The digital ad champion

When the popular technology blog Venture Beat asked its readers to nominate the most influential New York city techies, one of the names that the readers came up with was of Nihal Mehta, the co-founder and CEO of LocalResponse—which describes itself as the first platform to help marketers respond to “real-time consumer intent”—defined as a social media event. In other words, Mehta, who is often called a digital advertising pioneer, tries to make the advertisements you see on the web as less irritating as possible by making them most relevant to what you are doing at any given time on the web.

Mehta is a graduate of University of Pennsylvania from where he has a BA in Philosophy and a BSE in Computer Science. Mehta’s first venture was in 1999, called Philly2nite.com, which was a local city guide for Philadelphia. He developed it into the global city guide service Urbangroove which later succumbed to the dotcom bubble. After Urbangroove, in 2001 itself, Mehta saw the potential in mobile web and started Iphsl, one of the first full-service mobile marketing agencies. This was acquired by Omnicom, a global advertising behemoth, in 2005. Mehta’s next venture was the popular social city guide Buzzd, in 2007, which has eventually been grown into LocalResponse. Apart from being a guest lecturer at business schools around the world, Mehta also mentors a lot of budding entrepreneurs. Through India Internet Group, he invests in India-focused early stage Internet and mobile tech start-ups.