Meet The 21 Most Powerful Women In Mobile Advertising: 2012

When we compiled our list of the most important people in mobile advertising — the Mobile Power List 2012 — it contained one depressing anomaly: They were all men.

While there are plenty of influential women in the business, most of them have CEOs above them who are male. When women are CEOs, it tends to be at smaller companies they founded themselves.

So we set out to find and rank the most powerful women in the mobile ad business.

Go straight to the list >

First, we asked our readers to submit nominations. To ensure the nominations weren't self-serving, we also asked you to submit two nominations from other companies, rivals or colleagues.

This is not a complete list of every influential woman in mobile advertising, obviously. We chose the women with larger client bases, greater revenues (or spending) further reach, larger staffs and more innovative ideas than their peers. There are plenty of women who could have been named to the list, but because they work for companies where there is a peer company that employs an even more powerful woman, we didn't include them here. We also discriminated against companies that aren't specific about their revenues, employee headcounts and user reach.

The result is a list that counts not just the most important women in the business, but the women who are also the most prominent for their company type. (For further detail, we discuss the methodology behind the rankings at the end of the list.)

21. Jennifer Lum, president/cofounder at Adelphic Mobile

Adelphic Mobile only launched this year but Lum makes it onto the list because of her resume and connections: She was vp/advertising operations at Quattro Wireless, the company that was acquired by Apple and turned into iAd.

She's been in mobile advertising since 2005, and mentors and invests in other small mobile companies.

We're curious to see how successful Lum and Adelphic's "predictive data platform" will be.

20. Anna Bager, vp/general manager at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence

As the mobile chief at lobby group IAB, Swedish-born Bager knows everyone in the business and gets to hear their gripes and needs firsthand. She leads IAB's mobile operations and brought in the industry's first ever lobbyist in Washington devoted solely to mobile advertising, Sarah Hudgins.

She was formerly head of business intelligence at Ericsson and has been an analyst or consultant in telecoms since 1999 at IDC and Ovum.

Her colleagues told us:

"She has had a profound impact on bringing mobile marketing and advertising into the mainstream of marketing thought and practice."

"She has created a mini-IAB [for mobile] within the IAB."

19. Kathy Leake, president/co-founder of LocalResponse

Leake co-founded LocalResponse with Nihal Mehta, the investor best known for his early funding of AdMob. She makes the list because of LocalResponse's ingenious but simple offering: It's a mobile retargeting agency that serves location-based ads based on the content of your social media actions. If you tweet that you're hungry, you might next see a local pizza joint ad, for instance.

LocalReponse claims to serve 7 billion impressions per month for clients such as Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Walgreens.

What her colleagues and competitors told us:

"Prior to founding LR, Kathy was Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at social targeting company Media6Degrees. She pretty much rocked it, taking Media6 to $20M in revenue and $100M valuation in two years. "

"Kathy is a visionary in the ad targeting world."

Please follow Advertising on Twitter and Facebook.