Company Divests Its Messaging Aggregation Business to Exclusively Concentrate on the Burgeoning Mobile Advertising Market
BELLEVUE, Wash. – SinglePoint, the leading provider of mobile interactivity and SMS advertising services, announced that mobile and media industry veteran Gowri Shankar has been appointed president and CEO to lead the company as it greatly expands its focus on mobile advertising.
An early innovator in the mobile marketing industry, SinglePoint has built a successful business in interactive media, powering industry-leading SMS campaigns, including Deal or No Deal, MTV Movie Awards, the Oscars, Project Runway, the 2008 Olympics and the tremendously effective Obama for President text campaign. SinglePoint works with the world’s most prestigious media companies, including CBS, NBC Universal, Viacom and ABC/Disney. Over the past three years, SinglePoint has enabled over 80 percent of interactive TV transactions initiated by text messaging.
In 2009, SinglePoint expanded its portfolio to include SMS advertising services, creating a marketplace for publishers and advertisers to create content and purchase SMS inventory to serve advertisements. The SingleBrand Ad Marketplace is a Web-based transactional platform for delivering contextual mobile advertising, ranging from pure brand messages to interactive options, such as click-to-WAP, click-to-call and click-to-coupon, all dynamically inserted into the SMS message and targeted to the desired consumer demographic.
“Under Gowri’s leadership, SinglePoint has become a true industry leader with a premium network of publishers for SMS advertising inventory,” said Alec Andronikov, CEO, MoVoxx, Inc. “As a result, we have seen terrific engagement results for our brands and interactive agency clients’ campaigns and look forward to working closely with SinglePoint as a valued mobile inventory partner.”
Shankar joined SinglePoint in 2001, spearheading the company’s evolution from a mobile messaging infrastructure provider to the leading enabler of SMS marketing and advertising for the media and consumer packaged goods industries. With Shankar at the helm, SinglePoint’s marketing and advertising business expanded rapidly. At the close of 2009, SinglePoint sold its infrastructure business to Ericsson to focus solely on further developing its full suite of products and services to rapidly launch, refine and manage mobile advertising campaigns.
Prior to his new role, Shankar served as senior vice president, sales and business development, at SinglePoint and was a founding member of the Sprint PCS team. He led the creation of the first nationwide telesales and e-commerce distribution in the wireless industry, creating the foundation for Sprint’s industry-leading enterprise sales strategy. In addition to his work with Sprint, Shankar was general manager for eAssist, a CRM software company, where he developed eAssist’s international strategy and was responsible for the organization’s expansion into nine European countries.
“As we are witnessing with the overwhelming success of the Haiti SMS donations campaign, it is clear that there is no more effective medium than SMS to reach hundreds of millions of people and prompt them to take action,” observed Shankar. “The mobile marketing industry is at an inflection point where SMS evolves to be the preferred advertising platform driven by its unique ability to instantly reach an audience with high rates of effectiveness. It’s an exciting time for our industry, and I’m thrilled to lead SinglePoint as we define and expand the category of SMS advertising.”
About SinglePoint™
SinglePoint enables brands, agencies and publishers to connect with upwards of 300 million wireless subscribers. SinglePoint’s full suite of products and services enables publishers to monetize their mobile messaging traffic and advertisers to access premium inventory to rapidly launch mobile advertising campaigns. SinglePoint works in partnership with entertainment, media companies, brand managers, advertising agencies and mobile networks. Current publisher partners include NBC Universal (Bravo, Oxygen, SyFy, CNBC, MSNBC, Telemundo, USA Network), ABC/Disney, Viacom and CBS Corp. For more information, visit www.singlepoint.com.
