“The festive season is all about generosity and giving, and weve now made it easier than ever to give the gift of Greggs, so there really is no excuse for a disappointing secret Santa present this year,” said Hannah Squirrell, customer director at Greggs. “Were excited to be the first company to use bot technology for gifting in the UK and we hope our customers get into the spirit of the bot, even after the Christmas period.”

The gifting bot integrates into Greggs existing ePOS infrastructure, enabling redemption at any of Greggs 1,800+ locations in the UK via scanning the users smartphone. The team behind the campaign are also planning to continue to evolve the product, enabling integration with third party payment platforms like Apple Pay and Android Pay.

The bot was developed in collaboration with chatbot specialists Autosermo, and Fetch, which operates as part of the Dentsu Aegis Network, has run media activation, planning and buying through its sister agency, Carat Manchester.

“We spotted an opportunity to go beyond the traditional gift cards and allow consumers to engage in random acts of kindness over the Christmas period,” said James Lodge, director of mobile at Fetch Manchester. “Were hugely excited to be working with Greggs and Carat on the Gifting Boy and to be leading the way in innovation. With the proliferation of messenger apps and over 50 per cent of users opening their messenger app at least once a day, it was a no brainer to build the Greggs Gifting Boy in a place of high engagement to drive scale and virality.”

The post Fetch helps Greggs launch Gifting Bot for the holiday season appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Sutherland moves from Fetch to head up Carat UK
Jo Sutherland is switching roles within Dentsu Aegis Network, moving from MD at mobile-first agency Fetch to become CEO of Carat UK. She replaces Rick Hirst, who is moving on to a new global role within Dentsu Aegis Network. In her new role, Sutherland will report to Matthew Platts who was recently promoted to CEO of Media Brands, Dentsu Aegis Network UK & Ireland.

She has been with Dentsu Aegis Network since 1999. In addition to her role at Fetch, she has also served as COO at media agency Vizeum. At Fetch, she doubled the agencys revenues over the two years of her tenure. She introduced new digital capabilities to the agencys offering, subsequently attracting significant mobile-centric business from UK advertisers, including The Telegraph Media Group ING Bank’s Yolt.

“Jo brings a dynamic mobile-first philosophy to the heart of the business,” said Stef Calcraft, executive chairman, Dentsu Aegis Network UK & Ireland. “She is a progressive leader with a collaborative style that inspires more innovative ideas and solutions for our clients, our people and our media partners. Jo has played a pivotal role in transforming Fetch into the thriving business that it is today and I look forward to her leading Carat through its next phase of growth. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Rick for his dedication to Carat over the past two years. I am delighted that he remains within the group and wish him all the best in his exciting new role.”

Morgan takes up GM role at OpenMarket
Jonathan Morgan has been appointed to the role of general manager at mobile messaging firm, OpenMarket. OpenMarket, an Amdocs company, enables enterprises to reach mobile users across the world, sending over 2bn business-to-consumer mobile messages each month.

Morgan has almost 20 years’ experience in commercial, engineering and operational leadership roles at OpenMarket, and prior to that, worked at Proxama and Hypertag.

In his new role, he will be responsible for driving the company’s global strategy and helping enterprises transform their operations in order to improve customer experiences through SMS, based on the principle of what the company calls ‘empathetic interactions’ – delivering text messages at the right time and in the right place.

Morgan said: “In the customer age, it’s not enough to say a business is consumer-centric, it must adopt a new mind set and approach which is entirely customer first. At OpenMarket, we believe the future of customer experience is around empathy. Those companies that capitalise on empathetic interactions, at those moments that matter, will drive the best loyalty among their consumers.”

ConsumerAcquisition.com hires Disney animator
Filmmaker and animator Mike Merell has joined ConsumerAcquisition.com as creative director.  Merell brings over 25 years of visual design experience, spanning both computer animation and live action, in the entertainment industry. With over 15 years at the Walt Disney Co., he worked as a CGI character animator and supervisor, and in development on such films as Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Atlantis, and Chicken Little.

