Spyke’s goal: To become Africa’s leader in mobile performance marketing
Last week, our team was out and about, meeting partners and scouting for trends in England and South Africa. With the Appsworld shows in London and Cape Town as well as the Africom going on at the same time, we were ready for some serious travel and networking activity. It was an exhausting, but also very interesting week.
In Cape Town, our Managing Director Frank Maschmeier attended both Appsworld and AfricaCom. He came home with a clear message:
“Our goal is to be the leader in the mobile performance marketing space in Africa and especially South Africa.”
Frank met lots of players from the industry, and enjoyed catching up on industry trends – even though some of the contents, like fiberchannel, mobile network suppliers and the like, are not directly connected to our stream of business.
Frank was impressed to see the startup scene arising in South Africa as could be seen at AHUB conference, which was held as a startup/investor get-together in the AfricaCom framework. “Quite a startup scene has been established there”, Frank observed. Apparently, the ratio of failing startups is much higher than in Europe, as an insider told Frank. The biggest problem is seen in the general lack of knowledge and education. Another thing that always needs to be considered is that infrastructure can fail, as we experienced ourselves with power outages during business meetings.
Frank drew a very optimistic conclusion from the visit: “Without doubts the African markets are very interesting. There are lots of people with a hunger for mobile entertainment in general and apps specifically, some of them related to job offers or other community services.” The overall development, handsets getting affordable and mobile network infrastructure upgrades, means that the markets will gather a lot of relevance. “This is also reflected by the fact that Google and Facebook just opened offices in South Africa.”
Looking at this, now is the time for Spyke to repeat its previous success story in other parts of the world withing the South African and the broader African markets. Spyke Media also have reached an agreement with mobile expert Riccardo Vallaro, who will represent Spyke in South Africa. For this purpose, we founded Spyke Media Pty. Ltd. in South Africa two weeks ago.
Meanwhile, General Manager and Co-founder Heike Burr, accompanied by our newest member, Martin Rohrmoser, went off to London for last week’s second Appsworld exhibition. “Overall it was a great experience”, Martin summarized. There were lots of meetings with partners and clients, and the overall relevance of people in attendance was outstanding. Although the event may not have been quite as filled up as 2014’s, the overall opinion was that this proved to be a good opportunity to develop app marketing business and meet many relevant people. So Spyke is very likely to come back in 2016.
