About
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30 months and advertisers have over 2.6 Billion pages of inventory available per month in 160 countries [NB this goes out of date so quickly, but it's accurate as of May 2008].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, analyst and consultant who has been working in the mobile industry for ten years.
From 2000 to 2005, he helped launch and worked on Nokia’s TheFeature.com, the leading early online voice of the mobile internet. He oversaw its day-to-day editorial operations and staff of contributors, and also provided daily analysis and insight on the mobile industry. By the time TheFeature was shut down in June 2005, it was serving 2 million page views to 520,000 unique visitors per month.
The then joined Techdirt (now Floor64) as a senior analyst, where he covered mobile and other high-tech industries for clients of the company’s Corporate Intelligence service, including Sprint, Xohm, Dell, Verisign, McAfee and SAP. This involved working with the clients to shape custom research products based on their strategic needs and market areas of interest, then delivering daily news and market analysis, trendwatching and competitive intelligence.
Most recently, Carlo has been working as a freelance writer and consultant, delivering marketing collateral and internet content for companies like Nokia and Nortel, as well as marketing and content strategy consultancy services to several small organizations and startups. Throughout his career, his writing work has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, Business 2.0 magazine and on Dow Jones Newswires.
He is always available for work on interesting and challenging communications and consulting projects to help companies build their products and strategies and raise their brand and product awareness. Contact him at carlo at mobhappy dot com for more information on these services.
Carlo lives in Las Vegas, where he is currently working on an MBA with a concentration in marketing. His interests include travel and food, which you can share on his Flickr stream and Recession Recipes, a blog he writes with his wife.