I spent yesterday afternoon on the latest Heroes of Mobile event organised by Helen Keegan. It consisted of a panel debate around mobile advertising, followed by tech demos from seven companies.
The debate, featuring freelance strategy and innovation consultant, James Cooper, Rube Huljev from Infobip, Stephen Jenkins from Millennial Media, and Amanda Singleton from Qustodian, debated the merits, or otherwise, of the banner ad, within the face of other types of mobile advertising and messaging, as represented by many of the companies demonstrating their tech, including Qustodian and Avocarrott.
Qustodian is an opt-in advertising programme where the users choose the emblem categories they’re enthusiastic about hearing from. Avocarrott, despite having possibly the worst brand name I’ve ever heard – it comes from the belief of a carrot and stick combined with one of many founders’ love of avocados – was one of the vital more interesting demos.
The company deploys its tech in other people’s apps as a way to serve the app user with relevant offers, according to their activity. So if it was in a Nike running app, as an example, it could actually serve the user a suggestion for money off an energy drink after they had just logged the main points of the run they’d just completed.
The other demos came from Locomizer – location based targeting; Adoreboard – measures how people feel about your brand, Klout meets Google Analytics; Hitmeup – a social networking app that tells you what’s happening near you; Pass-force – a b2b platform to regulate mobile wallet content, which also looked very interesting; and LoopMe – a social advertising platform which we now have covered previously at the site and in our print edition.
Needless to claim, the panel debate didn’t have the ability to resolve the problem of whether mobile banners are good or evil, nevertheless it was an attractive discussion, and the range of ideas on show inside the tech demo served as a reminder of the way much innovation there’s accessible, as startups continue to look for the large concept that nobody else has thus far considered.