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 Unicast, a division of Enliven Marketing Technologies Corporation, today announced that AdMob, the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, has partnered with Unicast to power mobile web pages through the Unicast Rich Media Mobile platform for its advertising customers.

Unicast and AdMob have collaborated on more than 10 rich media mobile ad campaigns to date, creating successful executions for major brands including Land Rover, SCJohnson, Adidas and more. These mobile marketing campaigns include rich multi-page mobile web sites featuring data capture, video streaming, interactive store locators and wallpaper and ring tone download capabilities. Unicast’s business intelligence reporting tracks user interactions on the mobile sites, in order to provide marketers with deeper insight into user behavior and brand engagement.

Unicast’s Rich Media Mobile technology is a hosted delivery and tracking solution for optimized rich mobile web page content. This solution helps advertisers to provide a richer experience for audiences that are both media and mobile savvy. The Unicast platform provides the tools for advertisers and agencies to quickly and efficiently create, deliver, and measure the effectiveness of rich media mobile ad campaigns. These campaigns can be tracked with real-time reporting, and the metrics can be tied to the reporting interface for rich media online and in-game ad performance metrics. This provides a true cross-platform solution for the efficient management of mobile marketing campaigns.

One of the key features of Unicast’s Rich Media Mobile technology is the ability to dynamically detect the type of media a user’s mobile phone can play, and then offer the advertiser’s content in the appropriate format. This provides seamless integration for marketers and an enhanced experience for end users. Currently, Unicast Rich Media Mobile is compatible with many devices across the major US wireless carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

“We have extended our technology into the mobile marketing arena at a key inflection point, just as mobile marketing is emerging as a vital element of a fully integrated digital media strategy,” said Jason McKay, President of Unicast. “We continue to invest in the development of our digital marketing technologies to deliver best in class rich media products to address the critical growth areas of the marketplace. We are excited to partner with AdMob, as they are truly an industry leader and a pioneer in the emerging market for the delivery of mobile solutions for advertisers and agencies.”

“AdMob’s clients leverage mobile marketing to reach their customers in a highly personal and interactive way,” said Tony Nethercutt, AdMob Vice President of sales. “We have partnered with Unicast in response to the significant demand for rich mobile websites to support mobile advertising campaigns, and believe that Unicast’s robust platform will make it easier for advertisers to deliver this rich experience.”

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SEEKING CLOSER TIES WITH MADISON Avenue, San Mateo, Calif.-based mobile ad network AdMob has opened a New York branch.

The AdMob East office will be led by ad sales veterans Adam Schneider and Robyn Borok, and will focus on expanding brand advertising on AdMob’s mobile platform. Much of that effort will involve continuing to educate agencies about mobile marketing opportunities, according to Tony Nethercutt, AdMob’s vice president of sales.
“We are spending a ton of time on education about mobile, what the possibilities are and best practices, and just trying to demystify it,” he said. “People make it way too complicated. It’s a lot like interactive, but with a few more subtleties about what you can do.”

Started in 2006, AdMob now sells banner and text ads on more than 3,000 mobile Web sites from big-name marketers including Ford, Procter & Gamble, BlackBerry and Best Buy. The company says it is serving 2 billion impressions per month. With growing interest in mobile advertising, Nethercutt said the time had come for the company to have a physical presence in the ad industry’s capital.

The larger agencies AdMob has worked with to date are GM Planworks, Avenue A|Razorfish, OgilvyInteractive, MEC Interaction and AKQA. “All of these agencies have groups they’re starting and assigning mobile expertise to,” Nethercutt said. “So we’re talking with a lot of players in the [mobile] space, and expect those relationships to grow.”

In the last few months especially, Nethercutt said he has seen agencies incorporate mobile into broader interactive media buys through media planning tools like aQuantive’s Atlas and DoubleClick’s MediaVisor. “It’s definitely becoming more of a staple on interactive buys as advertisers take advantage of the things mobile can bring to the table,” he said.

Making face time with the agencies on behalf of AdMob will be ad sales directors Schneider and Borok. Before joining AdMob, Schneider was a founding executive at mobile startup Cellfire, and previously was vice president of sales at online rewards network MyPoints.

