Payvia has acquired Mogreet, creating what is likely the largest mobile company in Los Angeles with nearly 150 total employees. The mobile payments and messaging company, which was used to great effect by President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign team, acquired Mogreet to help close the loop between mobile marketing messaging and direct transactions.

Payvia’s direct billing deals with carriers combined with Mogreet’s CRM and messaging platforms for brands will give marketers a unique ability to drive transactions through text- and video-based messaging campaigns. Mogreet’s video and rich messaging platform is now being integrated with Payvia’s mobile payments platform, and some major customer announcements are expected in the coming weeks.

“You can drive a consumer through our platform, give them the best video, maybe drive them in store, but what if you want to actually drive an immediate transaction?” James Citron, founder and chief executive of Mogreet, tells ClickZ.

“No matter the hundreds of millions of incredible videos that we’re sending out as multimedia messages, if we want to provide an instant transaction to any of our merchants, the easiest way to do that is through a text message. And with Payvia we can complete that transaction in seconds.”

The talks with Payvia began as a partnership discussion but quickly evolved into an all-out acquisition once the two companies gathered feedback from their customers, Citron says.

“They get the ability to have the CRM capabilities and thousands of customers who are using us for all their marketing and communications. And for us, we can turn to all of our customers and tell them that they can ‘instantly start monetizing and driving m-commerce revenue through all their messaging,” says Citron, who becomes Payvia’s chief marketing officer.

Despite all the chatter and hype surrounding over-the-top messaging services of late, Citron describes how Payvia’s acquisition of Mogreet reinforces the strength and importance of carrier-supported commerce and messaging.

“If you’re a brand, you can not afford to work with a service that’s only going to reach a small fraction of your customers. And separate from that, you can’t afford typically to go work with 15 different service providers just to reach your customer on a mobile device. The biggest and the most strategic marketers go, ‘I need to go with a platform that’s going to enable me to reach my customer on a mobile device regardless of what app they’re using, regardless of what handset and carrier they have,’” he says.

“While I think some of the over-the-top services are cannibalizing peer-to-peer messaging, they’re not cannibalizing any of the brand-to-consumer or the application provider consumer messaging. That business is growing tremendously and I think no matter how successful these over-the-top apps are, at the core the average app only has a few week shelf life on a consumer’s device. Text messaging is still used by 90-plus percent of consumers every single week, versus the most popular app in the world, Facebook, is using a small fraction of the amount of time that text messaging is by the overall population,” Citron adds.

Terms of the deal are still being kept under wraps but Citron emphasizes that it’s a great transaction for the company he founded in 2006 and helped raise $14 million in funding over that seven-year span.

“I couldn’t be more excited because when I started the company I hoped to do a few things. I hoped to create a product that no one had ever created. We did that, we built the best MMS platform and the only one that’s achieved truly transformational scale in the industry. We do about two-thirds of all short code based MMS in the country,” Citron says.

“Whenever you start a start-up, you want to be able to deliver a great return to all your investors, everyone who’s believed in you, and your team and give them a bigger platform to succeed. And this does that. Our combined company has scale that’s unmatched in our industry,” he adds.

According to Citron, the newly formed company will have more messaging throughout, meaning Payvia can send out more text messages at higher speeds than anyone in North America. “We have a true global presence now and we have mobile commerce capabilities. For me, it’s the most exciting thing. We accomplished well beyond what we had humbly scratched together on a white board several years ago, and we have an opportunity together as a combined company to do something incredibly remarkable,” Citron concludes.

Google continues to tighten up and organize various services into key focus areas at its sixth annual developer-focused conference. A morning keynote that dragged well beyond three hours highlighted just how messy and unintuitive Google’s product structure can be for end users. Even with ongoing leadership changes and reorganization efforts that aim to replace the horizontal flow of ideas and services that cobbled Google’s chances for a more clear strategy for years, the company appears to have as many moving parts as ever.

Google is trying to get out ahead of these issues instead of hiding from the challenges it faces due to fragmented product lines. After more than 50 years of work and progress in real-time communication products, “we are still stuck with gadgets that get in the way,” says Vic Gundotra, SVP of engineering at Google. “Frankly, even Google’s own services have been fragmented and confused at times.”

Google revealed changes and updates across most of its portfolio on Wednesday, particularly with respect to Android and Google Play, Chrome, Google+, Search, and Maps. “We view this as one of the most important moments in computing,” says Sundar Pichai, SVP of Android, Chrome, and apps at Google. “At the heart of this journey is the impact we can have on people around the world.”

He, and indeed Google itself, is putting an ever-growing emphasis on the company’s two large platforms in Android and Chrome. The company has activated more than 900 million Android devices as of this week, marking a dramatic growth curve from the 400 million activations it had clocked by 2012 and the 100 million activations it reported in 2011.

Google wants to bring that number into the billions, and there is plenty of room for growth considering Android is still hovering around less than 10 percent in most areas of the world, Pichai adds. Google’s business goal with Android is simple and very clear, he says. It wants to bring the power of the Internet to as many people as possible.

After announcing a series of new APIs and tools now available to developers, Google unveiled its own music subscription service that will compete with the likes of Rdio and Spotify at a non-competitive monthly fee of $10 per month. Much of the early reaction focused on Google’s awkward branding for the service, which it calls Google Play Music All Access, but industry watchers and shakers could change their tune if Google is able to disrupt an industry that has mostly avoided Google’s influence to date. Key details surrounding Google’s new music subscription service were in short supply, but the service did launch in the U.S. within a matter of hours carrying an offer for a free 30-day trial.

Google Play is also growing exponentially, surpassing 48 billion app installs prior to the company’s annual developer gathering, says Hugo Barra, VP of Android product management at the company. Google has paid out more revenue share to developers on Google Play over the last four months than all of last year and revenue per user is now two-and-a-half times what it was a year ago globally, he adds.