At Disney Feature Animation he helped transitioned Disney’s 2D iconic characters, such as Ariel and Donald Duck, into the 3D world of animation for the theme park film Mickey’s Philharmagic. Later at DisneyToons Studios, he provided animation on Planes, Planes 2, and co-supervised animation on Tinkerbell’s ‘The Pirate Fairy’.

Merell was an animator at Starz/Arc on Gnomeo and Juliet and has also supervised animation at Warner Brothers, and animated on live action films for ILM and the Orphanage. More recently at Mattel he was in development for a future franchise and following that he was at The Third Floor Inc., where he provided pre-visualization for major studio films yet to be released by Disney, Marvel, Fox, Sony, and Prime.

At Consumer Acquisition, Merell will oversee the company’s professional in-house design team and its Creative Marketplace, which delivers creative videos and images to Facebook and Google advertisers. The company offers managed services for Facebook user acquisition, a creative marketplace that delivers a high-volume of fresh creative concepts for Facebook and Google UAC ads, and a self-service campaign management platform for Facebook. It has created over 300,000 videos and acquired over 150m app installs and leads for Glu Mobile, Ford, Lucktastic and Yelp, among others.

“Mike’s breadth of animation and filmmaking experience at top entertainment studios, including Walt Disney Feature Animation and Warner Bros., will be invaluable as he joins as creative director to lead our in-house design studio,” said Consumer Acquisition CEO, Brian Bowman. “He will be instrumental in driving the creative innovation of our design services team and we’re thrilled to have him on board.”

The post Movers & Shakers: Carat, OpenMarket and ConsumerAcquisition.com appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Most Innovative Campaign
This award was won by The Telegraph and Fetch with their News Personalisation at a Grand Scale project. The revolutionary initiative used a combination of smart ad technology platforms, sophisticated audience segmentation and targeted headlines to offer readers a modern and news source that was crafted in real-time by The Telegraph’s editorial team but personalised for the individual.

Fetch worked with The Telegraph’s data team to identify six key audience segments, using online behaviours, device usage and content preferences to pinpoint targets, then designed a unique ad unit that aligned each readers’ digital media preferences and content affinities across all devices. The unit could be delivered across programmatic, native and social channels, creating curated content feeds that were most likely to drive the highest level of engagement.

The campaign saw readers who actively arrived through Fetch’s units 245 per cent more likely to return to the site compared to the average digital Telegraph reader, with excellent engagement times and massive amounts of partner revenue generated by the initiative. It also resulted in internal changes for the Telegraph’s editorial team, with headlines now recrafted every day to suit different audience segments.

The judges said: “A good effort and good template, plus well executed. I like that they’re considering new, younger audiences and the longer term. This was an impressive campaign.”

Ubisoft, Maxus and Weve were awarded a Highly Commended in this category for the Watch Dogs 2: Unleash your inner ‘hacktivist’ campaign, which cleverly matched its product launch by simulating a ‘hack’ on consumer’s smartphones to create a unique experience tailored to the individual.

Most Effective Use of Data
Winning in this category was iTaxi and Cube Group for their Reach the Destination with iTaxi! campaign, which comprised of a multidimensional Google AdWords strategy, run in 54 cities across Poland and optimised in real-time to drive exception return on investment. The campaign combined both short-term and long-term goals, driving orders from consumers looking for immediate taxi hire while also generating installations for iTaxi’s native app.

In order to optimise ad spending, Cube Group based targeting on both the massive amounts of historical first-party data available to iTaxi and external data like weather forecasts, event calendars and district characteristics of each of the 54 cities targeted by the campaign. Using this data, the team built a granular AdWords strategy with different bidding strategies for each market, and then reacted in real time to changes.

The campaign resulted in a huge boost in calls to iTaxi, and as the team refined their strategy using real-time data, the number of phone calls from the click-to-call campaign increased by almost 400 per cent. Overall, the campaign had an astonishing ROI of over 700 per cent, and the app installation campaign alone saw an impressive conversion rate of 12 per cent.

