Anne Frisbie is confident that five years from now we’re all going to laugh about the relative simplicity of the mobile advertising marketplace. It is after all, dominated by two huge companies. It is still in the nascent phases of creative development. And global brands are just starting to develop their expertise.

Not that the new VP & Managing Director, North America of InMobi doesn’t take her job seriously. Frisbie is experienced enough to know that there is still plenty of room to compete for mobile advertising in the expanding domestic and global market. Her company claims to be the world’s largest independent mobile ad network, and recently announced its official launch in the US market.  InMobi already maintains 2 billion US ad impressions monthly following its soft launch in January 2010, most of those for global publishers who have a US footprint. In addition to complete operations in India, Africa, and several Euro capitals, she will now position InMobi to compete with Google’s AdMob and iAd, as well as other independents including Millennial Media.

“We’ve worked with global brands, we’ve developed a lot of expertise with global operations and I think we have a clear advantage in terms of global scale,” Frisbie says. “In other global markets we’ve seen Google and Apple as a competitor and we’ve still operated a very strong business.”

In less than six months, InMobi has more than doubled from 7.5 billion to 16.7 billion available impressions monthly across Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe. It’s platform covers display and in-app ads, and will offer US advertisers the ability to reach 179 million consumers in over 108 countries through a single integrated buy.

Frisbie also believes InMobi’s analytics platform will give her and her team a strong competitive position. But mainly that “five years from now” perspective provides her with an understanding that the market is young.

“”Personally I think the US marketers are unprepared for how big the mobile marketplace will be,” she says. “We’re in the very early days and just starting to look at video, display, and search. We’re independent which is a decided advantage and focused on advertising. This will all become bigger than we expect.”

With that in mind InMobi also recently announced a $2 million world developer fund to encourage application developers to use InMobi for in-app advertising. Developers on Android, iPhone and iPad are eligible. Developers who sign up for the program and add InMobi via their SDKs will get a new revenue split. InMobi usually keeps 40% of gross advertising revenue, and 60% goes to the developer. But during this program developers get to keep 100% of the advertising revenue, and InMobi’s 40% comes out from the $2 million.

Frisbie joined InMobi in 2008 as Head of North America. She most recently served as Vice President of Category and Sales Intelligence at Yahoo! where she worked from 2003 to 2008, managing Yahoo’s most important categories that accounted for a majority of the company’s revenue. She has been working in the digital media industry for the past eleven years. She helped found an online shopping service in 1996 that was ultimately funded by CMP Media, and then she focused on local search in 1997 at Zip2 Corporation where she served as a Director of Publisher Development. Zip2 was acquired by AltaVista in 1998.

Mobile Marketer’s inaugural Mobile Women to Watch 2010 list celebrates smart women who are expected to make a difference in mobile advertising,marketing and media in 2010. These women now have the brush, oils and canvas to paint bold strokes in 2010. Anne Frisbie from InMobi has been interviewed about being selected as one of the Mobile Marketer’s Mobile Women to Watch for the year who, according to Mickey Alam Khan from Mobile Marketer, is poised to make more history  and write yet another chapter in mobile marketing’s book.

“In 2008, I almost decided to stay in PC Web business. I could not be happier about my decision to go into mobile, and I certainly would love more women to enter the field.”

What do you most like about your job?
The mobile industry could not be more
exciting right now.The pace of innovation is simply astounding.The excitement that I see from consumers about the mobile Web reminds me of the early PC Web and search days circa 1997. With that said, advertisers and publishers are smarter today than they were then about digital advertising, so adoption of mobile advertising is happening at an even faster pace and with a greater intelligence of being able to measure its eTectiveness. InMobi’s revenue has increased by more than 20 times since I began, and that is happening in a weak media year.

What’s the biggest challenge in your job?
One of the best things about InMobi is its global footprint. We are available in 24 countries, headquartered in India,with offices in Singapore, London, South Africa and Palo Alto, CA, and even more importantly, have thousands of clients who are located all around
the world. While this global footprint allows InMobi to service its clients around the clock, it presents work challenges with late night and early morning calls. Let’s just say that I have become quite proficient with the use of timezone calculators.