With 750 million active users on Chrome today, Google says it’s now focusing on bringing the same level of speed, simplicity, and security that users expect from the desktop version of Chrome to mobile. “We think we can do to the mobile web what we did for the desktop web,” says Pichai. “The same capabilities that you’re used to on Chrome on the desktop are all coming to Android.”

Google+ got a refresh as well, with a new three-column format that resembles Pinterest and some of Tumblr’s themes, improved social streams, photo features, and a new version of Google+ Hangouts that the company is pivoting into a dedicated app for iOS, Android, and the web. The new Hangouts app will continue to evolve as Google intends to bring text, photo, emoticon, video chat, and eventually voice communications under one big umbrella.

Beginning with a bold declaration of “the end of search as we know it,” Amit Singhal, SVP and software engineer at Google, introduced Google’s vision and plans for the next wave in the evolution of search. Google Search can now set reminders by voice and bring conversational voice search and responses to all tablets, laptops, and desktops in Chrome. Google Now is getting a makeover as well, with a series of new cards for reminders, public transit commute times, music, books, TV shows, and video games.

Finally, the company also previewed its next version of Google Maps that it plans to streamline across all channels and platforms this summer.

GE is one of those companies that is familiar to almost everyone because it is so massive and old, and yet most people have very little knowledge of what it does. GE Wonderground, a new desktop and mobile game released for the iPhone last month, is designed to inform or reintroduce consumers to the 121-year-old company’s long history in science, design and industrial technology.

Whether it’s the jet engine that powers the plane we’re traveling on or the energy technology that provides power to the cities we live in, GE wants people to discover the important roles it serves in a game it describes as a sort of modern-day treasure hunt.

The app, which was produced by GE’s agency partner Noise, was “based on the idea that GE technology is all around us, but we often don’t know it,” Katrina Craigwell, manager of digital marketing at GE, tells ClickZ. “There’s amazing technology and amazing science history all around us at the foundation of our cities and we probably don’t know about it. And for anyone who’s a science or tech geek, discovering that is always fun.”

The Wonderground app is part game and part augmented reality, presenting users with a series of missions they can play across the metropolitan areas of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco. By pulling location data, the app displays a series of nearby missions that users can play when they are within range of the mission at hand. A clue checklist leads users through a discovery phase as they learn more about places like Little Tokyo in Los Angeles or Telegraph Hill in San Francisco mixed with “random and delightful” facts about GE.

“The idea is to help people celebrate their cities, learn a little bit about GE but do it in a valuable way,” Craigwell says. “The grand majority of the information, about 75 to 80 percent of the information that you uncover in the game is not about GE because we didn’t want to hit people over the head with it.”

Wonderground is not only the most involved gaming program that GE has created from a brand perspective, it is also a “heavy lift” and ongoing experiment of sorts for GE, adds Craigwell. “One of the goals with this game is to really make GE accessible to a younger audience, to a college audience, to use it as a recruiting tool in a sense as well,” she says. “We comb through it to really make sure that the stuff was interesting, to make sure that it made sense, and make sure that the GE part of the story was compelling and it wasn’t kind of just cheaply thrown in there,” she adds.

“How do we create an environment that incentivizes people to keep uncovering information? There’s a lot of information that we want to get across and we think it’s valuable at that volume. We could put it in a long video. We do that a lot and we love video but you can’t have that long of a video. So how do we create something that’s new and fresh and will incentivize people to keep uncovering information?” Craigwell explains.

GE has put considerable effort into growing its base of 1 million fans on Facebook, 100,000 followers on Twitter, other social sites and its own GE.com, alongside branded content efforts on sites like BuzzFeed,Tumblr and others.

“We spent a lot of time making sure that we’re messaging across our own base and driving from there,” Craigwell says.

To reach residents and tourists in a more analog and creative way, GE hired Artist John Pugh to paint a series of outdoor murals on walls in the cities that Wonderground currently reaches through the app.

Back online GE’s branded content on BuzzFeed is – you guessed it, a series of images running under titles like “10 Things You Probably Never Knew About New York City” and “10 Things You Might Not Have Known About Los Angeles” in addition to a video produced by BuzzFeed about places to explore in Los Angeles.

“It’s not as simple as distribution for some other things might be, but the traffic and the visitors that we’re getting from Buzzfeed are sticking with the game for quite a bit of time,” Craigwell says. “Overall user acquisition is a slow burn… We look a lot at time on site, and we have people that are playing the game from anything from 10 to 19 minutes and we’re really happy with that.”

If you still think mobile marketing is a hobby, consider this: it contributed $139 billion to the U.S. economy and created 524,000 jobs last year. Does that sound like an area that belongs under “experimental” or “emerging” marketing budgets?

The Mobile Marketing Association certainly doesn’t think so, and now it has a dense 124-page research paper to back up the industry it has served as an evangelist for since 2000. The mobile marketing ecosystem is projected to generate more than $400 billion to the U.S. economy by 2015, representing an annual growth rate of 52.5 percent, according to the new “MMA Mobile Marketing Economic Impact Study.”

Greg Stuart, chief executive of MMA, notes that $400 billion is almost the size of the current gross domestic product of Argentina or Austria and would surpass the current GDP of Thailand.

Mobile is also projected to generate 1.4 million jobs across the country by 2015, according to the report. The marketers and retailers that are driving this growth spent a collective $6.7 billion on mobile marketing in 2012 and that number is projected to increase to $19.8 billion by 2015.

