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Posts Tagged ‘advertising’

Amobee lands Moto, Cisco investment

Monday, August 11th, 2008

Mobile ad company has announced its landed new investment from the likes of Motorola and Cisco, along with more cash from previous investments Telefonica, Vodafone, Accel Partners, Globespan, and Sequoia Capital. No official word on how much the round is, but it’s thought to be in the region of $22 million.

The company, which sells telco-grade ad serving, already has operators including Vodafone, Telefonica and Orange on its books as well as heavyweight customers like Coca Cola signed up. Getting Cisco and Moto on involved will doubtless give Amobee a boost with their collective handset and software experience, not to mention the cash.

Tags: advertising, amobee, cisco
Posted in Mobile Marketing | View Comments

Nokia trains execs in mobile dark arts

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Nokia is testing out a new way to get execs interested in mobile advertising: sit them down and show them how to do it. The handset maker will be opening “Ad Labs” in London and Boston, used to certify and “train traditional advertising agency staff in the “black art” of mobile advertising,” reports The Guardian.

According to Nokia, execs are not having trouble with mobile advertising technologies themselves, but instead with the planning and creative concepting, which is where they’re hoping the Ad Labs will be able to step in.

Nokia is giving advertising a real push at the moment: there was the enpocket acquisition last year and the Mobile Ad Alliance earlier this week. Mobile advertising has always been a nebulous practice at best, despite a lot of talk about industry standardisation and working together, that doesn’t appear to be changing very fast. Nokia looks like its going after the mobile advertising number one spot, with or without its partners.

Tags: ad labs, advertising, nokia
Posted in Mobile Marketing | View Comments

Nokia reveals mobile ad alliance

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Nokia has announced its very own Ad Alliance, which it says is aimed at making mobile ad buying an easier process. The alliance will sell “couponing, location-based targeting, image recognition, and other emerging technologies” alongside more traditional display advertising. The ads will appearing across the Nokia Media Network, which places advertising on Nokia properties like Ovi services as well as through other content providers and operators.

A number of companies have already signed up to the Ad Alliance including i-movo, Mobile Acuity, Mobiqa, and uLocate, according to Nokia, with “many additional members in testing”.

It looks like Nokia’s already doing far more interesting things with mobile advertising than Google, which is stuck in the banner and text ads space. Given that operators have proved more willing to embrace Nokia’s services push (as demonstrated by the recent spate of loving Ovi got), it looks like the mobile ad space won’t be as easy for Google to dominate as the fixed internet was.

Tags: advertising, alliance, Google, nokia
Posted in Mobile Marketing | View Comments

Yahoo teams with 4INFO for SMS ads

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

After all the Microsoft farrago, Yahoo is now getting back to the business of trying to take on Google in advertising. Its latest move is signing a trial partnership with SMS advertising company 4INFO, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Under the trial, the WSJ says, 4INFO will give Yahoo the tech it needs to publish content like news and horoscopes over SMS with a small ad included, with either Yahoo or 4INFO selling the ad space.

With operators now looking at embedding ads into games and trading them in return for mobile TV clips, it’s interesting to see search companies turning to the old school likes of SMS. While it’s not as flash as newer advertising types, it does have one major advantage – being opt-in – not to mention better click rates.

Tags: 4info, advertising, SMS, yahoo
Posted in SMS | View Comments

Vodafone Germany not impressed with mobile TV

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

It looks like Vodafone’s Germany head isn’t too impressed with mobile TV so far. After getting turned down for a mobile licence in the country, which went instead to Mobile 3.0, a consortium of publishers, the operator said it will now focusing its mobile TV efforts towards selling add ons. According to Forbes, Vodafone plans to offer services through which customers can buy products seen on mobile TV, such as songs aired on music television.

Another Forbes article reports the German head Fritz Joussen as saying he doesn’t see a viable business in offering pay television via mobile phones after the emergence of phones that receive regular terrestrial TV signals. “These devices came as a surprise and call a payment based subscription model into question,” he adds.

While I can’t help wondering why, if Vodafone was so unimpressed with mobile TV, it bid for a licence in the first place, but it’s right to pick up on the question of whether paid TV is the way forward. Vodafone has repeatedly championed the cause of mobile advertising – I’m surprised it hasn’t already starting giving away mobile TV clips in return for ad viewing. After all, it’s what we’re used to on terrestrial TV – we know the model works, why not export it to mobiles?

Tags: advertising, Mobile TV, Vodafone
Posted in Mobile TV | View Comments

How Facebook friends can get you free calls

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

In the US and want free minutes? Time to install a new Facebook application. It’s called Fund My Phone and it’s part of Virgin Mobile USA’s Sugar Mama service, which lets customers rack up free minutes, usually by sitting through advertising.

Fund My Phone works slightly differently: it gives you free minutes if you encourage all your Facebook mates to endure some advertising spots. Free-minutes-seekers install the application, tell all their friends about it, and for every four mates that watches a one minute trailer of some sort and gives their feedback, free minutes get sent back to the original user.

In principle, it’s a canny idea but how many of people’s Facebook friends are more than vague acquaintances they added to boost their friends list and make themselves look popular? Asking them to watch some adverts for you should separate the wheat from the chaff and you might even get some free airtime out of it to boot.

Tags: advertising, free, fund my phone, sugar mama, virgin mobile, voice
Posted in Mobile Marketing | View Comments

Google brings banner ads to mobiles

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

While rivals Microsoft and Yahoo continue the acquisition dance, Google is trying to think of new ways to turn the mobile phone into the ad-serving platform of the future, as it counts on the next billion users to become the next generation of web heads.

To try and make more cash out of mobile ads, Google is introducing banner ads to mobile web pages – sort of like chopped down version of what’s typically seen at the top of pages viewed on a desktop browser. Google said it’ll keep the number of banner ads down to a single one on each page, so as not to overload browsers.

On one hand, I can’t believe that Google has done this already – banner ads aren’t exactly a niche phenomenon the web. It seems like the ’search giant’ is a bit slow off off the blocks with tried and tested formulae – and ever slower with new formats.

Tags: advertising, banner, Google
Posted in Mobile Marketing | View Comments

Mobile TV ads worth $500 million by 2013

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

Analysts have been polishing their crystal balls over mobile TV and they reckon that it could soon be a top notch way of delivering adverts. A new report from Juniper Research has found that this year, mobile TV will earn $335 million in ad revenues while by 2013, that figure will reach $2.5 billion. The whole mobile ad market will be $7.6 billion according to the analysts.

By 2010, mobile TV will also be the most lucrative channel for mobile advertising, although idle screen advertising will also do well, with ad spend $7 million this year and up to $500 million in 2013.

If mobile is the biggest generator of ad revenue, it looks like we can expect more free channels and programming on the way. If there’s one thing that could open up mobile TV more than anything else – be it good handsets, clever standards, and so on – then it’s possibility advertisers will make sure we can watch TV gratis. As long as we can get over all those annoying ads…

Tags: advertising, analyst, idle screen, juniper research, Mobile TV
Posted in Mobile TV | View Comments

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	No - boring!		90%