What is your work priority for 2010?
InMobi is just beginning to hire more people in the U.S., so hiring and building a team here is my top priority now and in 2010. InMobi has become the clear mobile advertising network leader in Asia and Africa, and we are looking to replicate this level of success around the globe.

What will it take to attract more women to mobile marketing?
Mobile Marketer’s Mobile Women to Watch is a great first step. I think it will help to get the word out. In 2008, I almost decided to stay in the PC Web business. I could not be happier about my decision to go into mobile, and I certainly would love more women to enter the field.

Your proudest achievement in mobile?
I am very proud of the strong, exclusive international partnerships that I have helped put into place with leading North
American publishers who have built up large mobile audiences including MocoSpace, Vuclip and Jumbuck.

Anne Frisbie has worked at Yahoo, AltaVista,Zip2 and Goldman Sachs. She is based in Palo Alto, CA.

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PALO ALTO, Calif. – Mobile advertising company InMobi has found good success in India, but now the company is increasingly turning its efforts toward the United States, seeing it as the market from which much of the world’s mobile Web content comes.

The Bangalore-based company provides a mobile ad network that helps its customers collect ad revenue through the traffic to their mobile Web sites. It’s a game that has been proven successful by giants such as Google and InMobi has spread through India providing such services.

Founded in 2007 by Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal, Amit K. Gupta and Mohit Saxena in Mumbai, the company provides services in 25 countries and works with businesses such as Reebok, Nokia, Peperonity, Samsung, Yamaha and Friendster.

Originally backed with seed funding from Indian investors, such as Mumbai Angels, the company is now fueled by U.S. firms. It raised $7.1 million in April 2008, led by Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures.

According to InMobi, its network has over 3 billion ad impressions a month and the company is pulling in approximately $1 million in revenue per month. Its numbers also suggest that the company works with more than 700 publishers of mobile Web content.

Out of India, InMobi has made a living focusing on the local market, but also markets in Bangladesh, Indonesia and South Africa.

As Anne Frisbie, InMobi’s head of North America, points out what the company really does for its customers is help them generate local advertising dollars for mobile sites that provide global content.

Which is why, for example, InMobi was able to sign a deal in August with a German-based Web 2.0 platform peperonity.com, which has 10 million users. According to the social networking site, which features site building, blogging, chat, photo albums and video, it is among the top-five mobile sites in South Africa and Indonesia and ranks with Facebook and YouTube worldwide.

Just last month, InMobi began working with MocoSpace, a Boston-based mobile social network that has over 6 million registered users and over 1 billion page views. InMobi will push MocoSpace’s mobile content across 10 countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

“We selected InMobi as our first choice for an ad network in these international markets because their focus provides a better overall user experience and increases our revenue,” Justin Siegel, chief executive officer of MocoSpace, said in a statement about the agreement with InMobi. “InMobi’s new data infrastructure offers outstanding ad response times that have exceeded our expectations and set a new bar.”

InMobi hopes MocoSpace is just the start of increased business from U.S.-based publishers of mobile Web content.

“U.S. publishers have large audiences in markets around the world, but they don’t have a sales team that can generate revenue for their audiences abroad,” said Frisbie, who works out of InMobi’s U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto. “We can help publishers here by generating more revenue for them.”

As Frisbie explains it, the mobile content may be global but the ads need to be relevant to the local market and InMobi insures that happens.

With most of InMobi’s competition based out of the United State, the company feels it has a leg up because of its international presence. “I think people really are looking for strong international partners,” said Frisbie. “The businesses in the U.S. know their business is becoming more international, but they need international partners to help them.”

As an example of the perfect U.S. client, Frisbie creates the scenario of U.S.-based mobile Web site that launches and then discovers that 30 percent of their viewers are in Asia. According to Frisbie, the first question that company is going to ask is “How do I make money from those viewers?” InMobi is the answer, she said.

InMobi anticipates that a large percentage of its future revenue is going to come to the United States, which is why the company, which also has offices in Mumbai and Singapore, decided to open an office in Silicon Valley at the start of the year.

