Advertising: Eye on Emerging Markets, Firm Invests in Start-Up

Eye on Emerging Markets, Firm Invests in Start-Up

AS the world awaited the next pope in March, Peter Bale, the vice president and general manager for digital at CNN International in London, wanted to know how Africans would react if the pope were from their continent.

Jana rewards users with free mobile airtime if they take a survey or perform other tasks.

Maurice Lévy, the chief of Publicis, will join the Jana board. He plans to use data from Jana to help marketers reach buyers.

Instead of commissioning telephone pollsters or gleaning insights from social media, Mr. Bale used a mobile platform called Jana, which rewards users with free airtime if they take a survey. Within days, Mr. Bale said, he surveyed 20,000 Africans in 11 countries on questions like whether an African pope would increase support for Catholicism on the continent (86 percent said yes) and whether the world was ready for an African pope (61 percent said yes).

“The spread of the mobile economy in Africa is so far and so huge you can reach not only the high end of African people, but you can reach many, many people there,” Mr. Bale said. Because CNN International receives a “very significant amount” of its digital traffic from its African consumers through their mobile devices, using a mobile survey platform made sense, he said.

CNN, however, is not the only organization that wants to connect with a growing mobile-savvy market. On Monday, the Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s largest advertising holding companies, will announce a $15 million investment in Jana.

The investment is the first by the company in a mobile technology start-up. As part of the investment, Maurice Lévy, the chief executive of Publicis, which is based in Paris, will join the board of directors at Jana. (In 2012, Publicis united with France Télécom-Orange and Iris Capital Management to create venture capital funds to invest in European companies.)

“Everyone is fighting very hard and trying to find solutions to get these next billion consumers, and we all know the next billion consumers will come from emerging markets,” Mr. Lévy said in an interview by phone. With brands including Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Procter & Gamble and Google having used Jana, gaining access to consumers in Africa and other emerging markets like India and Brazil is “not something which is just wishful thinking,” he said.

Nathan Eagle, the chief executive and a co-founder of Jana, said the majority of its clients were large global brands seeking to reach consumers in developing countries. Brands can reward consumers who register for Jana, which is based in Boston, with free mobile airtime after they view an ad or buy a product.

“We’re building up this massive profile of people who are eager to engage with different brands,” Mr. Eagle said. “Now we are presenting our clients with an alternative to billboards.”

Brands can also gain access to consumer data like age, sex and location, Mr. Eagle said. “We’re enabling them to be able to provide discounts off products in a nationwide campaign and for the first time get real insights into who is buying the products,” he said.

Mr. Eagle views the service as “economic empowerment” for consumers. Brands, Mr. Eagle said, “can either put more money into the pockets of people who own billboards or they can put that money into the pockets of people they are trying to reach.”

Mr. Lévy said he expected to focus his efforts on personal hygiene products, beverages and food, and detergent. Data from Jana will help marketers determine “how much toothpaste they are using, how much detergent they are using, the potential is the sky, there is no limit,” he said.

Todd Dagres, a partner and founder of Spark Capital, a venture capital firm that was an early investor in Jana and social media companies like Tumblr, Twitter and Foursquare, said the potential for growth in emerging markets piqued interest in the possibility of a Publicis investment.

“It became clear to us that it would be helpful to have a partner that had relationships to the advertisers and understood on a global basis advertising and research,” Mr. Dagres said.

Mobile phone penetration and advertising are expected to grow significantly in developing countries in the next few years. According to the research company eMarketer, 671 million people in the Middle East and Africa will use mobile phones by 2017, up from 526 million in 2013. Spending on digital advertising in the region is expected to reach $3.8 billion by 2017, up from $1.3 billion in 2013.

“It’s not surprising that companies are sensing tremendous opportunity in the Middle East and Africa,” said Clark Fredricksen, vice president for communications at eMarketer. “To get a foothold now in an early stage in a small market could mean a dramatic high growth for the next decade or more as that market becomes more mature.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 15, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Eye on Emerging Markets, Firm Invests in Start-Up.