Amobee, the California-based end-to-end mobile advertising solutions company, has recently being building a strong foothold in Asia. The mobile advertising company recently announced its partnership with Indonesian digital marketing agency, Merah Cipta Media (MCM) Group and also Vietnam-based online media services company, Ambient Digital.

Trevor Healy, who is CEO of Amobee, talks about the company’s strategy of valuing partnerships. He firmly states that Amobee helps brands turn customers into fans, saying, ”We are not in the marketing business, we are in the fan business. We help people create fans. Because when a brand can turn their customers into fans, then no matter what happens with the brand or what the brand does, there is always a level of forgiveness that they have. And also there is a level of performance that they can get which is really second to none. Price differentiation, acquisition, etc.”

When it comes to penetrating the Asian market, Trevor talks about go-to market partners and in-market partners. Ambient Digital is Amobee’s in-market partner into Vietnam. The largest online space network in Vietnam, Ambient Digital service customers such as Google and Coca-Cola. With 90 percent of the local population accessing the internet via mobile, Ambient Digital approached Amobee for their technology to reach out to more of the population. MCM, on the other hand, is more of a go-to market partner for Amobee. The digital marketing agency is leveraging on Amobee’s technologies to sell advertisements on their MindTalk platform. MCM will be dealing directly with advertisers to push their advertisements on MindTalk using Amobee’s technology, thus being a go-to market partner.

Trevor regards Singapore as a very important country of operations to acquire go-to markets for Amobee. ”You have to look at it in two ways. You have to look at it in terms of implementing the go-to market and acquiring the go-to market. You acquire the go-to market in Singapore. You sit with somebody in Singapore and have tea at the Peninsular Hotel and you walk out with $10 million dollars in a deal. It may be implemented in Indonesia, Vietnam or the Philippines, but it’s actually inked here in Singapore. And that’s the key thing that I think a lot of people don’t understand. They think of Asia and they automatically think of China. This is the buzz in the West Coast of America, people say what’s your Asian strategy? And they start talking about Beijing. They are forgetting to talk about the rest of Asia and I think that’s a huge oversight. Major mistake. You’ll acquire the go-to market here, you’ll implement it elsewhere. Singapore is very important,” says Trevor. He adds, “Singapore is the connective tissue of a lot of countries. When we look at Singapore we don’t think about Singapore as just this location here. We think about Singapore as the connective tissue to other parts of Asia.”

On his take on mobile advertising, Trevor had this to say, ”On mobile, people do things very quickly. I always tell people to think about it like this. It is either lean forward or lean back. When you are watching the television you lean back. When you interact with your mobile you lean forward. When you lean forward you are impatient. So the advertising mechanism has to be highly targeted, has to be relevant to you, has to be in a format that doesn’t really interrupt your experience and it is targeted to the extent that you really want to interact with it. And I think that is a key thing to think about when you are architecting campaigns.” However, many companies don’t seem to get mobile advertising. ”What has been surprising in the mobile advertising industry is that people have assumed that you can take the online expertise and knowledge or online people and just do it. And that hasn’t been the case. The same way that you couldn’t take Madison Avenue television executives and make them internet executives. So, it’s a new phenomenon and that’s good because that means the powers that feed on the online world, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, have a level playing field with the likes of us,” said Trevor.

Being a hot topic, Steve Wozniak’s comment on Singapore not being creative enough was also brought up during the lunch with Trevor. Trevor put it clearly that he disagreed with Wozniak, but there are things that could be done better. ”In terms of the risk taking profile, people have to be encouraged to fail. Failure is okay. I always tell people that running startup companies is not about success, it’s about minimizing failures. If you minimize more failures than the other guy, then you’ll probably win,” said Trevor. According to him, the Silicon Valley approach of investing in the best people, with the best product, with the biggest market opportunity is the winning philosophy. Everything is about the person, the founder. US venture capitals, such as Sequoia Capital, stick with the founder from Day One until the last day, be it an exit or closure of the company. The best venture capitals, according to Trevor, is one that invests in areas that they themselves are not comfortable in. ”Investing in venture is an out-of-body experience. You have got to lose all of the things that society told you is right and wrong and you have to take your rational brain away, put it away for a moment, and try to look at the future and see the realm of possibilities,” said Trevor.

Trevor has very high hopes for Asia. ”I’m getting the same feeling here that I got when I moved to California in 1995. Same feeling. I think the whole China and India explosion is just the beginning. And I think this market is going be a huge, long road ahead.” And his dream for the region? He says, ”The big catalyst changes are freeing up immigration, so an engineer from Mumbai can just come here easily and start writing code, making available venture capital without rules and restrictions, and the cultural change of respecting the ability to fail.” If that happens, and things keep growing, Trevor predicts there’ll be more companies coming out of Asian cities like Jakarta than from Mountain View.