I spent yesterday afternoon at the latest Heroes of Mobile event organised by Helen Keegan. It consisted of a panel debate around mobile advertising, followed by tech demos from seven companies.
The debate, featuring freelance strategy and innovation consultant, James Cooper, Rube Huljev from Infobip, Stephen Jenkins from Millennial Media, and Amanda Singleton from Qustodian, debated the merits, or otherwise, of the banner ad, in the face of alternative forms of mobile advertising and messaging, as represented by some of the companies demonstrating their tech, including Qustodian and Avocarrott.
Qustodian is an opt-in advertising programme where the users choose the brand categories they are interested in hearing from. Avocarrott, despite having possibly the worst brand name I’ve ever heard – it comes from the idea of a carrot and stick combined with one of the founders’ love of avocados – was one of the more interesting demos.
The company deploys its tech in other people’s apps in order to serve the app user with relevant offers, based on their activity. So if it was in a Nike running app, for example, it might serve the user an offer for money off an energy drink when they had just logged the details of the run they had just completed. 
The other demos came from Locomizer – location based targeting; Adoreboard – measures how people feel about your brand, Klout meets Google Analytics; Hitmeup – a social networking app that tells you what’s happening near you; Pass-force – a b2b platform to manage mobile wallet content, which also looked very interesting; and LoopMe – a social advertising platform which we have covered previously on the site and in our print edition.
Needless to say, the panel debate didn’t manage to resolve the issue of whether mobile banners are good or evil, but it was an interesting discussion, and the variety of ideas on show in the tech demo served as a reminder of how much innovation there is out there, as startups continue to search for the big idea that no one else has so far thought of.
