Behind The Scenes @ InMobi With Emmanuel Allix

Within this short span of three years, InMobi has managed to grow so rapidly that they experienced an an 8 times increase in the number of ad impressions from 250million to 2BILLION within a 6 month period. (update: these figures are for their US market only) They are now considered to be one of the largest global independent mobile networks. The network was launched in 2007 by the founding team consisting of Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit K. Gupta, Abhay Singhal.

We caught up with Mr. Emmanuel Allix, VP and MD (APAC) of InMobi at ad:tech held a few weeks ago to find out more about their business strategy.

Cornerstone Of Success

While most mobile networks first established their bases in the developed markets, InMobi is unique in doing the reverse – they first gained a strong presence in the APAC market then looked into penetration of Europe and US. Having said that, this therefore means that InMobi is going up against strong competition in the developed markets which is currently dominated by entrenched players such as AdMob (Google owned) and relative newcomers like Apple’s iAd and Quattro Wireless. As such, how does InMobi plan to differentiate itself from the competition?

When posed with this question, Mr. Allix’s reply was quick and simple: InMobi’s foundation lies in technologically superior products which serve the market needs - therefore there will be a place in the market for InMobi regardless of the competition. A sales force may not even be necessitated since the product is able to speak for itself and serve the market’s needs.

Engaging Developers

If these stats are anything to go by, there are approximately 30,000 Andriod apps in total, doubling the total number of apps within 3 months. And for Apple, the numbers are even more mind blowing. The app store has reached more than three billion downloads from the roughly 100,000 applications at the App Store since its launch in 2008 and following this trajectory, the numbers will keep on increasing.

As such, InMobi has added in-app advertising to their revenue stream and continually engages developers to build on their SDKs. Hesitating between which platform to develop on? Mr. Allix has this to say: Try all the different platforms then settle on the one that offers you the best monetization. Also, create more than one variation to put into the system and then let users decide which which gives the most desirable combination. Customer feedback in this case is easily determined via the clickthrough rate of the ad.

In so saying, Mr. Allix has displayed his confidence in the InMobi platform and its ability to help developers leverage on it. And just this month, reasons Mr. Allix’s confidence were made clear – InMobi just announced the launched of a 2 million developers fund which allows participating developers to keep 100% of the advertising revenue during the duration of the fund.

Of course, this is a seemingly smart move by InMobi to gain further penetration in the developed markets -”The biggest challenge is to get developers to switch from one platform to the other. This will give them a good number of converts and a good percentage of those would be lazy to switch back after the deal is up.”

Additionally, the Google-Apple warfare which prevents Google owed Admob from advertising on the iPhone therefore means that InMobi with its independent network status will stand to benefit greatly from the decreased competition in the iPhone landscape. (Update: New Link Included)

Managing Asia’s Fragmented Market

InMobi’s stronghold is in the APAC region. However, Asia, with its multicultural and multilingual landscape makes for a highly fragmented market. The network therefore has to pay close attention to country specific cultural and religious sensitivities. InMobi relies on both technical help as well as locally based backend operations team to monitor the billions of ads which are launched on their self – serving platform. Aside from screening for sensitive content, the backend team also maintains the quality of ads by ensuring that ads are posted on the relevant networks. This is achieved by closely monitoring what readers are talking about and matching them to key words stated on the ads.

Comments