Started in Descending order
18. Brian Wong, CEO of Kiip
Kiip
This 21-year-old's company only has about 30 employees and his revenue is no more than "high seven figures," but his business model is the kind of original thinking that the mobile space—littered with ignorable ads—sorely needs.
When consumers play a mobile game or use a an app with levels or stages in it, Kiip's "ads" will reward users for completing those levels. Wong believes that as soon as advertisers learn to offer rewards that are relevant to the game and the demographics playing them—Amazon gift cards for every 15 thumbs up inside Pandora, for instance, or matchday tickets for fantasy league players—then consumers will respond by only playing games and using apps that contain Kiip-enabled rewards.
His clients include Pepsi, Best Buy, Carls Jr, Popchips, Dr Pepper and Disney. Kiip is inside 300 apps and 30 million devices on both Android and Apple platforms.
17. Chris Cunningham, CEO of Appssavvy
Chris Cunningham
Cunningham employs more than 60 employees in four offices across the U.S. and sells a product called "adtivity," or "social activity advertising." These ads are only served during the natural breaks in apps and games between activities so that the activity itself isn't rudely interrupted by the advertiser.
Nearly 100 different brands have used adtivity including American Express, Coca-Cola and Nestle on 100 publishers' apps.
16. David Gwozdz, CEO of Mojiva
iabuk / Flickr, CC
Mojiva has a monthly reach of more than 1 billion devices worldwide, with 270 million of those in the US. The company has its HQ in New York and offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Detroit, Chicago and London.
Gwozdz was formerly vp/ad sales and a founder of DoubleClick, the web ad company acquired by Google for $3 billion in 2008.
15. Paul Gunning, CEO of Tribal DDB
Tribal DDB
Tribal DDB (the interactive arm of DDB) has about 10,000 employees worldwide, roughly 1,000 of which are involved in creating mobile campaigns. Volkswagen and McDonald's are its showcase clients—Gunning says that McDonald's is so advanced as a client in the space there isn't a mobile format the fast food chain isn't using somewhere in the world. (Location-based impulse buys are a sweet spot for mobile marketers. it turns out).
Previously, as vp/general manager of Tribal DDB Chicago, Gunning worked with clients such as Lowe’s, Johnson & Johnson and State Farm Insurance.
14. Jeff Plaisted, director of sales and strategy, mobile and Skype advertising at Microsoft
Microsoft
This is the man who most wants the Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone to succeed. The device has gotten rave reviews—it really is beautiful to use—but it has a tiny share of the handset market compared to iPhone and Android. Plaisted got a big boost recently when Millennial Media developed a new ad-based software development kit for Windows Phone after noting that the Windows app marketplace had grown to 80,000 developers.
Plaisted previously worked in sales and management at AT&T/Lucent, SBC and the tech start-up InfoBlox. He joined Microsoft in 2003, and has managed integrated, cross-platform initiatives with clients like McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, Unilever, and Ford Motor.
13. Michael Collins, CEO of Joule
John Federico / Flickr, CC
WPP Group is the largest ad agency holding company on the planet, and Joule is its mobile ad division. In theory, every WPP client can now buy mobile campaigns through Joule. Headquartered in New York, Joule has expanded aggressively in the last 12 months, acquiring or opening offices in Los Angeles, China, France and Australia.
Joule offers a full range of mobile marketing services from campaign strategy through implementation and measurement, and has the ability to execute campaigns across all mobile channels.
12. Ernie Cormier, CEO of Nexage
Nexage
Nexage is a massive mobile advertising exchange that claims to have the market’s most advanced real-time bidding platform. It has 42 employees, took $9 million in funding between 2009 and 2010, and another round of $10 million this year. Nexage is "the most mature, most capitalized and most liquid mobile ad exchange" available, Cormier says. Its RTB exchange grew in bid volume by more than 70% per month in 2011, the company says.
Nexage serves 12-13 billion ad impressions per month. It has 300 publisher clients, including the NFL, Rovio (Angry Birds) and Reuters. Cormier tells us he has about 150 buy-side clients, including roughly 100 on the mediation side and 50 in real time bidding.
Cormier is formerly the chief commercial officer/MD group strategy and corporate development for Virgin Media in the United Kingdom.
11. Paul Palmieri, CEO of Millennial Media
Millennial Media
Millennial claims to be the leading independent mobile advertising platform company and the second largest mobile display advertising platform overall in the United States. It went public earlier this year and saw revenues of $33 million in Q1 2012. The company has about 265 employees.
More than 30,000 apps use Millennial's platform.
Palmieri has been around the block: He formerly held management roles with Verizon Wireless, Advertising.com, Tessco Technologies, American Personal Communications (now SprintNextel), and Acta Wireless.
10. George Bell, CEO of JumpTap
JumpTap's targeted ads for clients such as Adidas, Best Buy, and Lincoln reach 107 million mobile users in the U.S. and 156 million mobile users worldwide.
More importantly, the rumor is that Amazon wants to buy JumpTap. A threeway marriage of the Kindle, Amazon.com, and JumpTap could create a formidable challenge to both Apple and Facebook in terms of mobile ads and shopping.
