Tag: mobile advertising

Mobile ad startup InMobi is laying off almost 10 percent of its staff

| April 14, 2016

The iconic smartphone advertising company is letting about 100 people go out of around 1,000 total employees.

InMobi, a mobile ad company that has been seen as a considerable Indian success story that has been drawing leading talent and investors throughout the tech industry has now revealed that it is laying off a massive ten percent of its staff.

The cutbacks are going to affect approximately 100 people out of the total staff of 1,000 company employees.

This is the most recent indicator that the mobile ad network is finding it increasingly challenging to be able to survive the staggering competition from giants such as Facebook and Google. The startup has been in direct competition with those massive players when it comes to the data-driven mobile marketing arena. InMobi had been maintaining great hopes for their products, but the startup has not been meeting its targets when it comes to revenue, moreover the burn rates don’t appear to be decreasing, say many media reports.

The mobile ad network has received venture funding from exceptionally powerful top investors.

Mobile Ad Startup layoffsAmong those investors are Sherpalo Ventures from Caulfield & Byers and Ram Shiram, and Softbank from Japan. In 2011, it was the recipient of $200 million from SoftBank, bringing it to the point of being a startup that had more than $1 billion as its market cap.

According to an anonymous source who has knowledge of the latest developments at InMobi, “Investors have told them (InMobi) to reduce costs,” adding that “The layoffs have happened from the senior executive level to the programmer ranks.”

A spokesperson was reported to have said in an email query response that employees have left for a range of different purposes, such as starting their own ventures or moving forward with various career aspirations. That individual explained about the mobile ad network that “We also let go of a few people for performance reasons each year.” That person stated that the startup has a strategy in place for 2016 for driving growth, which included the hiring of 40 additional employees and that it had issued offers for more than 48 management and engineering grads.

Retailers to invest more into mobile marketing strategies

| April 6, 2016

A recent data analysis has found that retailers, brands and restaurants will be spending more on smartphone ads.

Digital savings experience, RetailMeNot Inc, has recently released its report on a recent study it conducted, titled “The Rise of Mobile Marketing Spend in Retail,” in which it stated that restaurants, retailers and brands will be investing more of their advertising budgets in the smartphone channel.

The study looked into the responses of over 200 retail marketing execs with authority over ad budgets.

The most notable point from this study was that among all the participants in the survey, 87 percent said that they had the intention to make a larger investment into mobile marketing this year. This was the case across all the different retail categories. It was noted that the marketers were shifting the way the budgets would be spent, sending more toward mobile ads and other smartphone based opportunities, while withdrawing funds from certain other more traditional channels.

This trend toward mobile marketing occurs as consumers engage less often with print newspapers, catalogs and TV.

Retail Investment - Mobile MarketingAccording to RetailMeNot CMO, Marissa Tarleton, “We’ve seen increased interest from our retail partners working to better understand how mobile marketing channels like RetailMeNot can help them drive brand awareness, traffic online and in-store, and ultimately sales.”

She also pointed out that retail marketing leaders have been looking to make larger investments into digital media by way of mobile advertising. Attribution capabilities are assisting in allowing those marketers to gain a more thorough understanding of the overall positive impact of what they spend in this area.

Tarleton underscored the fact that the outcome of this survey only further supports the feedback that RetailMeNot has already been receiving from its retail partners. Such feedback includes the opinion that many traditional marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to move as quickly as is necessary toward a new mobile marketing direction while still being able to take the necessary time to go over the metrics and understand what is or is not paying off in terms of the impact their investments are actually having. It looks as though the challenges of this transition are highly commonplace.