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Smaato @SXSW 2010 – Refreshing Spring Break for Mobile Marketers

SMAATO — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:55:31 +0000

Reported by Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder of Smaato Inc.

Coming down to Austin Texas in the middle of March is a great break from the usual trade shows – and especially the weather lately in New York, Europe or the Valley.
Greeted by a refreshing 77° F (25° C) the City of Austin is kind to its regular and newbie visitors and reveals an upbeat, young and vivid scene of creativity. The SXSW (South-by-South-West, or “South-by” for the regulars) festival for interactivity was started 13 years ago – added to the foremost music and film festival founded 24 years ago.

This year, 14.000 people flocked to Austin for a long weekend with a conference program running from Friday to Tuesday in the Convention Center plus adjacent hotels and music venues. Social Media is the overarching umbrella and is examined in lots of parallel tracks of panels and keynotes. Lots of online and mobile’s leading CEO’s and founders are present and share their visions and new product releases on stage with their peers.

Is Twitter Old School?

Twitter CEO Evan Williams officially announced the highly anticipated Twitter ad platform in a chat on stage by with Omair Haigue, who is the head of the Havas Media Lab. That did not go well with the real-time twitter community in the Ballroom and the additionally set up simulcast room – many left early.

The @anywhere named ad platform was presented with a short video and with underwhelming features. It does serve a purpose of make life easier for publishers and authors to set up “follow me” buttons on websites that we know already from Facebook. In addition a keyword feature has been introduced, where websites can set up links to twitter accounts of editors, brands or trending topics. There was no involvement of any big brand marketers presented – only some known publishers that will set these links up on their side. Those include the New York Times, CNN, Yahoo and the Huffington Post – there was no mobile screen and no mobile marketing initiative present, other than the availability of location published with every tweet. Within the hour 2.500 people signed up to follow @anywhere.

A much more energetic keynote was presented by New York Times bestseller Gary Vaynerchuk, Author of “Crush it”) as he emphasized heavily that brands need to open up and engage via twitter and social media with their target group and have authentic conversations. “Every meaningful conversation will lead to sales and a loyal brand community,” he proclaimed. When he said “Big brands don’t get it, a marketing person from P&G protested heavily – but Gary V. made clear that hiring agencies to do the dialog might not be the ideal way, but sometime necessary.

Training in-house teams to get involved on all levels will make big companies fitter for a much more educated and knowledgeable customer base that have a clear “bull shit detector” to filter out plain marketing messages from meaningful invitations to engage and provide feedback.

Geo Apps – the cool kids on the block

As anticipated the new rock stars of mobile location based apps made a big splash and were working the panels and presentations: foursquare (of New York) and Austin based Gowalla. They where even going head to head in party mode on Monday night – out doing their rivals with bigger, better events. The 13th annual SXSW Web Awards, sponsored by Adobe, rewarded Gowalla over Fourquare.

Foursquare founder NN spoke on a panel and emphasized, that mobile advertising in geo-apps is happening and evolving into local offers and targeted values to people checking into a new location, e.g. restaurants, businesses or event venues. Businesses can profit from the micro feeds of the foursquare crowd through viral marketing as word of mouth is getting blended with conversational, branded messages.

A new start-up entered the fray with an official launch at SXSW: stickybits based in New York and founded by Seth Goldstein is a pioneer in social media in the online space – and the founder and Chairman of Social Media Inc. – one of the fastest growing ad platforms for the Facebook platform. Now, he is at it in the mobile space: stickybits is a crossover of foursquare and Flickr – all around mobile barcodes. The interesting concept got of to a great start as SXSW visitors added coments, pictures and videos to provided barcode stickers attached to name tags and products such as coke cans and energy bars.

Big brands come out and play with social media

In a big local presence, some big brands came out to Austin and engaged in branded conversations with their audience and the local community of the festival.
Pepsi organized a clever initiative that invited the people to vote for one of three charities with twittering about the selected initiative by a specific hashtag. Refresh Pepsi provided then the “Refresh Zeitgeist” on lots of flat screens locally and online to show what is going on locally. In included maps of happening locations, quotes and tweets that related to SXSW and the campaign. The Pepsi Refresh Project is a groundbreaking effort to foster innovation in social good, and will award more than $20 million this year to fund great ideas that “refresh the world”.

Other brands onsite included Miller Light, AOL, GM and Microsoft among others. The expo floor has a focus mainly on tools for creativity and was a showcase of new startups and creative agencies to showcase their product or service.

Big telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent featured a developer and publisher lounge to present a solution of total access open API bundles. The set of technologies enables developers much faster to monetize services provided by operators (like advertising, virtual goods, anonymous demographic data, text messaging) within their app. Smaato was selected to be the mobile ad platform for the launch, other partners included Motally(analytics) and Billing Revolution (payments).

What can Marketers learn from this leading Interactive Festival?

Spending a few days in the atmosphere of this busting college town with all the start-up and social media energy one can only wonder how fast the mobile marketing train is coming out of the gates. This hotbed of alpha geeks, leading bloggers and influencers of old school media id the breeding ground for a new generation of creative ideas, discerning audiences that no longer want to be target groups.

