AdMob East To Focus On Expanding Mobile Brand Advertising

Seeking closer ties with Madison Avenue, San Mateo, Calif.-based mobile ad network AdMob has opened a New York branch.

The AdMob East office will be led by ad sales veterans Adam Schneider and Robyn Borok, and will focus on expanding brand advertising on AdMob's mobile platform. Much of that effort will involve continuing to educate agencies about mobile marketing opportunities, according to Tony Nethercutt, AdMob's vice president of sales.

"We are spending a ton of time on education about mobile, what the possibilities are and best practices, and just trying to demystify it," he said. "People make it way too complicated. It's a lot like interactive, but with a few more subtleties about what you can do."

Started in 2006, AdMob now sells banner and text ads on more than 3,000 mobile Web sites from big-name marketers including Ford, Procter & Gamble, BlackBerry and Best Buy. The company says it is serving 2 billion impressions per month. With growing interest in mobile advertising, Nethercutt said the time had come for the company to have a physical presence in the ad industry's capital.

The larger agencies AdMob has worked with to date are GM Planworks, Avenue A|Razorfish, OgilvyInteractive, MEC Interaction and AKQA. "All of these agencies have groups they're starting and assigning mobile expertise to," Nethercutt said. "So we're talking with a lot of players in the [mobile] space, and expect those relationships to grow."

In the last few months especially, Nethercutt said he has seen agencies incorporate mobile into broader interactive media buys through media planning tools like aQuantive's Atlas and DoubleClick's MediaVisor. "It's definitely becoming more of a staple on interactive buys as advertisers take advantage of the things mobile can bring to the table," he said.

Making face time with the agencies on behalf of AdMob will be ad sales directors Schneider and Borok. Before joining AdMob, Schneider was a founding executive at mobile startup Cellfire, and previously was vice president of sales at online rewards network MyPoints.

Borok was previously advertising director for Child magazine and has also held ad sales-related positions at Primedia and iVillage.

During the last year, AdMob has grown from a dozen to 60 employees, including some working overseas, Nethercutt said.

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