The study commissioned by MMA also sought to determine the effectiveness of mobile marketing spend based on its impact on mobile sales. The marketing impact ratio, or overall return on every dollar that a marketer invests in the business, peaked at $20.77 in 2012. The lead researchers were also surprised to report that mobile marketing has yet to experience the law of diminishing returns.

“When they look at that data across different sectors…there appears to be no diminishing returns,” Stuart tells ClickZ. “It’s like the law of gravity, you don’t ever get to avoid diminishing returns.” Despite that controversial concept, he emphasizes that marketers have a unique opportunity to invest in an ecosystem that is not conforming to traditional economic models or rules.

Data from the top four mobile marketing spenders indicates that increased spend across mobile marketing platforms does not increase the impact rate and that marketers who spend more on mobile achieved the highest impact ratio overall.

Mobile marketing spend was also organized by industry categories including mobile advertising, mobile direct response or enhanced traditional media, and mobile CRM. Mobile advertising gained a lead over CRM last year and is projected to further distance itself at a compound annual growth rate of 56.2 percent through 2015. Mobile advertising spend will more than triple from $3.06 billion in 2012 to more than $9.2 billion in 2015, according to the report.

Mobile direct response spending is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 77.4 percent, representing the fastest growing category in mobile. Investment in direct response is expected to reach $1.3 billion this year and surpass $2.9 billion by 2015.

While mobile CRM expenditures are growing at the slowest compound annual growth rate of 43.8 percent, the category remains incredibly steady with projections for it to clear nearly $7.7 billion by 2015.

The study also concluded that finance, retail (excluding CPG), and manufacturing (excluding CPG) were the three largest industries for mobile marketing spend. Measuring investments in mobile across 16 industry groups, the three mobile stalwarts contributed $3 billion or nearly half of the total amount of investment in mobile marketing in 2012. The report also found that the largest markets for mobile employment are being driven by the industries that spend more on mobile marketing and advertising.

Marketers have always been trying to unlock the path of least resistance to in-store purchases. While broad strokes don’t capture the various behaviors and activities that consumers go through during their shopping routines, those different pathways have become even more profound and challenging for CPG (consumer-packaged goods) marketers since the rise of smartphones.

A new study about the impact of smartphone use on in-store shopping from Google and a group of marketing agencies known as the Google Shopper Marketing Agency Council concludes that smartphones are transforming the shopping experience and that CPG brands and retailers have embrace these behavioral changes as opportunities, not challenges.

“There’s this huge shopping transformation being led by technology,” says Kevin Kells, national industry director of CPG at Google. “Increased engagement, especially in stores, is leading to greater purchases in every product category…It really is taking the friction out of the shopping experience.”

Shoppers who frequently use their smartphone to research products and compare prices in-store spend an average of 25 percent more per transaction than those who rarely augment their shopping trips with the aid of a smartphone.

“Those folks who are actually using the mobile more are buying more in-store,” Kells adds. Manufacturers are “scrambling to figure it out,” he says, but reinforces that empowered smartphone shopping behaviors and the brands that want to capitalize on these changes are “at the beginning of the journey.”

Nearly eight in 10, or 79 percent of smartphone users use their devices in-store at least once a month to assist in shopping, according to the study. Shoppers are pulling their smartphones out of their purses and pockets to assist in all product categories, but the leading CPGs include appliances (97 percent), groceries (89 percent), baby care (87 percent), electronics (87 percent), and household care (86 percent).

Total purchase amounts also increase across product categories when smartphones come into play, however, health and beauty purchases increase the most at an average rate of 50 percent per transaction. The median basket size also increases an average of 40 percent with appliances, 34 percent with electronics, and 25 percent with household care products, says Google.

The “Mobile In-Store Research” study also found that almost half of all smartphone shoppers use their device for at least 15 minutes in-store. This behavior is enabling shoppers to engage less with customer service representatives, as one in three smartphone shoppers will turn to their device to find information instead of asking employees for help. Indeed, time was cited as the primary benefit of using a smartphone while shopping with more than half of the survey’s respondents reporting that smartphones cut back on the amount of time they spend shopping now.

While some retailers have taken a more protective stance against show-rooming and deeper in-store research enabled by smartphones, Kells believes it’s only a matter of time before CPG brands and retailers embrace smartphone shoppers without reservation.

“It’s very difficult to change consumer behavior,” he says. “If you are concerned about show-rooming…I think you really have to rethink the whole shopping experience.” Retailers and CPG brands should confront this transformation by determining where they can add value to the smartphone-powered journey of shopping, he adds. “You want to start to own that digital shelf,” Kells says. “You should wake up caring as much about the digital shelf and the online shopping experience as your physical shelf” in-store.

The era of successful jerks in business and marketing is over, according to Peter Shankman. The founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and now VP and small business evangelist for Vocus, which acquired HARO in 2010, has dealt with a fair amount of jerks throughout his career. ClickZ caught up with Shankman following the release of his latest book, “Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management is Over - and Collaboration Is In,” to learn more about his positive vibrations in marketing and how marketers can be effective without being a jerk. As Shankman prepares to launch a new consultancy next month based on the teachings in his book, he describes how business leaders can generate more revenue by empowering their entire workforce to simply do what is right.

ClickZ: How does one become a successful marketer without being a jerk?

Peter Shankman: When you look at 50 years ago, no one really cared how you acted. You could do pretty much whatever you wanted and you didn’t get in trouble because it was really hard to catch you, as it were. But, the problem is now you have everything out there. Everyone you meet, everyone you talk to, everyone you know has some sort of 24-hour connection to the Internet and the ability to grab anything - audio, video, or otherwise - anytime they want. That, fortunately, winds up resulting in the ability to lie disappearing. It used to be when you would screw up at some capacity at a company, there was nothing they could do about it. They were upset, they told their friends maybe. Now it’s everywhere and it’s very easy. So with this 24-hour connected world that we’re in, the easiest way to keep the clients you have and gain new ones is simply to be 1 percent nicer than what we always expect, which let’s face it is crap.