Looking at the campaign, the judges said: “You cannot argue with these impressive results! The combination of multiple data sources and an established practice such as AdWords demonstrates the highly innovative approach taken by this agency.”

Vodafone and MEC took home a Highly Commended in this category for the Shhh…Don’t Mention the iPhone 7 campaign, which managed to increase Vodafone’s market share over 80 per cent during the iPhone 7 launch, all without mentioning the device once.

Most Effective Use of Video
The team at Doritos, OMD UK and Blis took home the trophy for the Most Effective Use of Video with their campaign for Doritos Heatburst, which was designed to tease and entertain the brand’s ‘hyperlifers’ audience – young consumers with a passion for film, gaming and sports. After identifying its audience using online and offline behaviours, the campaign used location-targeted video to raise awareness and drive footfall.

The Doritos Heatburst campaign brought to life the ‘Baby Dragon’ character that had been used in previous marketing, and focused on mobile as the key device for its target audience. Blis’ location data was used to determine what kind of content would be served to audiences, ensuring contextually relevant videos that were designed to have the maximum impact.

The campaign was a big success, with a high view through rate of almost 90 per cent across the various content, and footfall uplift of 43 per cent against a control group sampling. In-store sales saw an increase of over 13 per cent, and social synching used during the campaign also proved successful, with users exposed to keywords more likely to click through.

Our judges praised the campaign, saying: “A very effective campaign – lots of rigour in thinking and execution. Great use of demographic profiling and mobile location targeting. Spot on for the target market.”

Most Creative Campaign
Winning our highly-sought Most Creative Campaign award was The Lenz App: Telekom Electronics Beats meets Gorillaz by Deutsche Telekom, MediaCom and Saatchi & Saatchi. The campaign saw Deutsche Telekom teaming up with virtual band Gorillaz to turn its brand colour, magenta, into a media channel.

Using chroma key technology, the Lenz app let users point their phone at anything magenta to reveal AR content featuring the Gorillaz characters, along with local product offers in some instances. The campaign targeted millennials, traditionally the hardest demographic for Deutsche Telekom to engage.

To drive downloads of the Lenz app, its launch was promoted through a fully integrated campaign, covering digital, OOH and print. A mobile ad mimicked a phone call from Gorillaz character Murdoc, inviting them to download Lenz. This was supported through partnerships with 500 micro-influencers, and out-of-home stunts across Europe, including turning the grass in front of Tower Bridge magenta.

The campaign generated 14m impressions in its first two weeks, along with over 1m organic video views and 2,700 social mentions. Lenz was downloaded 132,000 times, with users opening the app on average nearly three times each.

The judges said: “Bang on trend. Used AR well to engage their targeted customers using a bold colour to highlight engagement opportunities in their environment.”

The post 2017 Award Winners: Use of Video, Use of Data, Most Innovative and Most Creative appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Recently though, there have been signs of trouble in adland. Earlier this year, P&G’s chief brand officer Mark Pritchard took the digital ad industry to task over some of its failings. Speaking at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Hollywood, he said: “The days of giving digital a pass are over. Its time to grow up. Its time for action.”

The marketing chief’s main gripes were transparency, or the lack of it, and viewability, in particular, the plethora of different viewability standards that brands and their agencies are supposed to adhere to. Pritchard was at it again a couple of weeks in Dmexco, telling conference delegates: “The reality is that in 2017, the bloom came off the rose for digital media. The reason: substantial waste in what has become a murky supply chain. As little as 25 per cent of the money we spend in digital media actually makes it to the consumer. With $200bn in spending, it’s frankly time to stop giving digital a pass, and ask it to grow up.”

Last week, trouble erupted again, and this time, it was ad fraud that brought things to a head, as Uber filed a lawsuit against its media agency Fetch Media in San Francisco for fraud, negligence and breach of contract, among other issues.

