Somo Warrior

Talking to Somo co-founder Carl Uminski, it’s easy to forget he’s still in his mid-30s, such is the experience he has under his belt. In 2000, he and fellow co-founder Nick Hynes set up the European arm of Overture, the company that pioneered paid search. As CTO and CEO respectively, Uminski and Hynes built the division from zero to a $600m turnover in just three years, acquiring Alta Vista and Fast (alltheweb.com) in the process, and launching the world’s first mobile search engine for Orange, before Overture was sold to Yahoo for $1.6bn. “A steal at the time,” says Uminski. 

While Hynes launched a company that became The Search Works, and subsequently Europe’s largest search marketing agency, and Google’s biggest European customer, Uminski headed for San Francisco, working for Yahoo’s search and mobile teams, and helping to build Yahoo’s One Search mobile platform. (Those with long memories will recall that Yahoo made an almost Google Mobile First-like mobile push in the mid-noughties, though it has gone quite since.)

He left in 2006, when, in his words, he “saw where they were going”, but says the experience of working with Yahoo was a valuable one. “It gave me a good grounding in how Silicon Valley operates, I also did a lot in Asia, and of course Europe, I already knew pretty well,” he says.

Back in the UK in 2006, Uminski launched a mobile social network called TruTap, which he describes as “WhatsApp on steroids”. It was popular in emerging markets, but was hit by the credit crunch, and the investors eventually seized the business.

It was in 2008 that Uminski and Hynes first started talking about the idea of doing something together in mobile. “We had worked together off and on for 11 years, we could see the iPhone doing very well, and we were seeing the start of Android’s growth,” says Uminski. On paper, it was a good combination: Uminski is the tecchie, the qualified electronic engineer; Hynes the digital marketing specialist, who counts among his achievements, building the electronic points side of Air Miles for British Airways.

Market opportunity
“What excited us about the mobile space was the convergence of the products, the technology, and the market opportunity,” says Uminski. “Anything disruptive is what gets us excited and that certainly applied, and still does apply, to mobile. When you have a fragmented marketplace and confusion, and marketers who have a desire to engage in that space, there’s an opportunity, because those marketers need help.”

Somo – Uminski is honest enough to admit the name “just was”, though he likes the “social/mobile” connotations inherent in it – launched in Hynes’s lounge in March 2009. They got their first client, Interflora, four months later, after a 4-way pitch they were invited to take part in by someone advising Interflora, who knew of their previous exploits.

At that stage, Somo’s offering was the planning and buying of mobile advertising. This is still a key part of the company’s proposition - Uminski says it has relationships with 78 ad networks and publishers, and adds that as the number of ad networks, and the amount of available inventory, both grow rapidly, confusion is rife, and the need for specialist help never more apparent.

During 2009, the company expanded, recruiting some senior people, such as Simon Edelstyn, who was general manager of BT’s LookSmart search engine, and set up Google’s European distribution network, to non-exec roles. By the end of the year, Somo had 12 employees and 15 clients.

In 2010, Somo launched its development business. The company was invited to take part in a 5-way pitch for Audi, and won it, and has since produced some great-looking tablet apps for the car maker. It also continued its recruitment drive, hiring Stewart Hunter, who used to run the retail search division for The Search Works, and Telegraph Media Group’s head of mobile, Maani Safa, who joined as product director.

Full-service
2011, says Uminski, is all about cementing Somo’s credentials as a full-service mobile agency. To do so, the marquee signings, to coin a footballing term, have continued. This year’s include Ross Sleight, whose achievements including setting up BMP Interaction, and Virgin Games, and who is now Somo’s chief strategy officer. Thomas Schulz, ex-CEO of AdMob EMEA and also ex-Overture, is another big signing. He joined earlier this year as Somo’s international CEO. Somo has opened an office in San Francisco, and is working on the opening of another in Singapore.

As Uminski sees it, full-service encompasses four key elements. The first is strategy and insight. “This is about advising companies on what mobile means to their business, and we are doing this for some big companies, including Audi, AOL in Europe, and some huge gaming companies,” he says.

The second is building out whatever deliverables the strategy piece recommends, including apps for phones and tablets, and mobile sites. The third element is marketing the client’s products, using mobile, but also looking at how that plays with other media and other channels. “It might involve a sophisticated SMS campaign incorporating geofencing, there might be a role for QR codes to play, but we also ask where should email, offline and outdoor sit,” says Uminski. “We look too at TV and mobile and how they work together, but we come at it from a mobile-centric view. And social too. Mobile and social are hot right now because social usage on mobile is so high, so we try to help clients understand how to integrate the two.”

The final element is technology. “We bring technology to everything we do,” he says. “We launched our Apptimiser performance-marketing tool earlier this year. It’s a small SDK that goes into an iPhone or Android app and can then track mobile ad campaigns end-to-end. We also have a new version for iOS5 that solves the ID tracking problem. We have a team that is totally focused on the technical platforms that underpin our product platforms.”

Integrated strategy
But Somo, of course, is not the only reasonably-sized mobile marketing firm out there claiming full-service credentials, including the ability to advise large multinationals about their mobile strategy. So what’s its USP?

“We believe we are the only mobile specialist truly doing full-service integrated strategy with the marketing director, telling them what they need, and then doing the heavy lifting to build it, and on the advertising side, to plan and buy the campaign, completely independently, across the whole market,” he says. “We have the innovation, the platform and the technology companies need, and we have done international before; we are comfortable with it. Loyalty is the next hot thing, and we are well placed for that too.”

And what’s next? How long before Somo, like some of Uminski’s previous companies, attracts the attention of a bigger agency group looking for a company that knows mobile?

“At the moment, we are in a growth period,” he says. “We have 60 people, and a similar number of clients, and we are building it out, and we love what we’re doing. The speed at which this market is moving is insane. It’s five times as fast as the search business was, and it’s great to be part of that. We are having a lot of conversations with brands who now realise that mobile will be at the forefront of where they want to be in five years’ time. Two years ago, we were nowhere near those conversations, but with 60 people on mobile, all focused on the clients every day, we can cause a lot of damage.”

Well he did say he liked disruptive.