Jack Philbin has spent much of his working life trying to get a response. A concertgoer sends a message to a screen. A radio listener requests a song. A shopper saves an offer to a phone. Different settings, different decades, the same small transaction: someone pays attention, then does something with it. For a founder in the persuasion business, it is an admirably practical obsession. Applause is lovely. An answer gives you something to work with.
He co-founded Vibes with Alex Campbell in 1998. The friendship was considerably older: the two had known each other since kindergarten. They began the business from a one-bedroom apartment and built it in Chicago, pursuing the point where mobile communications and marketing would meet. Long before a brand could put a carousel of products into a text conversation, they were working on the machinery that would let businesses and customers communicate through phones.
By July 2026, Vibes was offering self-serve access to RCS, the richer messaging format that supports interactive experiences inside a phone’s messaging app. Philbin’s company had travelled from the early days of mobile marketing to a product a business could buy with a credit card. Twenty-eight years is a lengthy courtship for an idea. His subject, however, keeps finding new ways to reply.
Before the smartphone, there was the audience
Philbin’s early work had a pleasingly public quality. In July 2002, he arranged a US concert’s use of Text-2-Screen technology. The following summer brought a cross-carrier text-request line for Minneapolis radio station KTTB B96. These were experiments in making an audience visible and audible through a device people already carried. The listener could act while the song was still relevant; the concertgoer could participate while the event was happening.
There is something wonderfully direct about those beginnings. A request line has an obvious test: can the listener make a request? An audience screen has another: does the message appear? The business had to connect an intention to an outcome, with carriers and technology cooperating somewhere in between. For all the vocabulary mobile marketing would subsequently acquire, those early applications were remarkably easy to explain.
Recognition followed. The Mobile Marketing Association gave Philbin its Outstanding Individual Achievement award in 2005. He joined the CTIA Wireless Innovation Council in 2006. He also studied economics at Boston College and earned an MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, where a later alumni video identifies him with the class of 2007. The business and his formal education overlapped: he was already running Vibes while completing the MBA.
- 1998Vibes is founded
- 2002-03Concert screens & radio requests
- 2013Wallet Manager launches
- 2025-26RCS Studio arrives
A phone is a very small place to be unwelcome
In a 2010 interview, Philbin drew a distinction between display advertising’s branding role and messaging’s capacity to support a relationship. His interest was in engagement and conversation between a business and a buyer. It is an enduring theme in his work: the phone gives a company access to someone, but access alone scarcely qualifies as a relationship. Anybody who has received an irrelevant promotion can supply the missing lecture.
Ahead of a 2014 speaking engagement, he emphasized how personal a device the mobile phone had become. That intimacy explains both the opportunity he sees and the care the medium demands. A text arrives in a place associated with friends, family and everyday arrangements. A business appearing there has entered a familiar room. It would be wise to have something useful to say.
His thinking about retail was already moving beyond the first attention-grabbing message. Discussing the mobile developments of 2012, he focused on how phones could help across a shopping journey, from awareness to loyalty. He admired experiences that put useful functions together, such as Starbucks’ mobile offering and Target’s customized coupons. He also described Vibes’ work on Verizon’s NFL Huddle, which gave fans team-specific interactions and offers beyond game day.
Those examples explain his perspective better than a list of channels could. Coffee, coupons and football have little in common until a phone makes the next action convenient. Philbin kept returning to that action. A campaign’s ingenuity has a rather short shelf life if the customer cannot work out what to do next.
“The mobile phone is the most personal technology we own.”
Jack Philbin · 2014
The wallet gets another job
In September 2013, Vibes launched Wallet Manager for Google Wallet and Apple’s Passbook. Philbin was pushing a use for the mobile wallet that extended beyond payment: keeping offers, passes and loyalty material close to the customer. It was a modest change in the furniture of daily life. A coupon no longer needed to survive the mysterious journey from kitchen counter to checkout.