In the suit, Uber alleges that Fetch spent millions of Uber’s ad dollars on ads that were “nonviewable” by virtue of being so far down the page that few users would scroll that far, or being too small to see. Uber also alleges that Fetch bought ads on websites that didn’t exist.

In short, Uber was paying Fetch to drive downloads of its app, but claims that the ad dollars channelled through Fetch were not responsible for these downloads. For its part, Fetch has said that Uber is effectively using the fraud claims as a smokescreen to avoid paying its invoices, as well as those of partner companies it used to place Uber’s mobile ads.

Who’s telling the truth will be for the courts to decide, but I suspect this won’t be the last time that a brand takes its agency to task, in the courts, for allegedly failing in its duties.

It does make you wonder how seriously the ad networks and media agencies are taking all this stuff. After all, eight months elapsed between Mark Pritchard’s first rallying call to the digital ad industry in January and his second at Dmexco two weeks ago, but no one who heard him speak in Germany would say he sounded particularly pleased with the progress that had been made.

A couple of months after The Times ran its brand safety expose in February, JICWEBS, (The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK and Ireland), revealed that 20 companies had signed up to undergo an audit since the article appeared, while 35 companies had achieved JICWEBS certification for brand safety.

Earlier this month, JICWEBS announced that the past month had been the most prolific ever in terms of the number of certificates awarded for Brand Safety, with 11 certificates issued. That took the number of companies who have successfully been reviewed against the Good Practice principles for protecting where brand’s online ads appear to 46. 

Which sounds quite encouraging until you look at the digital marketing lumascape and the 3,000 or so companies in it. Not all are involved in advertising I know, but hundreds of the companies in the lumascape are, and I know from conversations I had in Dmexco that there is growing frustration in many quarters at the industry’s collective failure to get its act together.

Last week, Uber learned the hard way that you can’t just ignore the rules and do things your own sweet way and get away with it, as Transport for London announced that its licence to operate in the capital would not be renewed when it expires at the end of the month.

The digital ad industry may not be under anything like the same sort of regulatory threat, yet, but when big advertisers like P&G’s Mark Pritchard start calling on the industry to clean up its act, and big advertisers like Uber start going legal on their agencies, perhaps it’s time for things to change.

The post Viewpoint: Time to change appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The often-controversial transportation network is filing a lawsuit against Fetch, an advertising agency owned by Japanese advertising giant Dentsu, for alleged click fraud relating to ‘fake’ online ads and taking credit for app downloads it had nothing to do with.

“With Fetch, we learned the age-old lesson ‘buyer beware’ the hard way,” Uber said in a statement. “Fetch was running a wild west of online advertising fraud.”

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court in San Francisco, sees Uber seeking at least $40m (£30m) in damages, according to Bloomberg. Uber is said to have noticed something wasn’t quite right when it cancelled a campaign on far-right website Breitbart, where Fetch had been placing Uber ads.

The cancellation of the campaign came at a time when hundreds of companies blacklisted Breitbart, to prevent their ads appearing on the site, following last year’s presidential election. Fetch pulled ads from all networks associated with Breitbart, but the move is said to not have had any real bearing on the number of app downloads, contrary to what Fetch claimed.

On the back of this, Uber alleges that Fetch had been overbilling by claiming credit for app downloads it didn’t generate. Between 2015 and early 2017, the ride hailing company paid more than $82.5m for ads overseen by Fetch. Uber has refused to pay the over $7m that the ad agency says it owes.

The post Uber sues Dentsus Fetch for alleged click fraud appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Chris Cardew, head of strategy, Mindshare
“While the out-of-pocket cost for a prime Super Bowl ad slot has certainly increased over the last ten years, brands still value it as a highly effective platform for reaching a large, unduplicated audience in a highly engaged environment. Increasingly, ad exposure is not limited to just the TV screen, as the most successful campaigns begin weeks before the game itself and continue well after the game has ended. It’s therefore not surprising that the Super Bowl has the largest social footprint as well, which often extends to participating brands – for better or for worse.

