Any­one with enough expe­ri­ence of media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies will be aware that, by the time that a start­up has appoint­ed its first VP of nation­al sales, its prospects will be look­ing promis­ing. And, just five months after being found­ed, Man­hat­tan-based mobile phones adver­tis­ing start­up Lock­et, which we fea­tured on these pages in August, has just done pre­cise­ly that.

From Can­dy Crush to Mobile Phones Adver­tis­ing 

Char­i­ty Sabater, erst­while senior direc­tor of ad sales at online gam­ing meg­a­site King.com (the com­pa­ny behind the addic­tive­ly pop­u­lar mobile game Can­dy Crush), is step­ping into the new role and, accord­ing to Lock­et co-founder and CEO Yun­ha Kim, will be charged with the task of attract­ing more big brands into the program.

Locket’s unique approach to mobile phones adver­tis­ing involves pay­ing users of its app when they engage with the ads it places on their Android lockscreens. OK, at one cent per ad engage­ment, no one gets to be a mil­lion­aire, but after a few months there’ll be enough to cash out a lit­tle wind­fall, make a small dona­tion to a char­i­ty or add a lit­tle to a gift card. Users can even vote on brands they’d like to get ads from.

Recent­ly, Lock­et ran a cam­paign for Hershey’s fea­tur­ing the brand’s “Scharf­fen Berg­er” choco­late and the idea behind hir­ing Sabater is to bring more big name brands on board. And for Sabater her­self, the move is prob­a­bly a time­ly one – in July, King.com revealed that it was exit­ing the adver­tis­ing busi­ness to con­cen­trate on vir­tu­al pur­chas­es, a deci­sion which inevitably had impli­ca­tions for her role there.

Inno­va­tion at a crazy speed

Com­ment­ing on her new job with Lock­et, Sabater said that she joined the start­up because ““I like being in a place where true inno­va­tion hap­pens, at crazy speed. Reward­ing users for allow­ing adver­tis­ing on their lock screen is sim­ple yet brilliant.”

Things are mov­ing at a fair rate of knots for this inno­v­a­tive mobile adver­tis­ing start­up. It now has a nine-strong team and has recent­ly com­ple­ment­ed its oper­a­tions in New York with a new office in San Fran­cis­co, although both are essen­tial­ly apart­ments where team mem­bers live as well as work. Sabater, who already lives in New York, will be the first team mem­ber not to sleep under the same roof as her colleagues.