When you go to the hotel or the airport you expect bad things. You don’t expect the fast-food place to have your stuff on time. You go to a fast-food place and you don’t expect them to get your order right. You don’t expect the dry cleaner to have your stuff ready on Tuesday when they say it’ll be ready on Tuesday. You don’t expect the hotel to keep your room if you’re late. And so that logic is what we have come to accept, which is pretty insane. In the ’50s you go fill up your tank with gas and there’d be four guys out there, one checking your oil, one doing your tires, one doing your windshield, and the other pumping your gas. We’ve moved to this new world of you’re lucky enough if the credit card machine works. What people don’t realize is it’s actually beneficial for marketers and advertisers because now you don’t have to go out of your way to be amazing to your customers. All that you have to do now is be one level above crap. And while that sounds ridiculous, it’s actually incredibly simple. It’s doing the easiest things in the world, the simplest things in the world, and they don’t have to be that major.

What Morton’s does is when you call and make a reservation they ask you one simple question: “Are you celebrating anything for your reservation?” And if you say yes, they bring you a piece of cake. Something incredibly simple, but it makes “Oh my God, look at that.” We live in this horrendous Instagram-everything-you-eat world anyway, so first thought is: “Wow, look, they brought me a free piece of cake. That’s so cool.” It costs them what, 8 cents for that cake, but 400 people just saw it and one of them might say, “Oh, cool, maybe I’ll go there the next time I have a birthday.”

One of my favorite examples of that is about a month-and-a-half ago I was in a hotel in Dubai and I was running low on toothpaste. I get back to my hotel after a long day of meetings and there’s a brand new tube of toothpaste there and a little note from the maid that says, “Hey, I noticed you’re running low on toothpaste. I bought you a new tube of the same kind you use. I know how busy you are, I hope this is helpful.”And I was floored. So I go and I immediately post a photo of the toothpaste. Fast forward, I’m checking out two days later and the head of PR implies to me that they’ve already tracked incoming calls and reservations based on my photo. A 39 cent tube of toothpaste, dude! How much is that worth? It’s not even a question of money, what it really comes down to is empowering the employees to do these things. That’s the key. If you can do that, then the employees understand the benefit of doing it. What is the benefit of the employee at McDonald’s to be above and beyond their regular job? And more importantly, it’s probably a negative because if they do go out of there way to do something nice, “Well, that wasn’t in the manual.” So where’s the benefit when they could possibly lose their job for being nice? This isn’t about the customer service people doing better, this is about the CEO empowering the entire company with the permission to do better.

ClickZ: Brands and consumers will always define the lines between good and bad motivations in marketing differently. Has the notion of marketing for good evolved throughout your career, and how would you define it today?

Shankman: You’re not creating incredible things to reap the benefits of it, but you will reap the benefits as an added bonus. You’re doing great things because it’s the right thing to do. As you create these right things to do, the more people are going to want to hear about them, the more people are going to want to talk about them, the more people are going to want to share them. But you’re doing it because they’re beneficial to everyone, and that’s key.

ClickZ: How much of marketing is cutthroat at the core, and what can brands and marketers do to turn back that tide?

Shankman: The easiest way for marketers to realize that they have to change the tide is to simply look at how much money they’re spending on marketing versus their return compared to how much money they could spend by creating better customer service versus the return. I always use this example: Where’s the benefit of me going to a bar, approaching two hot women, and going, “You know what, you don’t know me but I’m awesome in bed.” The return on that is more than likely going to be a drink thrown in my face. I’ve done a lot of research on this, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The flip side of that is I’m sitting at the bar not even playing attention and a girl over there sees me, recognizes me, and turns to her best friend and says, “Holy shit, that’s Peter Shankman. I’ve heard incredible things about him, he’s amazing, he’s awesome, you’re both single, you should totally go and talk to him.” That’s word-of-mouth, that’s personalized belief.

The concept of marketing as we know it from PR used to be public relations. It’s changed to personal recommendations. The reason this has never been embraced by CEOs before is that CEOs have always said, “I have to come down on the bottom line. I don’t do things to be nice just to be nice.” Well, here’s the kicker: it so comes down to the bottom line. CEOs are starting to see that word-of-mouth return is actually better than marketing return. And this doesn’t mean there’s not going be a place for marketing, there’s always going to be a place for marketing. But the level of return on word-of-mouth and on customer service has increased 10,000-fold in the past 10 years for one simple reason: we are all carrying broadcast devices.

ClickZ: Do you transfer that to agencies and brands as well? Can they improve their bottom line by being nice?

Shankman: No question about it. When I ran my PR firm, The Geek Factory back in 2000, we had about 20 clients ranging from Napster to Juno. A lot of the dot-coms were ours. And once a month, we would show up at the office unannounced with pizza for lunch. We’d just go around to our clients’ office once a month, once every two months, and show up with pizza. We didn’t charge them for the pizza, we just wanted to talk about what was up, what was the latest, what were they working on. Companies have this vision of agencies where if I call them, they’re going to bill me for this. Marketing and PR firms are starting to act too much like law firms. If we go and we start talking to them and we don’t bill them, we just say hi, we’ll probably get more information from them. And if we get more information from them, that’s probably a better way to know how to pitch them. And if we pitch them better, we’re going to get more results, and everyone’s going to win. It cost us a couple of pizzas every couple of months. We became known as the pizza agency and it was awesome.

ClickZ: You argue that it doesn’t pay to be a jerk in business, so how do you wrap your head around the fact, whether it’s perceived or real, that so many successful businesses are led by jerks? Are you convinced that their days are numbered in this new era you describe in your book?

