There’s an interesting interview at StreetFightMag with Loren Hillberg, who recently took the helm as General Manager at Thinknear.
The interview, conducted by the magazine’s senior editor Noah Davis, suggests that in addition to the growth of local mobile, consolidation is ahead in the mobile advertising industry.
Thinknear, of course, is a major player with a fine-tuned sense of the marketplace. Founded in 2010 by Telenav, the parent company and one of the pioneers of mobile location services, Thinknear is at the crossroads of how consumers today interact with mobile.
What does Hillberg see in the near future?
“It’s a really exciting and still quite frankly new and young category,” Hillberg says. “It has some historical elements that go way back — like the wanted ad in the local circular — but what’s happening in mobile and where different companies are trying to enter the space and deliver new technologies make it wide open. I think it will ultimately be exciting from the consumer perspective. I think they will be better served by the kinds of information that they are getting.”
When Davis asks Hillberg about “the rampant amounts of “dirty data” flowing through the mobile advertising industry,” Hillberg notes that he expects improvement in this area.
“I would certainly say that not everyone has gotten there. Our Location Score service solution is an initiative that shows that the industry as a whole has caught up,” argues Hillberg. “I do believe from a pure technology perspective, people will continue to get better in that area. That’s a good thing for clients. We believe that because we started there first and because we work on it in a continuous way, we probably always will have a better solution than our competitors. If you go back a year and a half, we thought we were 50 percent better than our competitors. That’s a lot tighter margin today.”
There are many companies — both established and startup — digging in this field. Is consolidation inevitable?
“Given how early we are in the development of this space and the scale of it as a whole, there is no doubt that there will be consolidations occurring,” notes Hillberg. “But they will be occurring at least as much from a strategic perspective as it is from a scale perspective. I do think there will be a couple winners on the mobile side who will have a chance to be really scaled up entities that deliver value long-term. I’d have a hard time picking those people today. I’d like to think that Thinknear, particularly with our Telanav parent and the different technologies we can bring to bear, are giving ourselves a really good opportunity to be one of those winners.”
The whole interview is worth a look. Check it out here.
