Driving Force

DM: So Dave, give us the 2-minute guide to Mojiva please.

DG: Sure, there are two brands under the company umbrella. Mojiva is a premium ad network focused on the US and Europe, because this is where the dollars are.  In the US, we have premium publishers such as ABC, TMZ, Angry Birds and Elle magazine, and in the UK and Europe, these deals are currently being brokered. We reach 17m unique devices per month in the UK, and 750m globally.

We also have a white-label ad-serving solution called Mocean Mobile that’s used by 18 ad networks, app stores and publishers around the world, such as Webads, Optimobile, Fuse. Skype, Flirtomatic and TV Guide. They use it as the engine that drives their mobile advertising operation.

It is hard to develop your own platform. We have been doing it for four years. We have a team of great developers who understand mobile. We have 100 people, and 50 of those are on platform development. And if you are an ad network, you should spend your time serving your publishers and your advertisers, so it does not make sense for every ad network to build its own platform.

DM: So where do most of your revenues come from, the Mojiva ad network, or the Mocean Mobile white-label platform?

DG: The ad network is out in front, because it has been around for four years, but the white-label ad platform business is catching up very quickly.

DM: And what would you say is your USP?

DG: I have not heard of many other networks offering contextual keyword targeting.

DM: I can sort of guess what this is, but could you spell it out for us please?

DG: Sure. When a consumer is looking at a particular page on the mobile web, we will define what the content is about, say football, golf or whatever, and when we determine that the page contains words or phrases that an advertiser users in their search advertising, we will serve their ad.

DM: And what are the current trends in terms of the advertising content?

DG: We are seeing a lot more video and rich media, but there have been a lot of dead ends and issues in getting stuff to run smoothly, so we spend a lot of time making sure we have integrations with the world’s top rich media vendors to eliminate these. So if an advertiser is running expandable banners, or click-to-video, the back-end integration has mostly been done by our guys, so if you’re using a rich media vendor, it will run on our network.

DM: And in terms of your inventory, what’s the split between mobile site publishers and app developers?

DG: Right now, it’s pretty much 50:50, but with the mobile experience getting better with HTML5, we think it will swing back more towards mobile sites.

DM: But presumably it makes no difference to you either way?

DG: That’s right, we are completely agnostic in that respect

DM: And is it all premium? Is there any performance stuff going on?

DG: We do have a direct response team based out of San Francisco, a tea, that uses the analytics dashboard to monitor and analyse and figure out where the conversions are happening and the areas that marketers want to track -  email, phone, app downloads. Put it in and we will optimise based on that.

DM: So what do you see happening over the next 12 months?

DG: I think tablets will continue to be the story. The Samsung/Apple battle will be interesting to watch. HTML5 and the mobile web will eat into brands’ decisions to build more apps, so I think we will see publishers pulling back from app development. I think it will also be interesting to see what happens to BlackBerry and Nokia. The Nokia guys will fight for their lives, and they are not dead yet. They are going to put real marketing muscle behind it, so I would not count those guys out yet.

For ourselves, we are looking at geographic expansion. We are expanding in the UK and the US moving into China through a joint venture, and we are looking at India, Singapore and Latin America as the phase.

DM: So with those emerging markets, are we looking at a similar type of offering, or would you look at something like SMS to cater for the higher number of feature phones?

DG: I don’t think we would look at SMS; it’s a declining market and there’s not much value in it. We will push on with rich media and premium brand content. Video and rich media will become the norm as it becomes easier to consumer and the content can support it. Most of the revenue in those markets has been pure performance, so the question is whether we go after the revenue today or wail for it to evolve towards a premium model, which we think it will.