Bell has a BA in English from Harvard.
9. Alex Moukas, CEO of Velti
Screengrab / Mobile Interactive GroupFew have heard of Velti, but it's huge in mobile ad buying and campaign management. The publicly traded company had revenues of $51.8 million in Q1 2012. It has about 1,000 employees in 35 global offices (about 30 employees are in the U.S.)
It boasts more than 1,000 global brands, agencies, and operators as clients in more than 68 countries.
Moukas is also a brainiac: He founded and was the "chief scientist" at Frictionless Commerce, which was later acquired by SAP; he has a B.S. in Business Administration and Computer Systems from the American College of Greece; an M.S. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh; and an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
8. Alan Herrick, CEO of SapientNitro
SapientNitro / ScreengrabSapientNitro is one of the more established agencies in the mobile/digital arena. It has 10,000 employees across the globe and has been in business more than 20 years.
It's publicly traded, and booked $269 million in total revenue in Q1 2012 (the company does not break out its mobile services revenue from its total).
Forrester ranked Sapient as the strongest large mobile ad agency (beating out nine others) based on the scale of its offerings and its strategic abilities, in Q1 2012.
7. Seth Dallaire, vp/North American sales at Amazon
Seth DallaireDallaire makes the list because of the untapped potential that exists for Amazon and its Kindle in the mobile business. Although there are already ads running in some apps and on some versions of the Kindle, the difference between Kindle and other tablet devices is that the Kindle is expressly linked to Amazon's online store. It's the dedicated retail store of tablets, in other words. If Amazon is able to convince clients to tap its vast trove of shopper data on behalf of clients it could shift the mobile/tablet ad market dramatically.
Dallaire was formerly vp/global agencies and accounts at Yahoo!, a senior director/MSN ad sales at Microsoft, and a senior account manager/business development at Amazon.
6. Todd Teresi, vice president of iAd, Apple
Business InsideriAd is hugely important in Apple's mobile ad plan but its expensive price has cost the company market share. Minimum buy-in for an iAd campaign is currently $100,000, down from $1 million when the platform was launched in 2010. Apple's mobile revenues in 2011 were an estimated $92.4 million.
Nonetheless, iAd promotions set the standard for creative beauty in mobile.
Until January, Teresi was vp/general manager for media solutions at Adobe. Prior to that he was chief revenue officer at Quantcast and an svp at Yahoo!.
5. David Ko, chief mobile officer at Zynga
David Ko and Dan Porter, CEO, OMGPOP
ZyngaThe rap on Zynga is that it's too dependent on Facebook—and Ko is the man tasked with lessening that dependence through the development of monetizable games that can live independently from the social network on your phone, like Words With Friends.
He was a key player in the acquisition of OMGPOP, the maker of Draw Something. Zynga launched six mobile games in Q1 2012: Scramble with Friends, Dream PetHouse, Dream Heights and Draw Something. Zynga booked $28 million in ad revenue in Q1 2012; it did not break out the mobile portion of that which is likely a minority.
Ko is a former senior vice president of mobile at Yahoo.
4. Kang-Xing Jin, director of ads engineering, Facebook
FacebookKang-Xing Jin (who goes by "KX") helped design the first News Feed and is the director of ads engineering at Facebook. His work became suddenly crucial to the mobile ad world when Facebook began offering Sponsored Stories in its mobile News Feed this year, and also allowed clients to buy those spots on the mobile-only Facebook app platform.
KX graduated from Harvard University in 2006 with a degree in computer science and then joined Facebook. (He was in at least two of Zuckerberg's classes: CS182 - Intelligent Machines and CS121 - Introduction to Computational Theory.)
3. Adam Bain, president/global revenue at Twitter
About 200 of Twitter's 1,000 employees are now in sales as the microblog platform ramps up toward a goal of $1 billion in ad sales by 2014. Bain isn't done—he's still staffing up frantically on the sales side, particularly in non-U.S. territories. He arrived at Twitter in 2010; formerly he was a president at Fox Interactive.
Sixty percent of Twitter's 140 million users access the platform from mobile devices, and mobile ad revenue sometimes exceeds that of desktop/laptop platforms.
2. Naveen Tewari, CEO of InMobi
InMobiInMobi claims to be the largest independent mobile ad network globally. It has 774 employees in offices in Bangalore, Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo.
It has seen 88 percent growth in impressions on tablets across its network in last six months. It only launched in 2010, but it serves 93.4 billion impressions monthly.
Naveen previously worked at McKinsey & Company and Charles River Ventures. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
1. Jason Spero, head of global mobile sales and strategy at Google.
GoogleIn 2011, Google's share of U.S. mobile ad revenue was 51.7 percent or $750 million, according to eMarketer. Google, via its Android phone platform, is simply the whale of the industry. Various analysts have estimated how much annually Google earns from mobile ads. Some of those estimates are as much as $5 billion over the next few years.
Bonus: Check out his hip-hop Pinterest page.
Source - Business Insider
Regard,
Jitesh Navlani
