Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kelly Passey, EVP of Business and Product Development at Access Development (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t doubt that it is of value to those small businesses. What I doubt is how it is a profitable model for you to cater to that segment, given the business model you described – that those merchants need to pay you for the value you are creating for them.

Kelly Passey: The way we look at it is that we already have 320,000 merchants under contract today, and they use us to drive traffic for sales through our promotional model. We have those merchants relationships already, and now they are asking us for additional services. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kelly Passey, EVP of Business and Product Development at Access Development (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The answer you gave me is interesting in itself. But what I was originally asking you about the entrepreneurship audience is more about a loyalty program. For example, where the consumer is the entrepreneur, and you either have a small business and there is a bank or large vendor catering to that small business or entrepreneurship audience and bringing value. Do you have any customer like that? Amex Small Business would be a good example. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kelly Passey, EVP of Business and Product Development at Access Development (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is your business model in this scenario? Who pays you?

Kelly Passey: This is not a public-facing model – these merchants are getting access to a private network of consumers, Allstate Motor Club members in this example. Allstate is endorsing these merchants to their customers. That kind of value is hard for merchants to come by. They have all kinds of advertising channels, but that kind of goodwill and endorsement is valuable. Because of that and because of their not being public, these merchants give us very rich and valuable offers. Our system-wide average is about a 36% discount, and many of those offers are always 50% off on deals. I can literally use them again and again and get a two=for-one at the local pizza or hamburger shop, or dry cleaning, or whatever my needs are. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kelly Passey, EVP of Business and Product Development at Access Development (Part 1)

Kelly Passey is the executive vice president of business and product development at Access Development, a company that manages one of America’s largest discount and rewards networks. Kelly has more than 20 years of experience as an executive, having worked for Fidelity Investments and Visa USA previously. In this interview he talks about Access’s incentive system, provides interesting use cases of how merchants and consumers benefit from this system, and discusses trends within the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Kelly, let’s familiarize our audience with both yourself and the company.

Kelly Passey: My name is Kelly Passey. I have been with Access Development for about eight years and for 20 years I have been in financial services related support – a lot around incentives, loyalty, rewards, etc. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Gil Dudkiewicz, CEO of StartApp (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like it is a fairly immature industry, both on the targeting and the tracking sides. What is happening is quite inaccurate.

Gil Dudkiewicz: It is an industry that is booming in an unbelievable way. When I started this company three years ago, I did presentations and looked at projections – usually when you look at forecasts, the reality is less than the forecast. Here the reality surpassed any of the projections in the marketplace by far in terms of how fast the mobile market would evolve. A lot of the basics of it didn’t evolve as fast. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Gil Dudkiewicz, CEO of StartApp (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There is a very large inventory of free games out there. You are moving from one part of the game to another, and there is an ad showing up in between. That is also very common, isn’t it?

Gil Dudkiewicz: Absolutely. That is something we are doing as well. Because then the user is putting his entire attention into it, it is in full screen, and it is very clear what the message is. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Gil Dudkiewicz, CEO of StartApp (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What other trends besides the call to action becoming more precise and location becoming a wider spread phenomenon do you see?

Gil Dudkiewicz: One of the trends we are seeing in mobile is unique new ad units that didn’t exist before on the PC. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dave Maquera, CEO of EdgeWave (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How can you understand all that? That requires a tremendous amount of intelligence in your system.

Dave Maquera: There are two ways. What the system allows is upload of corpus. If you have a specific set of language or a corpus that you know is acceptable, it can be loaded into the system. If you want to develop one – alongside of us you can do that – we provide a baseline. >>>