Exclusive | Mobile advertising not a big challenge: InMobi's Sandeep Deshpande

Inmobi has named Sandeep Deshpande as its country general manager, India for their Bangalore based mobile advertisement network. An MBA from PuneUniversity he has almost two decades of experience in business operations and marketing. Deshpande who has previously had stints with Yahoo, AliBaba.com, and Rediff.com will be responsible for Inmobi’s business operations and growth in India.

 

He has more than twenty years of experience out of which he spent close to ten years in the internet domain. Commenting on his new role Deshpande says “I do hope that my experience in setting up new business and online marketing will help me take Inmobi to new heights.” Adgully had an exclusive conversation with Deshpande; Excerpts of the conversation:

 

 

Sandeep Deshpande (SD): Every new industry in the early stages has a fair amount of challenges. I think at this stage from a mobile advertising perspective I don’t see that as a challenge but more of something that we have to do is , evangelize and work with all the stakeholders to build the momentum that mobile advertising industry is capable of.

 

 

SD: Very clearly India is a home market for Inmobi. Not many companies have started in India and we have gone global  so to that extent  it is a lot of responsibility that we not only succeed globally but do well in the home market so that we can contribute to Inmobi’s success. So one of the key things is that we do well globally and not only in India. Secondly given that in India and some of the other emerging markets similar to India the number of mobile users using internet  on mobile device is likely to supercede the number of users practicing mobile on their PC  there is going to be a huge opportunity. So it has to be seen how it can be worked out  for both the publishers and developers on one side as well as advertisers on the other side to grow this market and really take the full potential of mobile advertising industry in India.

 

 

SD: Ideally I will not be able to talk in terms of numbers. Obviously there are targets and goals but we generally talk about these goals internally. There are very aggressive goals that we have because of a couple of factors . We all know that it is a very fast changing and very rapidly growing market . Currently there are about 50 million mobile internet users in the country and with the growth of Smartphones and Data plans and 3G and bringing down the prices  both for handsets and data plans which has been pretty scarce , there are different estimates in the market, but the growth rate would be much larger and it could multiply and not just grow at 50 or 60%. Obviously that means that there is going to be proportionate growth because of the reach that mobile advertising will be able to offer to advertisers in India.

 

 

SD: I can  try giving  you some some perspective although a separate team can tackle that better. We have operations and our   own  offices in more than  22 countries.and we have divided ourselves into five regions. In APAC other than  India we have presence in  four other countries . 

 

 

SD: Very clearly as I said earlier, active mobile internet users are currently in the region of 50 million and we reach majority of them through Inmobi’s ad network in India. Research has been done that there were 106 million internet users by the end of 2011 and 59% of those internet users in India primarily access internet through the mobile device. We tallied this number of active mobile internet user in India which crossed 50 million mark recently and there is very clear expectation that some time in maybe in 2013 we can expect the number of users accessing internet on the mobile will cross the number of users accessing internet on their PC. So the fact that there will be more number of people who always have access to internet wherever they are through their mobile devices has major implications for both content providers or service providers as well as for people who are advertisers. So a lot of these things will change the way people are consuming media. Today there are a lot of people in urban India who are reading newspapers on the go on their mobile rather than sitting at home. There will be significant changes to the way people consume media and that has direct impact on how brands get build or how advertisers use media. For e.g. a global research was done last year where about 14 thousand  people across the world responded to how they use their mobile for internet purposes. We discovered that there is a great overlap between TV viewer-ship  and mobile usage. While watching a cricket or worldcup football match people are simultaneously using their mobile device which could be a smart phone or a tablet and while they are watching TV they are commenting on social network, they are sending messages or emails. Essentially they are communicating and doing social stuff and also playing games using apps while watching TV. So there is a great overlap between TV and mobile and these kinds of things will have a major implication. Therefore mobile is a great complimentary medium to TV which is a primary medium for a majority of brands to build their branches across the world. So it is not necessary over a period of time that we don’t see mobile as a subset of digital but we actually see it as a standard of medium which will be complimentary because it can be consumed while watching TV. Increasingly the amount of time people are spending on mobile internet is far higher than what they are spending on any other media. 

 

 

SD: When the Indian team started talking to advertisers about a year back a bulk of our advertisers came from mobile first businesses . People like game developers or app developers type of people because they quickly understood the value of mobile advertisers. Now a large number of online businesses or traditional businesses like automotive companies, lifestyle brands, banking internet companies have started to use mobile internet targeting capabilities and the fact is that we have even reach media capabilities  to highly engage with the consumer.

        

 

SD:  Almost all categories of advertisers will eventually adopt the medium world, embrace the medium because it has huge advantages in terms of both reach targeting abilities as well as media capabilities and are able to engage with consumer that no other medium has. We have already acquired a platform called Sprout and that allows us to have rich media capabilities that takes the engaging consumer experience at a all together  different level . It quickly creates campaigns across all platforms, all devices without you really having to take care of it platform by platform. Given the reach targeting abilities that you will have pretty much all categories will be present. The only thing that will happen is not all of them will adopt the medium at the same rate as others. When we started about a year ago we had more first mobile businesses from the gaming industry, app developers. These were the very early users and now we have almost all handset manufacturers advertising on mobile advertising a lot of automotive companies four wheelers and some of the two wheelers have already started to engage. There are a lot of lifestyle brands, CBC companies are very keen, now given the reach mobile advertising has , to start to spend time to understand and actually engage with us to spend money. So we see all categories coming in over a period of time.