Mobile ad outfit Fetch is staring down its first $100 million year

$100 million.

That’s what London-based Fetch, a mobile ad marketing outfit with 70 employees, will take in this year. An astonishing feat for a company that bootstrapped itself and launched in 2009 with nothing more than a vision of where the mobile ad landscape was heading and what it intended to do about it.

Fetch, it seems, is prescient.

“We stay close to the tech market,” Fetch’s chief executive and co-founder James Connelly told VentureBeat as he drove in his car through the streets of London Friday evening on his way to meet his fiancée for a drink.

“We’ve got the right technology, the right people, and the right clients,” Connelly said.

The $100 million nearly doubles 2013’s more than $50 million in ad-based revenue. Fetch has attained these astonishing figures through a steadfast campaign of building a killer ad-targeting platform that has garnered serious attention in the British and American press and building, from scratch, an enviable client base that includes eBay, the Finish gaming company Supercell, StubHub, and Hotels.com.

“The key thing to remember is we are a mobile ad agency,” the good natured Brit said.

A seemingly effective one.

Fetch is aggressively expanding its North American presence and currently has twenty employees working out of their newly opened San Francisco office. Fetch is also one of Europe’s most awarded mobile ad companies, Connelly said, and the accolades on the company’s site seem to bear him out.

Building out and dominating the U.S. is also key for Fetch. The company’s eBay Christmas mobile ad campaign drew serious attention. Creative content and a vibrant exchange of vision and ideas among the Fetch executives is paying dividends.

Just look at the numbers: $100 million.

The mobile ad space and its incessant morphing with 500 different players occupying varying degrees of efficacy and purpose meant that it totaled over $17 billion last year. That tally is expected is expected to surpass $30 billion by the end of 2014, according to eMarketer. Google is the mobile ad leader, followed by Facebook, which had no mobile ad revenue in 2011.

Twitter and Linkedin are also standing strong in the mobile ad space, analysts say.

Fetch, in its own words:

“Why does mobile engage more people around the world every day than any other consumer device? These are the three reasons consumer reach for their mobile devices first to make their lives more fun, functional, and productive. Marketers need to deeply understand how these behaviors shape specific mobile campaign strategies if their brands are going to keep pace in today’s always on, always on-the-go consumer lifestyle.

Fetch understands that mobile is not just the Internet in your pocket.

Fetch provides our clients with a team of award winning strategists and a singular focus on leveraging usage behavior to engage consumers on mobile devices around the corner or around the world effectively. Our proprietary, customized software reports the effects of specific campaigns delivered in today’s multi-handset, multi-provider universe.”

Fetch’s mobile campaigns are live in 72 countries. Rich, multimedia content directed by the British outfit is taking the mobile ad experience to the next level, Connelly said. Fetch sponsored a pop-up shop for eBay in London and helped the online marketplace giants develop and app that soon went virtual. It replicated the success for the huge fashion show in Milan.

“We are helping technology businesses find their mobile customers,” Connelly said.