketing campaigns that BMW has run recently, and takes a look at where he sees the future going. more»

According to an interview published in ContentSutra, India’s Digital News Monitor, mobile CPM rates in India have increased by 40% in the first 6 months of 2008. The interview is with Abhay Singhal, Vice President of Corporate Sales at mKhoj, who also discusses conditions in the overall Indian mobile advertising market. more»

Getting something for free is always attractive for consumers, and it is the driver behind many of the ad-funded models we’re seeing these days.

One of the first mobile companies to give away free services in return for watching ads was Virgin Mobile US, with their SugarMama program. The youthful demographic of Virgin Mobile was the perfect group to offer free airtime in return for their subscribers’ attention.

We had a chance for an in-depth discussion with Scott Kelliher, Director of Mobile Advertising at Virgin Mobile US. Scott explained the details of the service, what works the best, and how customers feel about it. more»

One company that we’ve always liked to follow is Mobile Content Networks (MCN), who have a completely different approach to search from all the others.

In this interview, we speak with Marc Bookman, CEO of MCN, about their “Federated” approach to search, innovations in search advertising, and the differences he sees in markets around the world. more»

An interview with Pascal Thomas, mobile visionary and VP of Orange NExT (the mobile media division of France Telecom Orange)

France-Telecom Orange is one of the world’s leading tier-one mobile operators, and also one of the first true “multiplay” companies – offering not only mobile service, but also fixed line telephone, internet, and television (IPTV) to their customers.

Understanding the customer benefits of a “multiplay” offer and the evolving impact of social networks on advertising and revenue generation is one of the roles of Pascal Thomas. Pascal is one of the leading innovators in the European telecom industry, and was the lead initiator of Orange’s pioneering mobile television services. He now heads up Orange’s NExT group, which is responsible for “audience and advertising” as well as all things Web 2.0. more»

Interview with Derek Handley
Co-founder & CEO, The Hyperfactory

Founded in 2000 in New Zealand, the Hyperfactory has become one of the world’s leading mobile-focused agencies. In the past year, the Hyperfactory has won a Clio, awards at the MMA, the Asia Pacific Digital Media Awards, Best in Show at the OMMAs, and was part of 5 campaigns that won at Cannes Lions.


At the Informa Mobile Advertising Conference in San Francisco, we had a chance to talk with Derek Handley, co-founder and CEO of The Hyperfactory about his view of mobile advertising. more»

Interview with Henry Stevens
Director Entertainment & Media,
GSM Association

Henry Stevens is responsible for mobile advertising within the GSM Association. MobiAD News had a chance for an in-depth interview with Henry about the background and details of this new initiative. more»

Exclusive Interview with BJ Yang,
CEO of AirCROSS, Seoul, Korea

Korea has some of the world’s most advanced mobile technology and services. Ferhan Cook was in Korea participating in the Seoul Digital Forum (SDF) during the last week of May, and she had a chance to speak at length with BJ Yang, the CEO of AirCROSS, the mobile advertising subsidiary of SK Telecom. more»

Laurent Herbillon explains the recent TF1
agreement and Bouygues’ strategy for
mobile advertising

Bouygues Telecom is one of the leading mobile operators in France. Laurent Herbillon is Director of Service Development and Innovation, and is responsible for mobile advertising activities within Bouygues. Laurent took some time with us to explain the overall mobile advertising strategy at Bouygues, as well as the details of some recent business developments. more»

Interview with Richard Saggers
Head of Mobile Advertising

In the previous MobiAD News newsletter, we ran Part One of our interview with Richard Saggers, where he discussed Vodafone’s view of the mobile advertising opportunity, their overall strategy, plus details of key partnerships with Yahoo! and Google (if you missed Part One, you can see it HERE). This is Part Two of the interview. more»

Richard Wheaton is Managing Director of Neo@Ogilvy, UK. Neo@Ogilvy is one of the largest media buying organizations globally. Richard gave a presentation as part of the Mobile Advertising panel at MIPTV in which he raised some interesting points. We had a chance to talk with Richard in more detail later to get his insights into mobile advertising. more»

We had a chance recently to talk with Minh Tran, Director, Head of Sales and Marketing, Nokia Ad Service. Minh has been one of the key driving forces behind the development and recent launch of the Nokia Ad Service and Nokia Ad Connector. more»

MobiAd News had a chance to chat with Russell Buckley, the European Managing Director of AdMob, one of the fastest growing companies in the Mobile Advertising space. more»