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Berens: Some wags have argued that the U.S. "isn't even a Third World country" when it comes to our cell phones. A recent -- and detailed -- profile of AdMob in the Wall Street Journal noted that you do a lot of business with companies in developing countries like India. What is your sense of how the mobile advertising market is different in the U.S. than in other places in the world? Can we look to Japan, Finland, India for what 2015 will look like in terms of the mobile internet in the U.S.?
Tony is responsible for executing AdMob¹s revenue strategy, building the sales team and managing agency relationships. Tony is a leader in interactive advertising and considered an expert in both media and creative targeting with more than 20 highly successful years of sales experience.Hamoui: Although countries like India and South Africa contribute significantly to AdMob traffic, we know that the U.S. is the leading contributor to our mobile web network. We expect the usage of mobile Internet in the U.S. to mirror the traffic patterns from developed countries, such as Japan, as mobile infrastructure in the U.S. evolves. "Communities" and "Downloads" channels are the leading contributors to our network at the moment.
Berens: Just to clarify, are the websites onto which you're serving ads WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)? Are they WAP only? As the mobile internet gets faster and faster with the spread of higher speed connections, what do you think will become of WAP?
Nethercutt: Yes, WAP sites only today. We are always considering other options of course. We believe that WAP will always have its place... and the experience will continue to improve along with both devices and speed.
Hamoui: The Mobile Web (a.k.a. WAP) is really about designing a user experience for the mobile device in a purely mobile context. Overall, we see more companies developing mobile services that have a very rich experience, which will only be enhanced by faster access speeds.
Berens: Omar, you said one of the more frequent questions you get is, ""how do I get my text ad to show to the greatest number of potential customers"? That seems like a very good question indeed. What are your strategies for getting the right ad in front of the right number of customers?
Hamoui: We are investing a fair amount of development resources into mining all the data we've captured over the last 12 months of ad serving and targeting. This effort really helps drive the contextual awareness of showing the right ad to an interested customer. It's really a combination of knowing what the goals the advertiser is trying to achieve while offering suggestions through our full and self serve teams to help improve the relevancy. This may be as simple as changing the ad text or the time of day the ad is being served.
Berens: And what about the flip side of that last question: on the not-so-mobile web, we have behavioral targeting, contextual and demographic targeting... what is the mobile equivalent? How do you limit an advertiser's reach so that the ad gets in front of the right people rather than just the most people?
Nethercutt: As Omar mentioned, data will be a critical part of our targeting, and it can be used in many ways. We are working on all three types of targeting you mention and more. Targeting works well if it can be tested, proved to work as well as it is hoped, and then get scale. The scale part is what we are working to bring to market.
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