If mobile marketers what to stand out from the crowd, find the engaging consumers that can spread the word about new products and services, then brands need to start digging deeper into new formats of mobile engagement and messaging.

Pure banner ads are challenged to add value to geo-location apps, social media and user generated news sites. Especially the hyper local advertising to targeted audiences of one on this personal device needs new ways to evolve – fast.

Smaato @ Mobile World Congress 2010 Barcelona

SMAATO — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:32:35 +0000

Please join us at Mobile World Congress 2010 Barcelona, February 15-18 to learn about Smaato’s Mobile Ad Optimization Platform and all it’s benefits for mobile publishers/developers and mobile ad networks.

Meet us at Booth 7C38, Hall 7

Smaato Team @MWC 2010:

Ragnar Kruse
CEO & Co-Founder

Harald Neidhardt
CMO & Co-Founder

Petra Vorsteher
EVP Strategic Alliances & Co-Founder

Joerg Anhalt
Senior Vice President
Mobile Publishers Development & Monetization

Meet also:
Robert Guenther (Manager Partner Development), Yoko Nakagawa (Director of Strategic Alliances), Kedric Van de Carr (Director Publisher Development & Monetization), Miriam Hoppe (Marketing Manager) and Johannes Heinze (Product Manager).

PS: If you want to join our excellent team click here.

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About Smaato
Smaato is a pioneering mobile advertising company that operates the mobile ad optimization platform called SOMA (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising) and partners with mobile publishers, developers, ad networks and operators.

Smaato’s SOMA mobile advertising platform aggregates more than 35 mobile ad networks worldwide and optimizes mobile advertising revenues according to automated rules overseen by an experienced ad operations team. More than 2500 publishers have signed up with Smaato as a partner to monetize their content in 215+ countries and Smaato is managing 4 billion ad requests per month.

SOMA’s unique feature is the aggregation of multiple leading ad networks globally to maximize mobile advertising ARPU. SOMA can be easily integrated with ad networks, ad inventory owners (publishers, developers and operators) and 3rd party ad technology providers.

Smaato is an active member of the Mobile Marketing Association, the dot.mobi Advisory Group and the German Digital Media Association BVDW. Smaato received a Top 100 Private Company Award by AlwaysOn Media (2009 & 2007) and was an Andrew Seybold Choice Awards finalist at CTIA 2008 for best Newcomer, among other awards.

Smaato Inc. is based in Redwood Shores, California. The privately held company was founded in 2005 by an experienced International management team. The European headquarters are in Hamburg, Germany and the Asia-Pacific presence of Smaato has been established in Singapore.

www.smaato.com

Mobile Stats: Mobile Media Rocks!

SMAATO — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:33:58 +0000

“According to the latest data, the use of social networking services by mobile users has increased by almost 139 percent compared to last year. Stimulated by the introduction of the iPhone, digital media consumption on mobile devices has increased by 17 percent.

Not only Apple, but also Microsoft, Nokia and Samsung are driving this development. The mobile games and mobile internet sectors also profit from these trends. “M-Days – The Home of MOBILE”, the largest congress trade fair of its kind in Central Europe, will take up these topics and give the starting signal for the coming mobile year on 28th and 29th January 2010 at the BMW Welt in Munich.

Subjects like mobile media, mobile content, mobile entertainment or locationbased services (LBS) as well as aspects like “business solutions, applications and development” will also provide fuel for discussions. M-Days 2010: Samsung, HTC, Vodafone, Qualcomm, YOC, E-Plus group, Cellular and many more will participate.”

We appreciate the M-Days as the designated leading congress fair for the mobile medium. Its selection of executives of large media production companies, as well as innovative startups from Europe, is the perfect mix for the congress and the exhibition. This is definitively the best possible start into the mobile year 2010 in Northern Europe!, stated Harald Neidhardt, Co-Founder & CMO of Smaato Inc.

See the entire M-Days PR here.

Smaato Sponsors GoMo News Blender at MWC’10

SMAATO — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:43:49 +0000

Smaato is partnering with GoMo News at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona!

The GoMo News Blender is back…. at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next year… in a bigger venue!

Huge thanks to the wonderful Smaato for being the main headline sponsor and captain of the bar. This is the sixth time that Smaatohas sponsored GoMo News and our joint events are always extremely successful as we know the vendors and publishers that rock!

Everyone in the mobile marketing, mobile advertising, mobile search, mobile barcode and mobile application or web space is invited.

See the GoMo News article here:

Smaato is presenting at Mobile Advertising Conference in Tel Aviv

SMAATO — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:53:50 +0000

Join us in Israel – the Silicon Valley of the Middle East!
IMA’s Mobile Advertising Conference, Tel Aviv, June 29th

The IMA (Israel Mobile and Communication Association) is holding the 2nd annual Mobile Advertising Conference on June 29th. This is the largest mobile advertising event in Israel and a great chance for networking with the entire mobile value chain: attendees include operators, VC’s, brand managers, advertising agencies and technology enablers.

