Mobhappy is a collaborative effort of Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino. Sitting on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Russell and Carlo bring a unique perspective to their analysis of the mobile telecoms industry.
Russell Buckley is a leading practitioner, speaker and commentator on mobile marketing.
He has spent 15 years in marketing, working with some of the world’s largest brands such as Coca-Cola, Diageo, BT, Texaco and Mars.
In 2000 he helped found ZagMe, as Marketing Director of this VC funded start-up. ZagMe was recently described as one of the “Grand-Daddy’s of mobile marketing” and they were certainly one of the first high profile companies in the sector. ZagMe launched a location based advertising channel in Lakeside and Bluewater shopping malls, where they sent direct marketing messages via SMS (text messages) from retailers in the malls to an opt-in consumer base of shoppers in the malls on that day.
The service was very successful, signed up 85,000 consumers and 150 retailers. And it allowed Russell to get first hand, practical experience of the wireless channel through the 1,500 campaigns they ran. This is still a pretty impressive number, even today.
Sadly, ZagMe failed to survive in the new investment climate post 9/11 and in retrospect, it entered Location Based Marketing far too early. Russell’s free White Paper (published May 2004 and revised in 2007) recounts the main lessons of both the business model and the marketing campaigns.
After a period of consulting, Russell started AdMob in Europe and was actually the first employee in the world. AdMob is going from strength to strength, having served over 27 billion ads in its first 30 months and advertisers have over 2.6 Billion pages of inventory available per month in 160 countries [NB this goes out of date so quickly, but it's accurate as of May 2008].
AdMob is an advertising network that serves ads on partners’ websites when they are viewed with a mobile phone. This has allowed thousands of publishers to start generating revenues from their mobile websites, often for the first time.
Russell is also Chair of the Mobile Marketing Association for EMEA this year (2008/9) and is looking forward to helping the mobile marketing industry achieve its potential from within the industry’s premier organisation.
He lives in Munich, supposedly as the skiing and beer are better than in his native London.
Carlo Longino is an experienced writer and analyst who has spent several years covering the mobile industry. Most recently, he was an analyst for Techdirt Corporate Intelligence, and prior to that he was the executive editor of TheFeature.com, where he provided daily insight and analysis of the mobile industry as well as managed the staff of contributors. He joined TheFeature at its launch in 2000 and continued with it until it was shut down in June 2005. His previous experience includes reporting for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires as well as freelance writing and corporate marketing work for Nokia. Carlo lives in Las Vegas, and can be reached with comments, questions, large sums of cash and freelance inquiries at carlo at mobhappy dot com.
