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!

Q: You have years of experience working in the internet advertisement market. Why the move to mobile? What are the main differences between the markets?

A: I believe Mobile is going to change our life and in fact already did! With iPhone and other smart phones underway, browsing becomes so easy and applications like GPS makes the mobile device an important part in our life. When I go to watch a game or down town I would like to see if my friends are around; the social communities in mobile is a huge market because of the location and the personal device; unlike the internet which is not personal devices and is driven by the content, the mobile is driven by the users. We will see that people more and more are connected to the mobile internet via wi-fi and soon WiMax, therefore, people will consume more data than making voice calls. This is why mobile carriers are worried and they rush to take and be part of the data growing market.

Q: For many years now we hear that the mobile advertisement is the next big thing, and every year we see a great disappointment from this market with numbers way below the forecasts. Share with us your thoughts about the root causes for the delay this market experiences.

A: I think the main problem for the delay is a few factors:

i.      Lack of devices that are easy to use to browse the web- this has been resolved significantly with the introduction of the iPhone and other devices to follow. Apple knows very well how to build intuitive interfaces and rich content while others fail. We are going to see a growth in number of devices on this direction

ii.      Data rate was expensive- as I said in Japan there is a flat fee for mobile browsing! If this will happen in other territories we are going to see a major growth in data consumption over the mobile internet.

iii.      Optimized content for mobile- until this year, the content in the mobile was not really rich enough to the users. Therefore, the users were reluctant to consume content that was not relevant to them. The content in the mobile must be optimized to the users who browse the mobile device. It must be optimized to the audience habits and behavior on the mobile not on the PC. This year we see this revolution. I have seen content providers are building their content optimized only smart phone. In two years everything will be smart phone everywhere.

Q: Recent hardware and software solutions (iPhone, Skyfire, etc.) are new to the industry, How will it effect the market?  and what do you do in order to take advantage of it

A: This is fantastic development for us. Our company was built on this idea that such devices and fast browsing on the mobile will increase the interactive usage on the mobile, therefore, will create significant opportunity for premium mobile advertising which is where Toda!Cell is strong.

Q: How do you approach advertisers for mobile advertisement and how do you convince the advertisers as most of them are very reluctant about this medium?

A: We have contacts with few leading mobile agencies globally and also we approach unique advertisers who like to access mobile users in a specific geography. A simple example: if you want to advertise to download a game or a particular song there is no better platform than the mobile where we can target the right age and the right vertical to match the needs of the advertisers. I think that the mobile device is the only device that can match ads to users; the PC internet can do match to the content but not to the users.

Q: How do you think mobile operators can manage mobile advertisement as they have no specialty in advertisement management (unlike ads agencies and interactive agencies)?

A: I think mobile operators should stay away from advertising. It is not their expertise. I don’t see a communication company by DNA becomes a media company. It is not going to work. In fact we have already  seen that. Mobile operators more and more will outsource their media operations to those who know what to do and they will share part of the revenue, but mostly, they are interested to see the users consume more data in order for them to generate more revenue from data and not from advertising.

Q: Where do you think the mobile advertisement market will get to a year from now? (Technology, content types, services, significant players…)

A: We are going to see a continued growth. The economic situation could be an opportunity for mobile advertising. If a content provider can prove to advertiser better results than TV, we are going to see shift of money from the expensive advertising budgets on TV to  mobile which can be measured and less expensive.

Q: What do you wish Toda!Cell towards the New Year?

A: We hope to continue to grow and expand our deployment to many customers and finally to see a significant growth in mobile advertising.

We would like to thank Moshe Vaknin of Toda!Cell and to wish all our readers Season’s Greetings from TalkingMobile.