Madlabs gears up to offer innovative solutions

India is already a mobile first country when it comes to Net consumption and the next 100 mn Internet users are expected to be added from mobile. India would soon be the second largest country globally in smartphones shipments. In the past two years mobile ad spends in India has gone from a USD 26 million in 2013 to  USD 173 million in 2015 (E), that’s a 5X plus growth. However, it is still just 2% of overall media spent. Marketers now need to create marketing strategies which are mobile inclusive and mobile is not added to the plan as an afterthought.

Madhouse, the leading mobile marketing company in India, hence, is launching Madlabs, an innovation lab, that provides a start-up connect platform for innovative solutions and enables accelerated and sustainable commercialisation of innovation in mobile advertising ecosystem.

Talking about the concept of Madlabs, Milind Pathak, COO, Madhouse South Asia says, “We felt the need to mobilize the ecosystem and found that there is a significant lack of innovative advertising solutions in mobile space. We launched Madlabs with the mission to ‘accelerate commercialisation of innovation in mobile advertising’ and provide a platform to ‘connect’ to the start-up ecosystem. This we aim to do by introducing innovative solutions – whether incremental, breakthrough or transformation to leading brands and advertisers that help them grow their business over mobile and effectively engage with their consumers.”

As from advertising perspective, mobile is one of the more nascent ecosystems that marketers need to fully leverage to engage with their consumers. Madhouse is actively evangelizing and working with marketers to help make the transition from a mobile first to a mobile most world, and plans to extend it further with the launch of Madlabs. The new entity plans to educate the market on the communication opportunities mobile offers, and the way innovation can be leveraged. Pathak believes that though a lot is being done on mobile advertising front, a lot still needs to be done, “There are several innovations that we see in the sector. Most of them are in the ad formats as well as in cross media integration and targeting. Mobile technology is also continuously evolving and creating several engagement possibilities with consumers through mobile wallets, NFC AR etc. However, we still feel that it needs to evolve significantly specifically in advertising sector, when it comes to mobile analytics, measurement and content marketing to name a few.”

Madlabs intends to connect the start-ups that are innovating in these areas of mobile technology with the brands and advertisers and help them create commercially sustainable products along with an effective go-to-market strategy. Pathak is emphatic, “India has all the right ingredients to lead the innovation story on mobile. When we have such power, why not create a ‘made in India’ story? That is why we envisioned the platform of Madlabs to further catalyse the mobile advertising innovation agenda.”

Can mobile work well or all product categories? Or are certain categories set to gain more from innovation and research. Pathak elucidates, “We believe that the Madlabs platform will impact across client categories however there could be specific innovations that are relevant to some categories more than the other. Just to give you an example, innovations in cross media integration could significantly help CPG clients, location based innovation for CPG/Retail/ QSR client or in the IoT could be leveraged by automobile clients.”

It is an interesting concept. Mobile marketing, as is predicted, would gain momentum in near future. In that scenario services like the ones Madlabs plans to offer would not only be of great use to the marketers but also media agencies.

debarati(@)adgully.com

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