Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is following its $275 million (£172 million) acquisition of mobile advertising firm Quattro Wireless by hiring a couple of mobile advertising execs in Europe – suggesting it’s ramping up mobile ads sales in its head-to-head with Google (NSDQ: GOOG) in this space.
—Former Microsoft EMEA sales manager (for ScreenTonic) Theo Theodorou will head up its EMEA sales team.
—Todd Tran, previously an executive from WPP’s Group M, will be general manager for Europe, writes NMA.
I interviewed Theodorou many moons ago when he was still at Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Back then, he was outspoken on the challenges of mobile advertising and marketing breaking into the mainstream: “Frankly there isn’t one standardised way of doing this. It’s a barrier to overcome to get mobile onto that next level.” (via FT)
That barrier in “getting to the next level” is just as true now as it was just over a year ago when we spoke. Figures from Juniper Research say that mobile advertising in 2009 totalled $1.4 billion – but that is less than one-third of one percent of all global ad revenue. Apple still only has a tiny share of the overall smartphone market, but it is has made very big business out of maximising revenues out of those users.
Yet Apple has a major contender in the mobile ad space, in the form of Google. Tran’s boss from his days at WPP, Sir Martin Sorrell, highlighted this growing dominance in December: “There’s a lot of debate about whether [mobile ads] will take off – we think it will, driven by iPhone and Android development…Our view is, Google is much much more fitter…The potential they see in mobile and mobile search – they’re much more focused and, therefore, more effective.”
Quattro works across a number of mobile advertising and marketing functions: it delivers mobile ads to different platforms through its network, it offers ad targeting services and it does analytics. Still not clear whether Quattro will also be working on marketing and advertising opportunities on the iPad too.
Trying to look for some clues as to what Theodorou might focus on with Quattro, we tracked down his blog Theosauras, where the most recent entry is on search advertising: “the next big thing”, he calls it, making a particular focus on location-based search.
Theodorou most recently comes from a short stint with Hachette Filipacchi as head of digital sales, joining the publisher only last October.
Meanwhile, Tran had most recently been MD for Joule, a mobile marketing agency within WPP’s GroupM division, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Related