Borok was previously advertising director for Child magazine and has also held ad sales-related positions at Primedia and iVillage.

During the last year, AdMob has grown from a dozen to 60 employees, including some working overseas, Nethercutt said.

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As mobile advertising continues to establish itself as an important marketing channel, AdMob, the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, continues its own expansion. AdMob today announced the opening of a new East Coast headquarters in New York City, “AdMob East,” to serve growing interest in mobile advertising among New York based agencies.

AdMob has experienced dramatic growth as mobile internet usage has skyrocketed. In 2007, marketers embraced mobile as a highly personal way to reach their customers. The company has observed marked increases in the number of campaigns as well as average size of budgets available for mobile marketing and is expanding its East Coast operations in response to growing demand from agencies and brands.

AdMob sells mobile ads on behalf of over 3000 publishers, including leading branded sites like AccuWeather, CBS and ESPN and innovative mobile content companies such as Peperonity, ItsMy, Mocospace and Fotochatter. AdMob began building a full service Sales organization in late 2006 to complement its online self-serve marketplace. The AdMob Sales organization is now more than a dozen people strong in San Mateo, Los Angeles, New York and London.

“Marketers are increasingly extending their campaigns to mobile and we want to be available to guide them through best practices,” said Tony Nethercutt, AdMob Vice President of Sales. “We are deepening our presence in New York to better support agencies and brands as they ramp their mobile marketing efforts.” AdMob recently passed the two-year anniversary of the January 2006 launch of its online mobile ad marketplace. In the past two years, AdMob has served over 15 Billion ads, including over 2 Billion in December 2007 alone.

Two Sales Directors, Adam Schneider and Robyn Borok, will lead the new AdMob East location. Between them, they have over 35 years of TV, radio, print, interactive and mobile advertising experience.

AdMob East is located on the 39th Floor of 245 Park Avenue between 46th and 47th Street in New York.

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San Mateo based mobile advertising solutions provider AdMob has announced AdMob for Facebook Mobile, a mobile advertising solution for developers of third-party Facebook applications.

AdMob has enabled optimized mobile ads for Facebook Mobile, which developers can use to monetize their mobile applications. Developers can start showing ads and earning money immediately.

AdMob for Facebook Mobile is said to be the first monetization solution for Facebook Mobile developers. AdMob is now serving 1.5 billion ads a month, up from the 1 billion they were serving when we first wrote about them in August.

AdMob Investors include Sequoia and Accel Partners and management includes staff previously with eBay, YouTube and Google.

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Facebook Platform for Mobile allows developers to build applications that integrate with Facebook via user profiles and canvas as well as through SMS. Application developers can now monetise their apps by including mobile advertising from AdMob.

AdMob hired Facebook’s Vice President of Engineering back in February of this year. Todaym they have become the first platform to provide advertising on Facebook Mobile, hardly a week after Facebook Platform for Mobile was launched.

Application developers can integrate mobile advertising from AdMob into any application developed for Facebook Mobile. AdMob provide developers a sample application called AdMob Footprints, based on Facebook’s own developer resource called Footprints. The tool, which is coded in PHP, can be used as the starting point to build apps that have the mobile advertising function already included.
The best way to monetise Facebook and other social networks at present seems to be by tapping into their application developers. Yesterday’s news from Google about Open Social seems to indicate this and so does AdMob’s strategy. When Facebook launches its own advertising platform, though, it could end up competing with other ads from outside its own network, which could very quickly lead to ad fatigue among users if Facebook is not careful.

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AdMob, the leader in on-device mobile advertising, has released its metrics for September 2007 and the results show some pretty interesting and dramatic trends. Perhaps most interesting is the sheer number of advertisements served at 1,593,653,162. Yes that is a one billion plus figure you’re looking at.
Of this total, it appears that 42.2% of these advertisements were delivered in North America with India a distant second at 10%. I don’t know whether this is a factor of strength in sales on the ground in the US being far greater than elsewhere or if the demand for advertising is that much greater in the US than in other places. The numbers clearly don’t tell the whole story but I’ve been talking about bringing Omar the CEO of AdMob on for an interview as a reprise to a very well received discussion that he and I had back when I was writing another publication and perhaps this is the impetus to make that happen sooner rather than later as I’m sure that I’m not the only one that is curious about some of the details that these numbers only being to hint at.