Shankman: Well, they really are. What I saw from all the stuff I did in the book research was that companies that are nicer are making more money. So what you’re starting to see is the douchebag CEOs, as I call them, are going away. It’s easier for the board to let them go because they simply can’t justify what they’re doing to the public. I think that the concept of being a jerk is definitely going away because there’s no room for it anymore.

ClickZ: What trends or sociological changes are driving this new era of collaboration and kindness in business, and where do you see this happening most?

Shankman: In terms of collaboration, I’m seeing CEOs are getting smarter. They used to live in these ivory castles where they’d take advice from two people. I’m seeing CEOs now walking the main floor. I’m seeing CEOs spending time on the factory floor, spending time with their customers. It’s so easy - what is it, 20 minutes out of your day? That’s just the part that kills me, is you have all these companies, “Oh, I don’t have the time.” Yes, you do, you really do.

ClickZ: Finally, what are the motivating factors that should convince marketers to change their cutthroat strategies and embrace a more altruistic and collaborative spirit?

Shankman: To get CEOs to understand this, again it comes back down to revenue. I’ve never met a CEO in my life who believes cool trumps revenue. If you can explain to these CEOs that there’s money to be made on this, they will listen. And more importantly, that there’s money to be saved. I think that the key starting point is to explain that here are the studies and show them that companies that are nicer are making more money. Here’s what they’re doing, it’s not costing a fortune. And by the way, you’re also saving money because you don’t have to retrain new employees. Employees aren’t going to quit, the employees are happier. And they get it, but it has to start with them understanding there’s money to be made here. As soon as they understand there’s money to be made, they will listen.

Mobile is the fastest growing, and most widely adopted media channel of all time. But it hasn’t always been perceived that way by agency suits, brand experts, and mass-media marketers. Just as brands were getting into a groove with digital, cellphones went from talk and text to pinch, snap, flick, and zoom. If the Internet revolutionized communications and media, mobile is fulfilling that promise by putting these tools and features into the hands of billions.

Today, mobile is so much more than a device or technology that makes this experience possible. It is a concept, a growing framework of always-connected things. Mobile increasingly drives changes in user experience and interfaces across the digital realm. While the industry at large pays lip service to the opportunities that mobile brings to the game, the channel remains woefully neglected and underserved.

Before the rise of smartphones, mobile marketing and advertising was way out on the fringes. That also holds true for the men and women who embraced mobile early. These trailblazers didn’t just cop out and check the box on mobile under their emerging or experimental budgets; they pushed toward mobility while most held back.

Here at ClickZ, we wonder where these Mobile Trailblazers are today. Was it worth the struggle? After going against the grain for so many years, are they finally beginning to see the world they always imagined? These are their stories about all things mobile.

Eric Bader isn’t afraid to say what’s on his mind, even if it’s something like, “Banners suck. They always have sucked and they always will suck.” His successful career in digital media and mobility shows little deference to myopic thinking. Even though in many ways he is still fixated on the same questions and challenges that sparked his journey into the land of brands and consumers more than two decades ago. The chief executive and founder of Mobilize says mobile is best when it is direct. For him, mobile has never been a be-all-end-all channel for marketing. Bader views mobile as a complementary tool that, when used effectively, can close the gap between interest and action - the pitch and the sale.

ClickZ: Walk me through your career in media, marketing, and advertising. What have you learned about consumers and brands along the way? When did mobile first spark your interest and how have you fostered that into a deep area of expertise?

Eric Bader: There’s a theme that runs through my career. My whole career has really been about the relationship between brands and consumers. I like that, I’m fascinated with that. I just think that that puzzle between brands and consumers is a fascinating puzzle and there’s a bazillion ways to solve it. It’s like any fun, compelling, addictive puzzle. There’s so many ways to do it, so many combinations.

For me, all the places that I’ve worked, from ad agencies to startups, every one of those has been an opportunity for me to figure out, along with brand clients, what new channels can do to improve those relationships and frankly help them sell more. I was at a web shop…but then I went to Ogilvy because the problems were bigger, the money under management was bigger, the brands had bigger problems. It was kind of stepping up to the big leagues. Then I went to a startup because I wanted to learn how to operate a business. Every step is really about that relationship and every stop has been the role of new media for me.

There are a million people who understand traditional media. There’s phenomenal television, and print and out-of-home people out there who are incredible practitioners and strategists. It wasn’t just, let me find a way to differentiate myself, but I just kept seeing clients stumbling over new media. And by the way, the same questions that major clients were asking in the early ’90s persist today.

I got exposed to mobile back when I was at Ogilvy in the early 2000s. My colleagues in Japan were doing some really clever programs for CPG clients and honestly it’s stuff that would still be excellent if it were done today. Mobile was already a viable and relevant channel for brands in Japan because devices, bandwidth, and consumer usage were way ahead of the West at the time. I was hooked, and I just knew it was a matter of time before we could use mobile to do things that weren’t previously possible in any other channel.

I had the benefit of a few years to think about and experiment with the way that mobile could make a difference for brands. There was a gap there between what was possible in Scandinavia and Japan, where they just had better connectivity and better devices, and back here we were still using the Motorola RAZR flip phone and nobody could get mobile Internet. I was inspired by great stuff that I saw in the early days and then when the American markets caught up, I was like, “Finally, it’s time. Now we have broadband, we have 3G services.” And in 2007, boom, finally we got the iPhone and now a huge number of people have smartphones. That made a really big difference.

