Apogee Results’ Bill Leake On Scaling Mobile by, Vanessa Zamora on December 14, 2011

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During Pubcon Las Vegas 2011 recently re-branded internet marketing firm Apogee Results chief executive Bill Leake sat down with Pubcon video content producer Vanessa Zamora and revealed that people don't put enough thought into how mobile and local are intersecting at this time. Leake said he thinks that mobile is local and vice versa and that people are getting overly caught up in writing checks to advertising agencies to build a giant mobile site before they have done the preliminary work like claiming their Google Places listing, a Google service that provides a free mobile site that works well with both smart-phones and reaching people on a local level. People are spending six figures for Facebook applications when they haven't even figured out their Facebook corporate page, said Leake, so the large agencies are capitalizing on clients in the same way they did several years ago when over-priced flashy micro-sites that were Google invisible were being developed, often exhausting all media dollars leaving no money left to allocate toward getting the site found in the search engine results. A lot of agencies make their money on billable hours, failed artists in their creative department, said Leake, and the agencies are pushing mobile and social applications to bring in revenue. Clients need to get the bases covered, get some data and then figure out if it makes sense to write those checks, Leake revealed.

 

 

With regards to the growth in smart-phone usage, Leake said what is important to remember when optimizing a website for a mobile device is to remember that you are dealing with a lot less by way of screen real estate. It needs to be clear, contain fairly large text, and people are going to possibly be interacting with thumbs so it's important to ask how that is going to work with your website, and it also has to load very fast, Leake said. People have really high expectations in terms of speed, unrealistic in fact, so site owners need to compensate for that, according to Leake.

 

Moving forward over the next year, the online industry is talking about the integration of display and search - what we used to call banner ads and all the form factors and formats affiliated with that, Leake said. More people are buying things on a cost per impression (CPM) basis that are video ads and how that fits in with the re-targeting and re-marketing is the next multi-billion dollar market that Google is going to conquer, Leake concluded.

 

Watch Leake's full video interview from Pubcon Las Vegas 2011 now.