London-based agency Fetch has been spreading out across the globe with offices now in San Francisco, Berlin and a site in Hong Kong on the way. 

Since its launch in 2009 it has exclusively worked on mobile marketing and advertising, with a client base of companies that tend to already be steeped in mobile themselves, according to Guillaume Lelait, San Francisco-based vice president of North America at Fetch. Coming on board in year two, he has recently been seeing mobile come to forefront of many campaigns.

?In the past we were sometimes receiving the brief when the campaign was supposed to start in the next couple of days,? Mr. Lelait said, noting they frequently work in collaboration with other agencies. ?Mobile was just the afterthought.?

?We are getting more involved strategically,? he said. ?Sometimes we are the lead agency with companies that are really taking mobile seriously and putting mobile in the center of all concepts.? 

The independent agency currently employs 70 people with 45 in London, 20 in San Francisco and five in Berlin. It works across industries, but the company?s sweet spot are marketers who are already advanced in mobile; Fetch does not do a lot of mobile education for clients.

Hotels.com, eBay, Supercell, William Hill and BloomFM are among its notable client roster, along with even bigger players it cannot name. Founded by Declan Reddington and James Connelly, the agency wants to focus on developing campaigns that stretch mobile?s capabilities.

Novel creative
For eBay, Fetch created an app that enabled the audience to interact with a pantomime performance of the Cinderella story at London?s Charing Cross Theater. Everyone was equipped with an app installed on a tablet that allowed them to pick presents for each of the characters.

After the show, audience members received an email from eBay with links to the gifts they selected. There was also a youth cancer philanthropy component. 

Fetch has also been finding ways to enhance outdoor opportunity for mobile. In another campaign for eBay, it created NFC-enabled table wraps for cafes and bars in London through which consumers could access different eBay pages. 

Then for client Hotels.com, it built a Running with the Bulls game. The brand awareness effort complemented a Hotels.com Bull Run promotional video for the annual event in Spain.

Many clients, particularly retailers like eBay, are becoming very performance driven, noted Mr. Lelait. Thus the agency has introduced FetchMe, a service to quantify and analyze campaign data in real-time. 

FetchMe provides clients a dashboard to see results that help optimize the campaign on an ongoing basis. ?There are lots of decisions made by an account manager during the day,? said Mr. Lelait. 

Video is also rising in importance for mobile, with video-enhanced Twitter Cards now big tool on Fetch?s radar. ?There is really a need to have a good video to demonstrate their mobile product, and we?ve been pretty busy doing different things,? Mr. Lelait said.

Trending now
Last year was about getting millions of app installs for clients, said Mr. Lelait, who is witnessing a major shift. ?It is less about acquisition and more about, `how can I reengage users.??

?We are retargeting ? using the unit device identifier ? and coming up with a different message about a topic we know is of interest to them,? Mr. Lelait said. For Hotels.com, if someone was looking into Las Vegas, they would be presented other related travel information or offers.

?I think retargeting on mobile is going to be really hot this year,? said Mr. Lelait. ?It is already huge online. There are retargeted ads everywhere.? 

When doing this however, it is important to think about frequency caps, he cautioned. ?You don?t want to feel like there is always someone behind you and retargeting you.?

One of the primary challenges is around transparency of advertising placements. ?The way the industry buys advertising from ad networks on mobile is blind. You never really know where your ads are showing,? said Mr. Lelait.

?We are at a moment where brands want transparency because they want their money?s worth. We need a technological solution.?

The ads could be showing against something that is negative to the advertiser, he pointed out. ?It is still kind of the Wild West.?