Smaato is proud to be part of the conference with Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder of Smaato speaking at the Cross Industry Panel: “Who’s thinking of the consumer?” June 29, 2:30-3:30pm.

“All the people we meet around the world rave highly about the Israeli people, their passion for new technologies and provide best services. I have made friends at events around the world and really look forward to meet their home country,” comments Harald Neidhardt his experiences.

Israel is a powerhouse when it comes to technology. It is with 75 companies third only to the US and Canada in terms of number of companies listed on Nasdaq.

“The Israeli market is well-known to Smaato from trade shows and. We look forward to meeting members of the IMA. We have some very good contacts here and have finished the integration of our SOMA platform with Fring, a mobile internet community and communication service that allows friends to connect, share experiences and enhance their online communities together” adds Harald.

“Mobile advertising enables new forms of engaging the dialogue with the consumer and we are just scratching the surface of these possibilities. Mobile advertising experiences an uptake in budgets and momentum – this is the topic of this year’s IMA mobile advertising conference: “Money Time”. The IMA welcomes Smaato’s participation and is looking forward to assist in partnering with the leaders of the Israeli mobile business”, states Eyal Reshef, Founder & CEO of the IMA.

For more information to the Mobile Advertising Conference, please visit IMA’s website: http://www.imaworld.org/

Smaato supports Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona

SMAATO — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:22:08 +0000

Mobile 2.0 Europe is off to a great start. The developer day today kicked off a great conference with a great mix of leading edge developers, tool and platform providers and developer programs. Friday is the main business day with leading speakers & innovators in mobile advertising, mobile social communes and mobile tools from operators and handheld manufacturer.

Smaato is supporting Mobile 2.0 as a lead sponsor. The event is organized in Barcelona by dot.open and the Mobile 2.0 team including Rudy De Waele (mtrends) and Dan Applequist (Vodafone). Smaato’s CMO & Co-Founder Harald Neidhardt is talking at the panel “Beyond Free”.

Distinguished speakers on the panel include:
Fee Beyer (T-Mobile)
Priya Prakash (Nokia)
KF Lei (BuzzCity)
Inma Martinez (Stradbroke Advisors)
Ian Ginn (TransmediaLab)

Smaato is presenting at upcoming events

SMAATO — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:02:10 +0000

Meet Smaato at Mobile 2.0 Barcelona, June 18-19

The MOBILE 2.0 EUROPE conference brings together experts and thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem, including startups, investors, mobile carriers, device manufacturers, mobile application developers and web technologists.

Smaato’s CMO Harald Neidhardt is part of the panel Beyond Free, June 19, 3:00-4:15 pm

Please have a look at the full agenda for Mobile 2.0 Barcelona here.

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Meet Smaato at Global Messaging at MEM London, June 23-24

The Mobile Entertainment Forum is the global trade association of the mobile media industry, working on behalf of its diverse membership to drive mobile entertainment adoption, shape regulation and deliver competitive advantage to its members.

Harald Neidhardt is part of the panel: Delivering a Targeted Relevant Message to Enhance the Success of Mobile Advertising, June 24 – 4:40-5:10pm

Please have a look at the full agenda for Global Messaging here and for MEM here.

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IMA’s Mobile Advertising Conference, Israel, June 29th

The IMA (Israel Mobile and Communication Association) are holding their 2nd annual Mobile Advertising Conference on June 29th. This is the largest event on mobile advertising in Israel and a great chance for networking with the entire value chain: from operators to VC’s to brand managers, advertising agencies and technology enablers.

Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder of Smaato will speak at IMA’s Mobile Advertising.

Cross Industry Panel: “Who’s thinking of the consumer?”, June 29, 2:30-3:30pm.

Join the conversation in Tel Aviv.

For more info visit IMA’s website here.

bnetTV & Smaato presented Mobile Monday NY

SMAATO — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 09:20:24 +0000

Mobile Monday New York hosted by bnetTV.com and Smaato at bnetTV.com`s trendy studios in the West Village in Manhattan. Panel presentation included Harald Neidhardt from Smaato, Kei Shimada from Infinita and Nihal Mehta from Buzzd, moderated by bnetTV.com`s Michelle Sklar.

Smaato’s CMO, Harald Neidhardt spoke at MMA New York

SMAATO — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:33:33 +0000

Harald Neidhardt, CMO & Co-Founder of Smaato led a panel at the MMA Forum:
International Innovation in Mobile – What are the trends for the future?

You might be interested in the slides of the speech. They can be found here.

Smaato CEO presented at GoMo News Billboard un-conference

SMAATO — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:50:39 +0000

Smaato CEO & Co-Founder, Ragnar Kruse, presented at GoMo News Billboard un-conference in Las Vegas.

“We make sure any application make money. The money is the ability to engage consumers. Personalization can be hard but isn’t always necessary. Mobile advertising depends on the applications and the type of company.”

Se also the entire GoMo News article here.

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