CommerceTel, an award-winning provider of proprietary mobile marketing technologies and solutions, hosted a teleconference yesterday for investors and interested parties, offering an overview of the company’s history and giving an update of the company’s recent progress.
CommerceTel President and CEO Dennis Becker led the teleconference, detailing a history of the company and highlighting key milestones for CommerceTel that have occurred since the company was founded in 2006, as well as highlights from when the company became publicly traded in the fall of 2010.
Becker reported that last month CommerceTel completed a $4.3 million bridge financing to accelerate investments in technology and sales infrastructure and to capture additional market share. In 2011, the company acquired txtstation, Mobivity, and BoomText, achieving significant topline growth by joining these three companies together. CommerceTel’s revenue growth has accelerated both organically and through these three recent acquisitions, and the company recently reported Q1 revenues in excess of $1 million. CommerceTel’s product user growth has increased from approximately 1,500 to more than 3,500 implementations in less than 12 months, and 2012 revenues for the company are projected to exceed 60% growth over 2011’s revenues. The company’s growing IP portfolio includes two published patents with a third pending.
CommerceTel’s SaaS solution is licensed by television, in-venue, and restaurant brands, offering SMS and MMS interaction capabilities for viewers, spectators, listeners, and customers. The company has had a rapid penetration rate in the restaurant industry, with national clients including Sonic, Chick-fil-A, KFC, and Jamba Juice. A large national QSR franchisee recently achieved a 275% ROI using CommerceTel’s technology with its special offers via text messaging to consumers who opted in to receive them.
CommerceTel’s primary focus, however, is offering mobile marketing services to small and medium-sized local businesses. Annual local advertising spending is projected to grow to $153.5 billion by 2015, and local digital advertising is expected to grow to $42.5 billion by 2015. According to Borrell Associates, 80% of SMBs planned to spend a portion of their annual marketing budgets on at least one form of mobile advertising during 2011, and 20% of these SMB budgets were expected to be devoted to mobile initiatives. CommerceTel’s licensing model for small/medium businesses involves monthly licensing fees for clients as well as additional usage fees in some instances. For its national brand clients, CommerceTel’s licensing model involves short-term or annual contracts, usage fees, and services.
Becker also discussed macro trends in this digital age indicating that mobile phone usage currently outnumbers every other source of information. There are currently around 5.2 billion mobile subscribers globally, contrasted with 3.1 billion TV viewers, 2.3 billion Internet users, 1.9 billion daily newspaper readers, and 1.5 billion computer users. Marketing forms like television, radio and print are declining, Becker said, both in effectiveness and frequency of use. Alternately, SMS response rates have been unprecedented. It is currently estimated that 95% of text messages received are read by the recipient and around 90% of text messages are read within six minutes of receipt of the message. With this staggering penetration capability for mobile marketing, as well as a younger generation coming up as leaders of industry, CommerceTel anticipates that mobile marketing and advertising will continue to increasingly overshadow all other marketing forms as user focus moves further and further away from “archaic forms of advertising,” Becker said.
Among historical highlights Becker cited for the company, CommerceTel initially broke through in the industry in 2006 with commercial deployments of its patented SaaS technology for NBC and NPR, enabling viewers and listeners to text in and interact with shows being broadcast live over those networks. Other historical highlights for the company include being nominated for Mobile Marketer of the Year in 2008 and being a Global Marketing Finalist, and also receiving the Sybase Innovator of the Year Award in 2009.
CommerceTel is an award-winning provider of proprietary mobile marketing technologies. The company is also the inventor of Mobivity, an enterprise-grade platform that empowers brands to engage mobile consumers through multiple channels. Mobivity is a cloud-based solution providing broad mobile communications and extensive CRM features and is the only system of its kind. Mobivity is integrated with multiple tier-one PSTN/IP carriers, micropayment processing facilities, and carrier premium SMS billing systems. CommerceTel’s customers include CNN, Disney, Sony Pictures, AT&T, Verizon, USA Network, many professional sports franchises, the Golf Channel, and NBC Universal.
For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.commercetel.com
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