“This year, brands that have traditionally used a male lead in their Superbowl advertising will likely, or at least hopefully, have reappraised their casting strategy. 25 per cent of the 2016 Super Bowl ads had no women in them at all – a missed opportunity, considering 50 per cent of the viewing audience are women. 2017 is a great opportunity for typically male-targeted industries such as autos, beers and tech to better represent their female customers.”

Duncan Wynn, director of sales, Sky Media
“While American football continues to grow its following in the UK, the impact is just not the same. In an advertising sense, the Super Bowl is a key example of the perfect combination of live and event TV – each country has their own example of a ‘Super Bowl’ moment. It’s an opportunity for massive audiences to come together as friends, as family, at home or in pubs.

“This kind of event TV needs to be watched live. You want to watch it with others and you want to watch in on the biggest screen in the house. The must-watch, talked-about content creates an ideal opportunity for advertisers to connect with consumers in a highly engaged environment – something you just don’t get with any other media.”

Dan Wilson, head of data, Fetch
“For any UK brands doubting the lure of the Super Bowl, it should be remembered that American culture, now more than ever, has become an obsession for UK consumers. The Super Bowl is a US import that has taken to the global stage and is unique, both in terms of its sky-high viewership and the level of creativity that brands adopt to showcase their message. However, with eye-wateringly high ad slots and diminished viewer attention spans, brands should turn their focus towards mobile.

“From previous years we’ve seen that TV advertising causes approximately a 25 per cent increase in mobile activity, with users ‘second screening’ to download apps immediately after viewing ads, tweeting, and posting on social platforms. Therefore, in-app placement or a paid tweet may provide better ROI than a TV ad.”

John Koetsier, mobile economist, Tune
“We see record numbers streaming Super Bowl 51 via mobile and the web. Only about 3.5 per cent of those who watched last year’s Super Bowl streamed it — that number should be close to five per cent this year. Some of the early signals include the increasing demand for the Fox Sports Go app, which will have streaming rights to the game, and growth in searches for ‘football’ and ‘super bowl’.”

John Goulding, global product director, Media IQ
“Social data is an incredibly powerful tool for brands to connect with customers throughout the year, not just at peak sporting moments such as Super Bowl. However, the high viewership of these events cause a major shift in our behaviour and this represents an opportunity for advertisers to use the already high public interest to drive their own agenda. With the huge budgets diverted to TV advertising during Super Bowl, brands will be looking closely at their spend and wondering whether it is worth the investment.

“With social, you get instant feedback and a relatively high level of transparency and accuracy in real-time, something that traditional media has trouble competing with, so will only continue to grow as brand continue to crave genuine and trackable results.”

Sienne Veit, director of online product, John Lewis
“We have come to accept that it is the norm, rather than the exception, for people to dual screen while in front of their TV sets. At this years Super Bowl, we will once again see brands push the boundaries of experimentation to capture dual-screeners as they watch the event. More brands will use VR and AR experiences in an attempt to create unique, innovative and memorable moments – but unless the technology which supports these is pre-built into social media apps, it is likely most of these will lack the necessary scale to be truly effective.

“On the other hand, brands who have developed Messenger bots to create one-on-one personalised brand/customer experiences – and those who direct consumers to these from TV commercials and via Facebook advertising – will no doubt see the biggest return. Creatively these experiences will have to deliver value to the consumer, but those that do will no doubt be the ones who will win this years Super Bowl.”

Shachar Orren, vice president of content, Playbuzz
“A recent Salesforce survey found that 80 per cent of viewers planned on using two or more screens while viewing this years Super Bowl, with social media being the biggest distraction by far. This isnt necessarily a reflection of people becoming disengaged with the Super Bowl as such, but more of a reflection of changing behaviours.

“At Playbuzz, we believe one of the best ways to hold on to an audiences attention is through interactive content, as demonstrated by MTV during Super Bowl 50. MTV issued an interactive quiz around which team watchers should root for, resulting in users spending almost a minute and a half with the content, six times longer than the industry average of 15 seconds. Off-screen content that works across multiple devices is a prime example of how publishers and advertisers alike can engage viewers on Game Day without breaking the bank.”

