Alec Andronikov: Revolutionizing Mobile Advertising

>> Vince Thompson: Hi welcome to Dog and Pony. I'm Vince Thompson. There's a whole industry popping up around advertising and mobile devices. One of the companies, MoVoxx, is betting on the text messaging market, SMS, and advertising within that space. Today MoVoxx's CEO, Alec Andronikov, is with us here. So a message is delivered to me on my mobile device, your ads will ride along?

>> Alec Andronikov: That is correct, so you're not sending out for advertising ever. You're sending out for whatever content you're interested in. Whether you are an 18 year old male sending out for basketball alerts or you're a 45 year old male sending out for business alerts, we push you an ad on the bottom off of whatever you send out for.

>> Vince Thompson: So the ads really help subsidize the content?

>> Alec Andronikov: That is correct, so for the user it's a free service.

>> Vince Thompson: Now if I'm a marketer, should I be producing content for the phone?

>> Alec Andronikov: Not at all. I mean you as a marketer; your job is to essentially get out there to users and to be able to do three things. One is to be ensured that you're reaching a lot of people, two -making sure you're targeting people so I want males 18 to 34 living in Manhattan. We're able to get that for them. And number three - make sure we're not spammers as a brand; because that's the last thing you want to do.

>> Vince Thompson: How important is mobile marketing?

>> Alec Andronikov: Very important, the value of reaching consumer on the go - there's a huge value to that. I mean event of the day, if you are trying to allocate digital media dollars in saying, how do I know how well this medium will perform? Mobile is one of the few mediums out there where you know exactly the ROI on your marketing spent, because us as MoVoxx, we can track things like number of impressions, number of click throughs, number of click to calls, whatever interaction we engage or use; or we can track them all the way to the very end, which is a lot of times, point of sale.

>> Vince Thompson: Alec, what's the hardest part about this business?

>> Alec Andronikov: It's tough to get a lot of people to really understand digital is kind of the way to go. I mean there are certain companies out there such as JAMM shifting over a third of their budget into digital advertising, which is great but still there are a lot of brands and agencies out there that are still very, very much of an old school mentality.

>> Vince Thompson: So what are the most important things for you to do in the next 90 days?

>> Alec Andronikov: Hiring is what makes me toss and turn at night. I think hiring, especially for a young startup company is the most important thing. And one needs to be very, very careful because on one end you have money, there is venture capital money but at the same time you want to make sure you're very, very frugal. And so it's very tough to attract top talent without having a lot of money, or trying to preserve that cash. And so it's trying to attract the top talent both on the advertiser's side, the publisher's side, and the discology side.

>> Vince Thompson: When have you failed and what have you learned?

>> Alec Andronikov: Failed a lot, failed a lot and learned a lot. I mean event of the day, when you fail it's the best experiences because if you succeed all the time and most people don't, you don't learn anything from it. One of my biggest lessons in this whole process has been how to be a good chameleon, and how to be a good bull, because you have to be both. A chameleon being you have to adapt to a situation, like a chameleon turns yellow in the desert and brown against the stone; because you just have to do that right - to adapt to certain changes. But sometimes you have to be a bull, when you figure out the direction that you want your company to take, you have to execute it and go driving forward.

>> Vince Thompson: So there are people in the audience that are thinking about starting a business and they might be very strong in business development but may not understand all of the other functions. As an entrepreneur what advice can you give them?

>> Alec Andronikov: It's challenging. I used to be in investment banking back in the days, and so leaving the Big Apple to come to San Francisco, leaving a salary to come to a place with no salary is a very, very challenging thing. It's probably the best lesson you could ever learn, and if you love what you do you never have to work a day in your life.

>> Vince Thompson: Alec Andronikov, thanks so much for being here! As always if you have questions, ideas, if you'd like to tell us about a guest please do so. You can send us an email - info at dog and pony dot com. I'm Vince Thompson, thanks so much for watching! music