Tomer Hen - Israel's 19-year-old Mobile Marketing Guru

‘My success is just having the courage to do things,’ says Tomer Hen, who employs 13 people (all older than himself) in his global consultancy.

 

“Do Israelis have cell phones?” Teens in Ohio asked this question of Tomer Hen, when he was visiting the United States as a junior ambassador during high school. They sure asked the right guy.

Tomer, now 19, is one of the world’s foremost experts in exploiting the marketing potential of mobile devices. His multimillion-dollar Tomer Hen Mobile Marketing Consulting grew out of playing around with his smartphone during 10th grade in Netanya.

He and his friends were using their phones to look up train schedules and find the nearest pizza shop — but unlike on the Internet, search results rarely came along with advertisements.

“I saw that more and more people were using their phones to access products and services, but there weren’t many ads on smartphones,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “This was an untapped market and the prices were extremely cheap.”

Tomer, already an experienced eBay trader at 13, used NIS 12,000 of his bar mitzvah gift money to join an affiliate network (an intermediary between publishers and merchants) and place mobile ads for insurance companies, dating sites and hotel booking sites.

“I lost a lot of money, but I learned a lot. I learned about the market in Azerbaijan, in Germany — all over the world,” he says. “Once I realized the right way to do it, what the audience is looking for, I started making money.”

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