The data reveals some other interesting facts. Handset metrics are unsurprising as Nokia runs away with the lead at 30.% while Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson are in a virtual tie for second with 13.3%, 12.1% and 11.2% respectively which is probably within the margin of error for that analysis. This bodes well for the Finnish phone giant, is a strong indicator of their improving market position for Sony Ericsson and probably is scaring the crap out of Samsung and Motorola management.

This is especially interesting when you recall the discrepancy between international and US gross ad delivery metrics. Bear in mind that the US is and has historically been one of Nokia’s weakest markets and one that Motorola has typically dominated, especially since launching their home run RAZR device a few years ago. It is evident that the company has slid badly when they’re nearly neck and neck with Sony Ericsson and essentially tied with Samsung, two companies that the US electronics manufacturer had probably ceased to regard as competition back during their recent handset dominant days.

Looking at the US-only handset data it is even clearer how dominant Nokia is on a global level as they’re a distant fourth to Motorola, falling behind both Rimm and Samsung in this country. In fact, among the top ten most popular handset models to which AdMob has delivered advertising in the US, not a single Nokia device is to be found.

It is pretty clear evidence that Nokia owns the rest of the world when a lackluster showing in a market as big as the US doesn’t result in the loss of category dominance or confer it upon a US market leader.

The United Kingdom market is also interesting if not anomalous. Sony Ericsson is the most popular brand as well as the maker of the most popular handset. What’s really interesting from my perspective, however, is which handsets are popular. The UK has long been considered one of the most advanced markets when it comes to mobile phone users and these statistics appear to bear that out with the ten most popular devices being of a far higher average cost (and which much expanded mobile multi-media capabilities) than any of the other countries listed.

We’ve been looking at Europe as a potential indicator of where the mobile markets are going and I think this approach will continue to be sensible based upon this information that has been so generously made available by Admob.

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Flirtomatic has newly enlisted the services of Admob, and early signs reveal that the mobile sales agency is on track to meet the recent increase in demand for Flirtomatic mobile media. The news is another major development for the online and mobile based flirting service which boasts partnership deals with Screen Tonic and 4th Screen Advertising. Recent brands to run mobile advertising with Flirtomatic include household names Smirnoff, ITV and O2.

Gigi Dryer, commercial advisor at Flirtomatic, comments, “With both Google and Yahoo moving into the mobile advertising space, a clear trend has been identified. The potential of mobile advertising has been talked about for a long time, but it is only now that it is coming to fruition. The rapid growth in mobile advertising revenue which Flirtomatic is experiencing further exemplifies this change.”

The advertising industry has been forced to look beyond traditional methods to reach consumers in recent times, as consumer behaviour and habits have moved away from TV and radio towards new mediums. Flirtomatic believes that everything is rapidly falling into place for a boom in advertising on mobile.

Mark Curtis, CEO of Flirtomatic, “The latest advances in mobile technology, coupled with the fact that so many of us now own or make regular use of a mobile, mean it is finally ready to fulfil its potential as the ideal platform for advertisers,” explains Curtis.

“Consumers use mobiles for an increasing number of activities - checking emails, keeping up to date with the latest news, shopping and of course flirting! By understanding mobile usage and users, advertisers can target their market more directly than ever before.”

Mobile marketing has been boosted by the recent decision by the majority of UK operators to revamp their mobile internet packages - making it easier and cheaper for people to get online whilst on the move. Also, recent research has revealed there are now more mobiles than people in the UK - some 71 million handsets for a population of 60 million*. Advertisers have an ever growing audience to tap in to.

Given mobile advertising’s rapid evolution, it’s easy to see why so many leading brands are keen to promote their products and services on the Flirtomatic WAP site – which has a registered user base of over 500,000 and rising. In addition, Flirtomatic recorded more than 100 million WAP impressions in August 2007 - a little over a year after the service’s launch.