Tom Cummings, vice president, new market strategy, Fiksu
“Reaching Super Bowl audiences on mobile can result in a 77 per cent reduction in cost per view versus prime time ads. From posting on social media, heckling friends, or reading up on instant analysis and reviews, we can expect almost all viewers to spend some time on at least one mobile screen during the game.

“Coupled with astronomical costs for a Super Bowl ad, marketing on mobile devices during the Super Bowl is the next logical step for marketers. Allocating just a fraction of the budget many brands use for the Super Bowl can help marketers reach millions of viewers on platforms they’re also actively engaging with: their phones and tablets.”

The post Super Bowl 51: The Mobile Advertising Opportunity appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Fetch will work on digital strategy, mobile marketing, paid search, paid social and digital programmatic. Fetch was initially appointed by The Telegraph to successfully launch its new mobile app in October this year.

“Having assessed a number of performance marketing agencies, we feel that Fetchs knowledge in the digital mobile-first arena, combined with their deep understanding of our business, makes them the perfect partner for The Telegraph,” said Marc Waxman, performance marketing director at The Telegraph, who led the pitch for the work.

Fetch is a mobile-first agency with offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berlin, Manchester and Hong Kong. Launched in 2009, the company was bought by Dentsu Aegis Network for £30m in November 2014.

The post Telegraph Hands Digital Marketing Brief to Fetch appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

From a marketing perspective, one of the most interesting trends of the year just gone is the growing consumer shift toward mobile social messaging apps. We are seeing a move away from the public forums of social networks to the private and intimate communication channels of instant messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, Slack, and Snapchat.

As we head into 2017, marketers will need to increasingly consider how they can engage their target audiences in these popular mobile platforms through conversational marketing, alongside their other direct-to-customer CRM channels like SMS, email, and social media.

Chatbots have become a key way to integrate with these app platforms and establish a customer dialogue. Since Facebook launched its chatbot functionality as a part of Messenger for Business early in 2016, the buzz around chatbots has exploded.

Chatbots enable businesses, large and small, to establish an automated conversation with people to answer questions, make suggestions and deliver content that can help build loyalty, upsell and cross-sell – an opportunity being referred to as ‘conversational commerce’. If mobile marketers take advantage of this emerging communication channel, they will be well positioned to form a closer connection with consumers.

Establishing a brand or business dialogue within mobile social messaging platforms will require new approaches, practices and skillsets. For anyone responsible for CRM and social media management, it’s going to add an extra level of complexity. This is the closest a business can get to personalised, synchronous communication with individuals at scale, anywhere, any time.

Conversational marketing will require thinking through all the permutations of a potential conversation with a customer, and the data analysis to understand the needs and requirements of different audiences. Businesses need to decide the level of automation or real human intervention to maintain a realistic and valuable dialogue. This will require the necessary tech resource working closely with Facebook to understand the boundaries of what is feasible.

As leading brands and businesses increase their presence within social messaging apps, marketers will also need to consider how to integrate branded chat environments into their current marketing strategies. Conversational marketing will present marketers with an opportunity to share their brand story directly with their audience, increase loyal customer engagement, enhance the customer service experience and ultimately get more people to come back to the business again and again. This might be particularly useful for online and offline retailers, regular service providers and content distributors.

But beware: if marketers do decide to open up to customer chat through these new direct channels, they should be sure to meet expectations of a useful conversation with the customer at the other end of the smartphone. A delayed or unsatisfactory response to incoming queries will be a turn off to the mobile-first consumer.

Looking further ahead, chatbots are a precursor to AI, the next step of data analytics and aggregation, going beyond consumer behaviour targeting to consumer behaviour predicting. AI is at the forefront of Google’s current agenda, as it predicts a move from mobile-first to AI-first. For marketers, this means a deeper level of understanding that helps companies make better predictions and serve customers what they need in advance.

