Tomás Martins, Head of Sales at MOBIPIUM – Carrier Billing – describes how the company presents to the market, how it differentiates from the competition and how COVID has changed their business.
Who are you and what does your company do?
My name is Tomás Capela Martins and I’m the Head of Sales at MOBIPIUM – Carrier Billing. MOBIPIUM is one of the first nomad digital agencies in the world, our founders started this journey while they were traveling across the globe! With the company’s growth, we had to settle on our headquarters, we are based in Lisbon, Portugal.
Almost 10 years have passed since MOBIPIUM’s foundation, we have grown and expand to different areas such as our own DSP – Traffic Nomads – which was developed internally by our media buyers and our IT department. We also have our E-Commerce department and an agency specialized in transforming Portuguese brands by helping them to sell more online.
Our core business, and as a Mobile Performance Agency our main goal is to acquire the best users for our partners. We always strive to keep up with the ever-changing digital world, focusing on different verticals, types of traffic, payment methods or new interfaces.
What Verticals are you in?
Currently we focus on Carrier Billing services (mVAS), Dating and Lead Gen – for now. We are always testing new opportunities but these three are the ones where we can guarantee premium and steady results.
By focusing on different verticals, we can offer a wide spectrum of knowledge and multidisciplinary strategies that always surprise our clients and partners.
What Markets are you in?
Specifically focusing on Carrier Billing, we have tested more than 120 geos last year! We are delighted to test new geos and new segments, always looking forward to finding new opportunities.
Our focus relies on the opportunities that our clients want to explore, we focus more on Tier 2 and 3 countries since it’s where Carrier Billing has most expression. Most of these users want to be billed through their mobile phones and it’s a market where there’s always a big demand for digital services.
Our top markets are African countries such as South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria or Kenya; MENA region with United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia on the top; LATAM with Brazil, Peru or Chile and of course South East Asia, where Thailand represents a big part of the conversions we deliver.
How do you differentiate from your competitors?
I will try to be brief here, but on my view there are at least 5 different pillars:
- Media Buying: We have two types of Media Buyers: Our own department of Internal Media Buyers, the masters of creativity and optimization as we like to say, we offer dedicated campaign managers for each geo, focused on finding the best funnels for each offer, guaranteeing not only conversions but quality conversions, with the lowest risk in the market. We also have our External Media Buyers, partners who do media buying and run offers with us for more than 2 years with proven quality delivered and no misleading promotions. Then we also have our Affiliates department, where we had more than 2000 partners converting in 2021!
- Quality and Quantity: We know there aren’t many Mobile Performance Agencies able to deliver the volumes and daily conversions that we can. Moreover, we know that we can deliver quality with the volumes. For example, last year we delivered more than 7.8 million conversions, with more than 5000 offers tested.
- Proven Experience: By being in the market for almost 10 years, we naturally developed a sense of what works in each geo, we have also been able to develop a wide list of sources/publishers we can trust and those we can’t. Our modus operandi it’s well established, and we always like to advise our partners on what works better on each country or segment.
- Communication Strategy: Clear and transparent is how we like to be. We share the same boat with our partners, if they win we win, if they lose, we lose. We want durable and long-term partnerships with all our stakeholders, we like to align and design strategies side by side with each of them. You can always follow us on our LinkedIn and follow up on every new opportunity, get to know our community, check our top countries and much more! Stay tuned at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mobipium
- Advertisers Platform: Over the last year we have delivered and developing a self-service CPA Platform to give our clients the freedom to create and manage their own campaigns, send direct messages to any source or publisher, analyze their offers’ performance against competition and so on! This doesn’t mean they will stop having a dedicated account manager, it means they have more freedom and more visibility on what’s going on each campaign.
Fraudulent conversions. What action has your business taken to maintain / improve consumer / partner trust?
We know how tricky the market we work can be, it’s a day-to-day headache try to control every single conversion or promotion our partners deliver. Luckily with the help of our IT Department we have been able to develop some internal tools that help us to understand the types of promotions that are being made by our Affiliates. Moreover, with our experience we know which sources can lead to more or less risky.
We keep fighting hard to improve on this segment, although, I’m pretty sure that we are on the top of the edge when it comes to the low numbers of fraudulent conversions delivered.
To what extent has the pandemic affected your customer’s behaviour and have you been able to explore new opportunities as a result?
I think it’s a general opinion when I say that Covid-19 has changed the way we look at digital services. In some cases, we saw an increase on users’ engagement, on others we observed a shift of interest between areas. Our main challenge was to adapt to the different audiences that have emerged, we trusted on our experience and know-how to reach these new interests, these new users.
2020 was a difficult year, but we closed 2021 as one of the best years since MOBIPIUM’s foundation. It was a very challenging year but, in the end, we were able to surpass all difficulties. In terms of users, I think that now there’s a higher intension of consuming digital services, the quality of the services delivered have been increasing and this supports an idea of confidence, clarity and increase in demand.
Your words of wisdom: On a more personal level, what is the most inspiring piece of advice that has seen you through a life in business to this day?
Well, I will try to explain my point of view without making it look like a cliché. Resilience, Creativity and test everything. This is my motto on my professional life. First, we work on a market with infinite possibilities so we should never throw our towel away, it might not be now, but if something is not working it will in the future. It always depends on the time we spent with it, on the creative strategies that we apply and on the number of tests we make. This is the beauty of our market, there’s always something new to be tested, something new to discuss. On the other hand, this is also a problem because then we don’t have time to do it all as we wanted and when we wanted, a good problem I would say.
