Nihal Mehta

Nihal Mehta, CEO, Ipsh!

One of NAMME’s newest Board Members injects the organization with most advanced skills from the front lines of New Media and digital marketing.

But friends call him "the Indian Russell Simmons."

Nihal Mehta’s business ventures aren’t quite on a par with the millionaire hip-hop mogul, but give him time. At age 28, he’s already heading up his second successful enterprise, with the likes of Warner Bros., AT&T and HBO as clients.

Your kids probably don’t know the company by name, but if they’re into text-messaging and entertainment, ipsh probably knows them. The wireless marketing and technology company has its finger on the pulse of youth culture, and advertisers who want their eyes, ears and dollars are flocking to this hip young marketer in order to reach them.

Mehta’s six-year-old firm revolutionized the viral mobile-marketing business, and that industry considers him a pioneer. He recently made his fourth appearance at the Mecca of the wireless development business, the AD-Tech conference in San Francisco, to tell advertisers how and why they need to incorporate mobile marketing into their overall marketing mix.

As you probably know, mobile marketing involves the use of cell phones and other wireless technology to spread information about products and services. In other words, it’s a way to send commercials in the form of a text-message. ipsh! raised the practice to a new level by creating a database that allows companies to stay in regular contact with the biggest users of text-messagers—young people.

Ipsh! first used the technology to enable event planners to selectively summon individuals based upon their preferences, location, and area code--in other words, to reach the cool kids. It quickly achieved cult status as an effective marketing tool to invite them to special events occurring after the official closing of bars, nightclubs and concert halls.

Major entertainment companies were the first to recognize the company’s potential to gain connect them with the 12-to-30 year-olds who make up 80 percent of all text-messengers in the United States. And in 2003, ipsh!net devised a promotion that demonstrated the untapped power of wireless to influence the market. The company teamed up with Universal Records.

The idea was to get a video by rap superstar Nelly into frequent rotation on Black Entertainment Televisions’s "106 & Park" music show. Ipsh!.net, sent messages to all of the cell-phone users who had been prompted on Nelly’s website to enter their phone numbers. Almost 70 percent of those fans, about 30 thousand people, called the short-messaging-service--or SMS--number sent to them to hear a recorded message from Nelly, asking them to press "one" on their phone to vote for his video. Almost 68 percent of them did just that, propelling the video up the charts.

Before he joined NAMME’s Board of Directors, Mehta was selected as a New Media Catalyst Award Winner at the Annual Awards Banquet, "A Celebration of Diversity," on April 27, 2006 in Seattle, Wash. View his acceptance speech at www.namme.org/programs/awards.