The mobile advertising market holds a big promise.
According to eMarketer, mobile search ad revenues will reach $715 million in 2011 whereas mobile advertising in general  is estimated to generate billions of dollars.

Having said that, mobile advertising is still in early stages and there is no verified and long-lasting model for ROI.
We sat down with Moshe Vaknin founder & CEO of Toda!Cell to learn more about the company and to understand where mobile advertising is going.

Activity started at – May 2007
Entrepreneurs – Moshe Vaknin
Invesments – seed – $1M AfterDox and Fore-Group
Targeted markets – Japan and USA
Customers – ( not yet public) Mobile Content search Provider and Mobile Instant Messaging.

Q: Companies like Microsoft (with its dedicated platform), Media Layers, Amobee, adinfuse etc. supply Platforms that offer the management of advertisement in SMS, MMS, Wap, and Video. What is Toda!Cell’s offer to its clients?

A: Toda!Cell , does not target carriers at all. Our solution has been developed from day one only for off portal content providers. Toda!Cell believes that off portal browsing over the mobile internet is going to grow rapidly. Premium content providers don’t like to be associated or accessible via mobile carrier.
Publishers can benefit from our solution because our core system has been developed to increase their CTR; therefore, increasing the inventory value for them and providing high ROI to advertisers; so both publishers and advertisers are beneficial from the solution significantly. Unlike others we do not push ads, but only pull mode.
Our major differences  from our competitors are that we focus only on premium content that was optimized to the mobile medium and we collect data for six months activities, then we generate an optimization process to target accurately the users based on their behavior and not based on content. With the cooperation of the content provider, we use advanced profiling to enhance their inventory to achieve the maximum value for their ads.

Q: It seems like you chose to work in Japan which is an unfamiliar and distant market. Can you please share with us your insight about the Japanese Mobile advertisement market?

A: the Japanese market is the most advanced  mobile market in the world. With 3G all across the country, flat fee to access the web, and advanced mobile devices, it is a perfect market for off portal mobile advertising market. The Japanese people access the web over the mobile more than PC. Another important factor is that revenues from ad placement in Japan is about 70 percent from the 700M dollars marker while the rest is in other forms. In USA for example it is 50%. The mobile advertising as of today in Japan is about 1% from the total advertising budget while in USA it is about 0.3 percent. In Japan the off market mobile content portals already serve about 100B ads a month!

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