I incorporated mobile wherever it was important in the years after that first exposure, and then in 2007, John Haidl, my partner, and I launched Brand In Hand to help clients navigate mobile planning and buying and business development. We just thought it was a really underserved area; clients had serious questions about it and they were holding back. They were holding back money, they were holding back the green light on programs that were being proposed to them because they just didn’t know how to navigate it. They didn’t know who the publishers were, they didn’t know who the vendors were, they didn’t get the technology, they couldn’t differentiate between “Is this a good one, is this a bad one?” Unless you help them navigate, it takes a long time for brands to get it.

ClickZ: What does mobile mean to you? Where does it (or where should it) sit in the general framework of media and brand marketing?

Bader: For me and for brand marketers, mobile devices are really just vessels. I believe that mobile is about consumers who are mobile. It’s not about phones. I want people to have the device that they love to use, and I want them to have a very powerful device, and I want them to have multiple devices, and I want them to use them a lot, but I don’t care what they have. What I care about is that consumers are mobile and that really matters to brands because it’s not just, “Oh, man we’ve got to catch up with them, we’re falling back.” Consumers are now reachable, and they’re now interested and they’re now active in places where they didn’t used to be. That’s the purely optimistic view.

There is a pessimistic view, which is like, “Holy crap, here’s 15 more things that we as brand managers and media managers have to chase and spend our money on. This is awful.” But I see it as pure opportunity. Mobile is an excellent complement to mass media’s reach and storytelling. I don’t think it’s a replacement for it. You still need mass media, you still need the reach, and you still need the storytelling that happens in other channels. Mobile is this great complement to it because it can be effective at managing a customer’s interest after that initial awareness, and then carrying it all the way through to a transaction.

What I care about is that lag time between when you or I see a television commercial and when we go take action on it. If we have a tablet in our lap on the sofa, and we have a mobile device in our hand because we’re already doing something else, and the second we see an ad that matters to you, or you’re in the market for something, or it piques your interest, or you see that iTunes commercial and you go, “Damn, what’s that song?” and you hit Shazam. “I love that song, I’m downloading it.” A transaction just happened. It used to be the lag was you saw something you liked and then you sort of made a mental note that said “OK, next time I go to the store or next time I’m near an auto dealership I’ll remember to stop in,” and 90 percent of the time you forget. I want to close that gap. What I don’t believe is that mobile is the answer to driving your interest in the first place, but it’s a great way to manage that interest once it’s piqued.

The two most important things to me are in contexts and at locations that no other brand can reach. Lots of people say context and location, that’s kind of a popular combo, but here’s why. Let’s take, on the way to the store, at the gym, commuting, or running through the airport. Those are all perfect contexts and they’re real. Those are all perfect contexts and locations for mobile. Historically those have been frustrating and nearly impossible for marketers to master. If you talk to a CPG marketer selling personal care, trying to reach people at the gym is impossible. There’s no media at the gym. The thing we know from research is that most people are using their device for music while they’re working out. They’re not necessarily checking the screen, but the thing that we absolutely know is, the first thing that people check when they’re done with their workout is social networks - they’re checking Twitter, they’re checking websites to get information, they’re checking the weather. And, boom, you’ve got a context all of a sudden where people are worrying about themselves, they’re concerned now what their hair looks like, what their skin looks like. Just to use the other example, if you’re running through an airport you’re not worrying about your hair, but you might be worrying about a rental car…that’s perfect for mobile.

ClickZ: What are the trends in mobile that you find most fascinating today, and what are the biggest challenges holding it back as a marketing and advertising channel?

Bader: I’m most fascinated with in-car mobility. I think there’s enormous opportunity for content, shopping, transactions, social sharing, on-demand, local marketing. The opportunity’s just going to get greater and greater as these functions all become embedded in the on-board computer and then it’s enabled by cellular or Wi-Fi service in the car. We’re seeing some of it today. It’s coming on slowly and the reason is there are multiple platforms. From a brand and a buying standpoint, each element has to be separately negotiated. It’s just so difficult. That was our reason five, six, seven years ago: “Why isn’t mobile bigger?” Because you’ve got to cut nine deals and you have to have creative and messaging that’s optimized for all these platforms. Frankly, there’s going to be a day when Android or iOS is going to become ubiquitous across the car models as the platform.

ClickZ: How can mobile match the interests of consumers and brands without degrading the experience?

Bader: I think many of the things that consumers love about having and using mobile devices and services are the things that are generated or underwritten by brands. For an example, nearly every check-in on Foursquare involves a business or a commercial venue. A huge amount of mobile entertainment is in that intersection between brands and consumers. And entire experiences such as holiday shopping and car buying, those are the things that consumers love to do the most on mobile. We’re seeing people participating with the Super Bowl advertising. The truth of what people really do is they shop their ass off, they tweet about commercials.

Whenever we check in on Foursquare, what are we doing? We’re advertising a restaurant or a concert. That’s totally commercial and that’s what I mean by being underwritten by brands. But that raises the standards for brands, and that means they can’t be cynical or careless. Brands don’t have that many opportunities to either satisfy or piss off consumers. You still need to entertain, you still have to offer satisfying opportunities, you have to save people time, and you have to connect like-minded people.

One thing that never changes is the need for brands to do great things. Not just routine, not just by-the-numbers programs. At some point after enough meaningless and uncreative and interruptive messages, consumers are going to vote with their thumbs and their wallets. And they’ll click even less than they do now, and bail out before completing transactions. Brands can’t be complacent and say, “Well, mobile’s awesome because it’s all commercial and we belong there.” Are you kidding me? You’ve got to blow people away. You’ve got to earn it. The state of mobile is not totally recognizing that there’s an amazing opportunity to entertain people, to tell stories that people want to hear, and be incredibly relevant to people when they’re in the market for something. And those happen to be some areas that are just really underdeveloped.