“As one of the UK’s most popular mobile destinations we have seen a surge in the number of brands interested in advertising on Flirtomatic,” says Curtis. “The growth potential in this sector is huge and companies need to act quickly or risk letting their competitors take the lead. “

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M:Metrics and AdMob have released findings on audience composition for mobile advertising. The findings confirm the widely held view that mobile is the way to reach the elusive 18-34 age range, which represented 65.5% of respondents.

The data was collected from more than 2,000 mobile sites and was collected during Q3 2007.

The research also shows that AdMob’s mobile network delivers broad demographic reach with desirable demographic sub-segments. For example, the study confirms that numerous sites that target African-Americans have audience compositions in excess of 50 percent of the demographic, when the ethnic group comprises only 6.3 percent of the mobile population, according to M:Metrics. Similar results were found across females (sites with over 60 percent females versus 42 percent of mobile browser population), Hispanics (sites with over 35 percent versus 18.5 percent mobile browser population) and various other demographic profiles.

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Mobile advertising is far more acceptable to consumers that ever previously thought, finds the first global report into consumer acceptance of mobile advertising, conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Enpocket.

, conducted with more than 1200 mobile Internet users across the US, Europe and India, reveals that consumers are far more accepting of mobile advertising when it is made relevant.

The Consumer Mobile Advertising report research conducted among 1200 mobile internet users across the US, Europe and India shows that targeted mobile advertising is 50 per cent more acceptable to mobile Internet users than untargeted ads.

Some 78 per cent said they would be happy to receive mobile advertising that is tailored to their interests. Of those, 64 per cent would be willing to provide personal details to be analyzed to improve relevance of targeted ads.

In addition, 58 per cent of respondents would prefer banner ads displayed on mobile Internet pages to mobile marketing text messages.

Consumers are ready for mobile advertising but with an important caveat: ads must be targeted, says Mike Baker, CEO of Enpocket. Operators have the demographic, transactional and behavioral data necessary to deliver marketing and advertising that meets the consumer need for relevant advertising on this most personal of devices. Forward thinking operators, publishers and brand advertisers are realizing that this is a key requirement to long-term success in the medium.

The report also shows that mobile operators can reduce churn and increase average revenue per user ( ARPU ) if they leverage consumer data to personalise content merchandising and promotion.

Some 57 per cent of respondents said that they would be more willing to continue their service if their carrier personalized services and products to their needs. More than 40 per cent said they would be more likely to buy more mobile content if they received personalized recommendations.

The findings are backed up by AdMob Inc, one of the worlds leading mobile advertising marketplaces, has revealed that its network now serves 300 million mobile page views per month, a figure which is continuously growing.

To drive forward exponential European market growth, AdMob has appointed the leading mobile advertising expert and blogger Russell Buckley as Managing Director, Europe, following his consultancy in setting up European operations.

To already top 300 million per month is a significant achievement for AdMob and a major opportunity for advertisers, said Buckley. With mobile advertising gaining traction worldwide, were seeing more and more mobile websites join the network to monetise their sites. Its just a matter of time before mobile achieves parity and perhaps outgrows, the online market.

For advertisers, the AdMob Marketplace delivers access to the worlds largest network of mobile web inventories, a powerful set of targeting tools, backed by real-time metrics and reporting. AdMob enables advertisers to run targeted ads across a comprehensive set of mobile content channels, including communities, entertainment, news and portals.

We have seen a sustained boost to the number of mobile visitors to our site since we began working with AdMob in August to target new users, says Mark Curtis, CEO of Flirtomatic, the leading online and mobile flirting service. AdMob delivers the best returns weve ever seen from online advertising, and the per-click rates are hugely competitive.

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AdMob announced an exclusive partnership with mobile community service provider Peperoni that will place the mobile advertising network provider’s ads on more than 200 million Peperoni pages per month worldwide. The agreement guarantees AdMob advertisers like Coca-Cola, Adidas, Teletext and LG exclusive access to the peperonity.com network, which enables users to design their own mobile page layouts, launch blogs and chat with other community members. According to Peperoni, the network is growing at more than 20 percent per month, with 10 million unique visitors each month. The AdMob network now comprises more than 1,700 mobile website publishers running AdMob advertising campaigns on a revenue-share basis.

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