Startup Houston

It’s rare to find someone in the advertising industry that appreciates the value of turning your customers into raving fans. Allison Gower is such a person.

Allison Gower is no stranger to startups. In 1998, she founded The Platform Group Gallery, a Houston based manufacturer of promotional packaging. Just make a cursory review of their website and you can feel the how the customer experience permeates every section of their site. Now, Gower has taken that same approach that has made The Platform Gallery one of Houston’s fastest growing companies (they were #77 on the 2007 Houston Business Journal’s Fast 100 list) to her newest startup, qtags.

The service is built using short-codes that allow users to send “quick tags” using their text messaging service to effectively bookmark an advertisement they see that display varying qtag words. This will then store the advertisement’s info in the users inbox for review at some later, and more convenient time. An example of this can be seen through the image below featuring a campaign in Boston for Lucida Healthcare Group.

“I came up with the idea soon after becoming a mother. I found that I consistently saw ads that were interesting to me but could not keep track or recall the important information about that ad when my day settled down. My thought was that if I could find a way to work with advertisers to develop a platform for bookmarking those ads, it would provide advertisers with a more concrete way to measure campaign ROI and make ad placement more effective,” says Gower.According to a 2006 study by the Shosteck Group, an international telecommunications consultancy providing comprehensive strategic market, competitive, and technology analyses for a broad range of clients in the global cellular and telecoms markets for over 23 years, “mobile advertising is a huge opportunity with the potential to generate in excess of $10 billion in annual revenues by 2010.” I personally have seen reports that have this market ranging anywhere from $1 billion and up. Why else do you think Google and Apple is so focused on the upcoming 700 MHz auction?Although qtag’s model is similar to that of another recently featured startup, WHAMtext, the models target different niche segments within the mobile advertising space. Both are based here in Houston but interestingly enough, are not seeing much traction in the Houston markets.“Most of our business today is coming from major markets outside of Houston, like Boston and Chicago. I think that Houston is slowly developing a stronger presence in advertising, but we still have a ways to go,” said Glower.