ClickZ: Why is mobile such a prevalent consumer channel, yet still largely elusive for brands? How are the dynamics different from digital media, and what should brands be thinking about as the industry grapples with how to leverage such an evolving and fast-changing opportunity in mobile?

Bader: It’s more than one thing happening at once. One thing is that ads are not very natural to mobile websites and applications. They’re not natural to this stuff and, by the way, we’re learning that ads aren’t natural to Facebook either. They’re really not. Good for them that they’re making some progress on improving that. Now, what is natural? Google is really natural. But running ads, cramming in ads is just unnatural to the mobile experience. You see them, they’re bolted on, and most of the time they don’t serve a benefit to the user in exchange for her attention or interest. There’s a lack of clear planning, and at the moment, there’s no real role for mobile. We hear this a lot. Brands want to see mobile on a media plan, or they want to reuse a campaign from another channel in order to save money, but mobile’s just not planned or executed to take advantage of what mobile offers. Most brands are still not using it the right way. They haven’t incorporated it in the role in which it’s actually going to deliver for them.

There’s this misunderstanding that mobile is a subset of online media. For my money, online when used well delivers effective reach; you can do immersive storytelling and you can do attention-worthy experiences, especially when it complements messages in another channel that the consumer is exposed to. But mobile doesn’t also do those same things and certainly doesn’t do it at scale.

Mobile can be the most effective way of reaching the consumer in contexts and locations that are hard to reach with other media, or other channels. It can be effective at things like generating a lead, converting a lead, driving sample and trial, generating names into a database, making local brands and services relevant. So the way I look at it is, if you take productive budgets away from digital to feed mobile programs, it dilutes both because there’s never enough money to adequately fund everything. Therefore, funding for mobile in my experience needs to come from other sources. I like taking underperforming dollars from other direct-response channels and also local-market efforts like newspapers.

I often look for the underperforming dollars…in email marketing, banners, search, direct mail - stuffing people’s mailboxes with dead trees. There is a lot of money that is still being used in those channels that is not performing. The redemption rates, the conversions, and everything are tailing way off. But brands still spend hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars after the points of diminishing return. They do it anyway because there’s no alternative. I see mobile as an alternative. Now, that’s a very direct-response statement. There is some role for brand building, and for exposure and for brand metrics in mobile, but to me mobile is incredibly hard working when it comes to direct.

ClickZ: What is your vision for mobile marketing? How should brands be thinking about it, and what special skills or talent are required to succeed in this space?

Bader: I can see richer ad units coming. Ones where you can tell better stories, there’s more functionality into whatever these ad units are going to look like and behave like. I think what that’s going to do is inspire more interesting, creative, and attractive ideas for marketers because the palette is going to be richer. It’s just going to be a better platform. I think branded applications are going to actually increase, but they’re also going to be challenged by startup brands that aren’t burdened with legacy business like brick-and-mortar that they need to nurture. I think more and more of the apps we’re going to use, you’re going to care about the brand. It’s going to be a brand relationship that matters. From the consumers’ standpoint, we consumers are going to have a very seamless mobile experience. It’s going to be a lot less of the tapping and constantly opening different apps, trying to make unrelated apps work with each other.

ClickZ: Finally, we would like to close each of these features in our series with a simple question - what makes you a mobile trailblazer?

Bader: I didn’t stop at display ads and apps. I knew immediately that brands needed to do some really productive other stuff like acquiring customers and managing relationships, distributing samples and trials, putting names in databases, and selling more products via mobile. My partners at Brand In Hand and elsewhere, and I, we delivered on very productive uses of mobile beyond just brand exposure media and I’m really proud of that. When I have to describe why Brand In Hand, for instance, was important to me in my career, my greatest pride was we helped marketers accomplish eight different business objectives, only one of which were paid media. I guess if that qualifies as being a trailblazer. I think the difference is there are a lot of people working on the problem of display advertising and brand advertising and apps in mobile. If I blazed any kind of a trail, it was the one that did help marketers have an opportunity to do some of those other super productive things. Again, that’s why I like working with brands and consumers. That’s at the top of the list for brands. Brands don’t say, “Help me find another way to put the same ad up on yet another place.” In the end, they’ve got to sell stuff and that’s primary.

Advertising revenue from mobile devices comprised 30 percent of Facebook’s total ad revenue in the Q1 2013, up from virtually nil one year ago. Monthly active use on mobile devices climbed to 751 million, marking a 54 percent increase from the year-ago period, as Facebook’s total monthly active user base grew to 1.11 billion.

Facebook’s ad products delivered $1.25 billion, or 85 percent, of the $1.46 billion it generated in revenue during the quarter while payments carried the remainder, lifting the company’s net income to $219 million. Total advertising revenue grew 43 percent year-over-year.

Facebook’s CFO David Ebersman says the growth in ad revenue was driven by the strong performance of news feed ads. “Ad impressions were up 39 percent and average price per ad was up 3 percent compared to last year,” he adds.

COO Sheryl Sandberg also highlighted the success of Facebook’s mobile app install ad product. “During the quarter, 3,800 developers used these ads to drive nearly 25 million downloads. Of the top 100 grossing apps from the iOS and Android in the last week of Q1, about 40 percent of them used our mobile app install ads,” she says. “In gaming, travel, e-commerce, and the financial service industry, the early indicators are that our cost per install are highly competitive.”

Indeed, mobile has quickly become the growth engine for Facebook as desktop ad revenue remained flat.

“I think we’re still in the really early days of what we’re doing and that’s particularly true in mobile,” Ebersman adds. “We have an ad format that works on mobile and we have identity so that we can put the right ads in front of the right people…The big opportunity that’s right in front of us is trying to make the mobile advertising products higher quality and more relevant over time.”

