Mobile technology presents a marketing conundrum: Personal devices gather valuable specifics about the viewer, including location and activity, but render web advertisements distorted and invasive. Malvern-based
TapCLIQ is changing all that.
After 14 years directing software development and strategic partnership at
SAP AG, founder and CEO Chirantan Bhatt created a "customer engagement platform" that responds to user-generated feedback in real time. The company recently graduated from
Project Liberty Digital Incubator and is
hiring data scientists, software engineers, and marketing and sales directors.
Bhatt says he’s always the first to try a new gadget, but finds "an abundance of annoying and unrelated advertisement constantly appearing on mobile applications." When his four-year-old daughter came to him with a file downloading over the game app she was playing Bhatt realized the problem was urgent.
"Advertising completely interrupts the user," says Bhatt. "[Mobile devices] can’t have ads like a web page."
According to a 2012 study by Azullo, 80 percent of smartphone users have already forgotten all the mobile ads they’ve seen in the past 6 months. Yet internationally, spending on mobile advertisement is predicted to reach $28 billion by 2016 (based on reports from International Data Corp.).
Big ad companies—including Google, Real Media 24/7 and Flurry—are still stuck on display ads, explains Bhatt. TapCLIQ, conversely, doesn't asks users to leave their app and offers related purchases and commenting options for their current activity. Now in private beta, the company has created 1 million interactions with over 20,000 mobile users.
"We have an intense focus on user experience," says Bhatt. "That means better ads, coming at the right time, with more relevance to the customer."
Source: Chirantan Bhatt, TapCLIQ
Writer: Dana Henry