Marketing automation platform Mobile Bridge exits stealth, eyes U.S. market (exclusive)

The CEO of the mobile app marketing cloud company Mobile Bridge, Eyal Oster, says sending push messages down to app users is not enough to keep them engaged and moving toward making purchases.

Oster believes marketers need a way to quickly send many types of native content down to mobile users, including things like contextual offers, games that earn the user discounts, incentives to share offers with friends, polls, surveys and lots of other things. In fact Mobile Bridge offers its marketer customers about 60 different types of native assets to send to app users.

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The delivery of this marketing content is often triggered by geo-fences, which detect when an app user is coming near a brick and mortar store. Mobile Bridge also uses indoor iBeacons to detect mobile users.

Oster says the accuracy and consistency of the geofencing functions native in mobile operating systems was just not good enough for the marketers. So his company came up with its own solution for geolocating consumers.

But, as Oster points out, the location aspect of targeting content is only useful if the marketer understands the context in which messages and other content is delivered. So the platform pulls in lots of data to understand things like weather conditions and whether the user is walking or jogging, for instance.

If a user is jogging on a hot day, and he comes near a coffee shop, the coffee shop might send down a coupon for a free iced coffee to the runner’s mobile device.

Mobile Bridge came out of stealth mode at the MobileBeat conference Wednesday.

Oster tells VentureBeat that his company has so far taken $3.5 million in venture funding, including a recent $2 million investment from Ariel F. Lüdi, CEO of the e-commerce systems company Hybris (recently acquired by SAP for 1.5 billion).

Big in Europe

Amsterdam-based Mobile Bridge has been around only for about two years, but it’s already making waves in Europe. The company is already working with some very large brands there, and it has partnered with some large agencies and system integrators, some of which are white-labeling the Mobile Bridge platform to brick and mortar and e-commerce clients.

Part of the power of the Mobile Bridge Platform is it’s ability to integrate with, and work with, other platforms to deliver marketing content to multiple types of user devices.

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Oster says Mobile Bridge integrates with various CRM systems, point-of-sale systems, and e-commerce platforms. As an example, after you go into a store to redeem a coupon and are detected by in-store sensors, the Mobile Bridge platform connects with the retailer’s point of sale or CRM system to log the event or trigger delivery of more mobile content.

Mobile Bridge can share customer data with other platforms, and can trigger other platforms to send content down to a mobile user at a specific time, location or context. Conversely, the other system can trigger the Mobile Bridge platform to engage with the app user.

Mobile Bridge provides its customers with a user interface where they can easily and quickly create mobile marketing content with no programming skills required. The content is encrypted and sent to mobile devices in a native format.

Oster says the Mobile Bridge platform can be added to new or existing (iOS or Android) apps, and can be deployed within hours.

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