Facebook’s custom audience tool is also gaining traction with more than twice as many marketers using the feature from the previous quarter, including brands such as Hotels.com, Intuit, and Virgin America.

“Facebook is finding some success on mobile because its ad strategy does not focus just on big brands. A focus on big brands is why Apple has failed at mobile advertising,” notes Krishna Subramanian, CMO of Velti, a mobile marketing and ad technology provider.

“Mobile installs are absolutely through the roof. These installs have made Facebook one of the biggest mobile ad suppliers in the world and are really what’s driving mobile revenue,” Subramanian adds. “Cross-platform targeting remains the single biggest prize for Facebook’s mobile revenue. Facebook’s precise user profiles, combined with targeting users across devices and off Facebook, will be an absolute gold mine when they figure it out.”

Facebook’s costs are also skyrocketing as it maneuvers to increase the frequency with which users visit the site, the length of those visits, and the overall number of users it reaches on a daily or monthly basis. Overall, the company’s costs jumped 60 percent year-over-year to $1.08 billion.

Wall Street’s immediate reaction to Facebook’s latest quarter was relatively calm. Company stock remained flat in after-hours trading as Facebook narrowly beat the market’s expectations for the quarter.

Yahoo’s front-page news stream will begin displaying personalized ads alongside news articles and other features within the next 48 hours. Stream Ads, the new ad product, is already garnering interest from various advertisers and comes just a few months after Yahoo introduced the news stream on its home page.

Scott Burke, SVP of advertising and data platforms at Yahoo, says an industry trend and internal strategy are coupling to drive the new performance-based native advertisements.

“The industry trend is to evolve display advertising to be more consistent with the user experience,” he tells ClickZ. “Some folks call it native advertising, we’re calling it stream advertising…We all believe industry wide is the way to go.”

By leveraging the data it holds on its users and their personalized news streams, Yahoo believes it can provide a better experience for its users and higher performance for its advertisers. “Most other major publishers don’t have the level of science, investment, and platform engineering that we do,” Burke says.

Stream Ads will have a similar look and feel to the news articles that will share space with the ads, and Yahoo plans to improve those features after the new ad product goes to market based on early results.

“The principle that we have here is developing an ad unit and an ad format that shares the same information architecture with the content that it’s near,” says Burke. “Our ad format will be consistent with the content in the stream.”

“Since we launched our Yahoo news stream in February, our users have responded by visiting more, staying longer, and increasing their engagement with our content. Like with web search, users appreciate complementary, unobtrusive advertising, and we’re committed to delivering just that. Advertising can, and should, enhance content discovery in a seamless and effective manner,” CEO Marissa Mayer writes in a post announcing the new ad format. “The more our users spend time with Yahoo, the more relevant and personalized the content and advertising becomes. Stream Ads are the sponsored twin to our newsfeed articles and are every bit as personalized and engaging.”

Yahoo declined to disclose any numbers to help gauge how much the news stream is driving longer and more frequent visits to the home page, but Burke reiterates that all signs point upward. “We’re very confident we’re on the right track because we’re seeing upticks in every metric across the board in user engagement,” he says.

“We have really broad interest on this, and you’ll see that as soon as the ads start running,” adds Burke. “It won’t just be a few here and there. It’s going to be a broad turnout.”

Yahoo also introduced a new Billboard ad unit based on IAB standards that will dominate the home page above the fold. Yahoo sold a similar large-scale ad unit to brands in the past, but it has refined the product as it works to improve and design ad formats throughout Yahoo’s platform, Burke says.

“The purpose there is to help the brand buy big reach and make a splash on a new product,” he adds.

Finally, the new Stream Ads will also begin appearing in Yahoo’s mobile and tablet apps, giving brands a path to reach consumers across all three major platforms with a single ad buy.

This post is sponsored by the Mobile Enterprise 360 community and Citrix.

Does your business allow its employees to bring their own devices to work? If so, how does it mind the gap between the security of your company’s data and the efficiency gains that are to be had with a mobile-equipped workforce?

Mobile devices have a long history of push and pull between IT managers and users in the workplace. A world of closed-down architecture that used to be dominated by the likes of BlackBerry and Microsoft has given way to an always-connected world driven by consumers and the most popular digital services of any given day, week or month.

The scales continue to lean in favor of user experience as the most popular smartphones gain equal mindshare and use among general consumers and business executives. Lawyers and sales professionals may often be using the same devices as artists and soccer moms, but what they want and expect from their device varies greatly. In many cases, these consumer-centric expectations go directly against the grain of traditional IT thinking.

While enterprises, large and small, continue to revise their strategies and practices to confront this mobile reality, the rapid cycle of innovation in mobile (particularly on the consumer front) will keep them on their toes. Video conferencing is one of many popular services that will challenge mobility managers for the coming years, but also present them with an opportunity to stay ahead of the curve.

Any successful bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategy must not only be flexible enough to allow mobile video conferencing, but also encourage their use. Businesses need to embrace the inevitable and ongoing consumerization of mobility with secure, remotely managed apps that can deliver the services its employees use in their daily lives. Why fight the inevitable proliferation of video calling when your business can benefit by making it work now?

Intel, for example, is trying to give more of its employees access to audio and video conferencing capability through an “instant conferencing application” built for its massive BYOD program that reached more than 23,500 devices at the beginning of the year. When done right, mobile video conferencing will not only enable more consistent communication among internal teams, it also gives your employees a new channel to reach external prospects and customers.

Although video conferencing is still in the experimental phase, Intel is poised to see an even greater return on its investment in a large-scale BYOD program. The company said it gained 5 million hours of productivity and savings of about 57 minutes per employee workday last year with its BYOD program. How many hours of productivity and savings might your business gain if it included video conferencing capability in its BYOD program?