Another precursor to AI is virtual assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana. Consumers are already comfortable googling recipes for lasagne and are satisfied with the results Google throws up. This two-way dialogue is already happening, and voice search is a natural evolution of this conversation. Voice recognition is becoming more accurate and responsive, and now materialising in hardware extensions such as Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Consumers ask questions in voice search, and virtual assistants offer back answers to these specific questions. For SEO purposes, keywords will need to evolve to include not just search terms, but natural responses to questions. To encourage Echo to direct a consumer to a Thai Restaurant, keywords might no longer be ‘Thai’, ‘food’, ‘restaurant’ or ‘London’, but responses to questions, such as ‘Thai Kingdom is open until 11pm and is the top-rated Thai restaurant in London’. Marketers will need to shift their focus from reading and writing to speaking and listening, starting by saying aloud the conversational marketing content they write up to ensure it sounds like a natural conversational response, instead of just reading well.

The evolution from chatbots and virtual assistants into AI, and the opportunity for conversational marketing and commerce for marketers, should not be underestimated. Conversational marketing is likely not just a 2017 trend, but a 2018 and 2019 trend as well. It may well be the beginning of the future of marketing.

Julian Smith is head of strategy and innovation at Fetch

The post 2017 Predictions: Fetch appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Mobile agency Fetch has been sold to Dentsu Aegis Network for a figure in the region of £30m. Fetch will retain its brand identity and work collaboratively with Dentsu Aegis Network’s brand, media and communications businesses to help scale and accelerate the group’s mobile capabilities.

Fetch was founded just five years ago by James Connelly and Declan Reddington. The company is headquartered in London, with offices in the US, Germany and Hong Kong, and 96 people.

“With consumers increasingly engaging with brands through mobile devices, mobile media has become a critical part of the communication ecosystem and a key driver for business outcomes,” said Robert Horler, CEO for Northern Europe at Dentsu Aegis Network. “Growing our digital profile across all capabilities is one of our five strategic priorities and this deal clearly recognises the potential we see in both Fetch and the wider mobile market.”

Fetch co-founder Connelly described the sale as “a logical next step for Fetch as we look to deliver our ambitious growth plans and scale our business globally…  Dentsu Aegis Network has a proven track record of growing digital businesses and a clear appreciation of the increasing importance of mobile in the media landscape. We are very excited about the opportunity to partner with Dentsu Aegis Network to deliver world-class mobile capabilities on behalf of an increasing number of mobile-focused clients.”

David Murphy writes:
If you want an exit in the mobile marketing business, get into mobile media. The first company active in this space, Ring Ring Media, was acquired by Amobee in January 2010, just 18 months after launching. Amobee subsequently sold out to Singtel for £203m just over two years later.

Inside Mobile was bought by M&C Saatchi in 2010, and now Fetch has sold out to Dentsu for £30m. There are not many established independents left in this space, but it’s worth noting that Yodel Mobile, which, like the market for a while seemed to struggle to know exactly what to focus on, has built a solid business over the past couple of years, with mobile media buying at the heart of it.

The post Dentsu Aegis Buys Fetch for £30m appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The agency already has branches in tech hubs in San Francisco and London, and the new Berlin branch has already secured mobile acquisition work from local food delivery service Foodpanda, in addition to providing a more complete service to existing clients such as eBay and Hotels.com.

The Berlin branch will service pan-European and global clients as well as actively seeking further partners across Germany. Fetch has already seen exponential growth since its launch in 2009, reporting income of £34m in 2013, and predicting its first £100m revenue year for 2014.

“We remain a hugely ambitious company with global ambitions,” said James Connelly, CEO and co-founder. “This is our third operation in our network offering mobile media, strategy, creative and analytics that will complement what we do in London and San Francisco. Were confident we will attract new clients to our unique network, and this launch will be swiftly followed by a further launch into the APAC market place.”

The post Fetch Opens Up in Berlin appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.