Engineers as marketers: a mobile marketing strategy that seems to be working pretty good for InMobi

InMobi belongs to a category of mobile advertisers you might term “the Outsiders”. It’s a big company, with big reach – but it doesn’t have a huge presence in the US or Europe…. yet. GoMo News has reported on InMobi a lot in the past, and I leapt on the chance to talk to them at MWC. I spoke to InMobi Founder & CEO Naveen Tewari and VP of Global Marketing, James Lamberti. We had a great interview about the InMobi business model and expansion strategy – I had not realised how strongly technology driven InMobi is. We also discussed the fascinating concept of “engineers as marketers” and talked about some idiosyncracies in the Japanese market.

First, how about little background on InMobi?

James: We’ve got an ad-serving platform that works for any device and avertiser, on feature phones or smartphones. We have reach and scale that’s unprecedented – InMobi is currently serving 7.5 billion ads per month. Our strongest presence is in Asia PAC, South Africa and other Africa countries – and we’re moving into Europe and the US.

How do you prepare the ground for a new expansion?

Naveen: We don’t work with operators – because its just too hard and takes too long. We just use our existing base of international publishers to get into a new market. Look at Europe, for example. We’ve already got a reach of 13 million in Europe – and that’s without any offices or employees! We made our first European hire last month, he’s going to build on those 13 million. That’s our expansion strategy: we measure the influence we already have in area, then go hunting for new publishers. Because of our publisher base, we’ve already got scale in areas we haven’t even moved into yet.

James: We’re soft-launching in the US as well. In January we were at 250 million impressions, without launching. Today, one month later, were at 500 million – and we still haven’t really launched there. I believe that the future of marketing is is not being “a brand guy from Procter & Gamble”,it’s about reading the data. I believe in engineers as marketers.  Analytics is the future of advertising.

Naveen: We want to come out with an independent voice. The large acquisitions like Quattro and AdMob are now filtered through Apple and Google – we want to be the largest independent player.

What’s the future for InMobi, beyond the expansions?

Naveen: We don’t have time to think about that yet! We’re launching in a lot of huge markets right now. Launching in Europe is a lot of work, 46 countries! Getting strong in the US is hard – we’re a late entry. We’re even launching in Japan…

Japan? Isn’t that a very saturated market?

Naveen: It’s less saturated than how it looks from the outside. A lot of their business is very relationship driven – each agency has its own arms and branches in mobile advertising. So while the relationships are very good, they haven’t done any real development in around the TECHNOLOGY of mobile advertising. A lot of the time there’s no analytics in Japan, no one tracks anything. The physical infrastructure is very advanced, but the media structure isn’t very good. And since that’s what we’re about, there’s a definite opportunity there.

Is there really room for you in these markets? You’re entering them very late

Naveen: We fell that as long as our technology is good, there will always be a place for us at the table. Our philosophy has been to gather together a group of amazing minds and engineers, and create a truly excellent centralised offering. Now we’re expanding that offering to different markets around the world and making it local with new offices and new hires.