He continued making the case. Looking ahead to 2019, he spoke about customers saving loyalty cards on their phones and about the value of personalized wallet content. His ambition connected a marketing message to a usable object: an offer that could remain available when someone reached a store. The wallet gave a promotion somewhere to live after its initial interruption.
The connection mattered in practice. Vibes worked with Sparkfly to link mobile offers with redemption and measurement. The partnership supported Chipotle’s Freeting campaign and an NBA Finals promotion. During the 2021 Finals campaign, 120,000 free burrito offers were unlocked. A basketball broadcast, a phone and a restaurant counter could belong to the same customer experience. Even the most devoted marketing theorist must concede the explanatory power of a burrito.
A founder with a taste for the unglamorous parts
Philbin’s work also involved expanding the organization behind those experiences. In 2013, Vibes acquired Lumata’s US brands business, taking on its American customers and retaining its US employees. Later, following a $45 million investment from Syniverse, Vibes bought Red Fish Media in 2016. Discussing that acquisition, Philbin described acquisitions as part of a deliberate effort to grow and scale the company.
These are useful details in a story that could otherwise become a parade of predictions. A founder has to build the organization that can deliver the idea. Customers, staff, integrations and carrier relationships all belong in that account. The message may take seconds to read; establishing the business behind it takes rather longer.
Philbin’s industry work extended to service on the MMA’s North America and global boards, including earlier leadership as North America chairman and global vice chairman. His public role has combined running Vibes with explaining mobile’s possibilities to marketers. In a 2018 hiring feature, he described looking for curious people who wanted to learn and could think flexibly in a fast-moving market. It is a revealing preference for someone whose company has had to keep learning what the phone might do next.
Room for a question, and a little verse
There is a quieter record of Philbin’s leadership outside product announcements. He served on the National Runaway Safeline board from September 2008 through December 2022. In a public recommendation, former executive director Maureen Blaha praised his ability to make complicated information understandable and to give fellow board members room to ask questions. The useful skill here is translation: helping other people follow a subject well enough to contribute.
His own public posts show a less ceremonial register. At the start of 2023, he shared a holiday team photograph, thanked colleagues and offered a short haiku. Another post celebrated a team outing on a cold Chicago night. Executive communication does not always leave room for either weather or verse. These posts suggest he sees some value in both.
Away from work, he has coached his children’s sports teams and competed in triathlons. He also collects bicentennial quarters. The combination is agreeably specific: a person occupied professionally with what comes next also has an interest in coins commemorating what came before. It supplies a little texture to the founder biography, which can otherwise resemble a résumé wearing a better jacket.
The next reply comes with buttons
Vibes added the Nexus AI engine to its platform in 2023, using models to help marketers choose timing, frequency and content. The idea addressed an old problem with newer tools: how to send something relevant without sending too much. Philbin’s subsequent writing argued for more useful, personalized messaging rather than treating the channel simply as a pipe to fill.
His next emphasis was RCS, short for Rich Communication Services. In a 2025 essay, he described how branded messages, rich media, suggested replies and interactive cards could bring more of a customer experience into the messaging conversation. His forecast was enthusiastic, but the practical proposal was familiar: reduce the number of steps between a person’s interest and the action they want to take.
RCS Studio arrived in early access in October 2025. It brought together provisioning and compliance, experience building, and message delivery. In July 2026, the company announced RCS Studio Professional, with self-serve plans starting at $149 a month. The announcement distinguished between testing quickly and going live with customers: carrier verification and approval still formed part of the process.
That detail belongs in Philbin’s story. Behind a richer message are the same sorts of connections and operational work that occupied the company in its earlier years. The interface has become more expressive; the need to make the interaction function remains. His latest project asks businesses to build conversations that can do more inside the message itself.
From a song request to a saved offer to an interactive shopping conversation, Philbin has kept giving the reply another job. The phone has changed considerably since 1998. His career has followed its changes while retaining a recognisable question: what would make this useful enough for someone to answer? For a business built around messages, it is a good question to keep open.