“The U.S. is a very large market and has a lot of key advertisers and publishers,” Frisbie said. “We see an increasing importance in our company doing business in the U.S.”

InMobi’s leaders are no stranger to the U.S. market as many of them worked and lived in the United States before returning to India to start the company. Frisbie said they had no doubts that they could start the company from India and still have it be a global market. The company also has strong U.S. guidance from board member and investor Ram Shriram, founder of Sherpalo Ventures and former Amazon.com executive, as well as a founding board member of Google.

At the same time as InMobi is high on its U.S. business, the company continues to be excited by the growing mobile content consumption patterns in India.

In September, it released the results of a survey of Indian college-aged consumers that found that 57 percent of respondents browse the Internet on their mobile phones and close to one-third of them engage with the brands that advertise. This engagement is described by the survey as visiting the ad’s Web site (72.5 percent), calling the company (10 percent) or buying the product (17.5 percent).

The survey, which was conducted at an Indian Institutes of Technology School of Management, stated that results show that college-aged consumers are equally interested in almost all genres of mobile advertising, as long as the advertisements have something significant to offer and do not interfere with the mobile browsing experience. Welcome ads isolated by respondents include free coupons, free mobile games with embedded unobtrusive ads, money transfer services, free humorous clips and Bluetooth-based “alerts” for items on sale nearby.

With reports suggesting India is adding as many as 12 million mobile subscribers per month, InMobi’s excitement about the growing demand for its services is not a hard argument to swallow, as the company emphasizes.

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NEW YORK — Brands such as Yamaha and Reebok have tapped mobile ad network InMobi to target international customers in markets where mobile users outnumber PC users.

Anne Frisbie, Palo Alto-based head of North Americas at InMobi, shared campaign results at the digiday: Mobile conference yesterday at the W Hotel in New York. Typically the types of clients InMobi works with market to consumers via television spots or in-store kiosks, but now many are leveraging the mobile platform.

“There are five cell phones for every PC in Indonesia,” Ms. Frisbie said. “The marketing strategy is mobile-first or mobile-only in some countries.”

InMobi, the mobile ad network formerly known as mKhoj, has a strong user base in 24 countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East and is in the process of extending its reach in the Europe, especially Britain and Eastern Europe.

For the launch of the Yamaha FZ-16 motorcycle, InMobi used mobile advertisements to target males ages 18-35 in India. The mobile banner ads drove consumers to click to get more information about the motorcycle via a mobile microsite.

On the microsite, consumers were able to watch promotional videos that feature the bike. There were videos of consumers test-driving and talking about the motorcyle as well. The mobile video ads had a 10 percent complete-viewing rate, while the consumer-review videos were seen by 6 percent of consumers. Seven percent of consumers that clicked on the mobile ad ended up using the store locator to find a Yamaha store.The average click-through rate on the banner ads was 1.3 percent with a peak of 6.6 percent.

Cricket Nirvana, an Indian cricket news site, used InMobi to build its mobile Web site from the ground up. The cricket news provider then ran a mobile ad campaign in order to drive consumers to the site. Within one week of the campaign’s launch, the site saw a 72 percent lift in page views. Within three months of the campaign’s launch, the site saw 8 million page views. The banners achieved a 1.6 percent click-through rate overall. At its peak, the click-through rates were 3.6 percent.

For the Reebok promotion, a WAP site was created where users could download digital wallpapers of jerseys created for the Indian Premier League. Seventy thousand wallpapers were downloaded.Two different wallpaper styles were created. A wallpaper featuring of the jerseys of famous cricket players achieved a 53 percent download rate, while the other cricket-themed wallpaper achieved a 41 percent download rate.Fifteen percent of consumers used the store-locator feature.The campaign featured an SMS component where users could send cricket jerseys as gifts, with 2 percent of users sending them.

Ms. Frisbie said mobile devices are primarily used for entertainment purposes. High mobile phone penetration creates a hunger for content.

By working in a market that is primarily mobile, she said there is no hindrance of PC Web limitations such as having to be at home or in your office.

“What is making mobile popular is not the iPhone,” Ms. Frisbie said. “What is driving interest in mobile is its reach.”

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