On Thursday this week we attended the launch event for the EMEA chapter of the Mobile Marketing Association. The MMA EMEA chapter brings together more than 150 brands, agencies and mobile marketing industry players in the region under the Chairmanship of Richard Saggers, Head of Mobile Advertising for Vodafone Group. more»

NRK (the Norwegian public broadcaster) and Ericsson just recently published the results of a trial they have been running to look at mobile TV with advertising. Take a look at some of the images and video. more»

Interview with Gunnar Garfors,
Director of Development, NRK.

Last week NRK (the Norwegian public broadcaster) announced the results of a major mobile advertising trial they have been running for the past 5 months in partnership with Ericsson Mobility World. The trial showed very positive response to adding advertising to live mobile video channels. more»

There has been a lot of discussion recently about in-game advertising. Last week we interviewed with Michael Chang of Greystripe (link). Michael provided us with some screen shots and a short video of what the campaigns actually look like when running on Greystripe. more»

Q Research published findings from its latest survey on what Britain’s young people think about receiving advertising messages on their mobile phones. The research, published in the report ‘Mobiles
and Advertising’, shows that targeting advertising messages to the individual recipient is the key to success with this often-elusive audience. more»

Third Screen Media and Smaato Inc announced a strategic partnership today. Through the partnership, the companies hope to extend the reach of advertising to smartphones, and to grow the mobile advertising business. more»

Sky Media has made its first move into the mobile arena by signing a deal to sell advertisements on the mobile channel GeekTV from PlayerX. more»

Ad-funded mobile game company Greystripe has been in the news recently for growing their distribution partnerships (link) and being a finalist in the “Webby” awards (link). The company has also been the source of some speculation as a potential acquisition target. We spoke recently with Michael Chang, co-founder and CEO of Greystripe about ad-funded gaming, Greystripe, and the mobile advertising industry in general. more»

OgilvyOne is participating at this year’s MIPTV show in Cannes, where advertisers, brands, and agencies are meeting with the mobile and television industry. As part of this participation, OgilvyOne has made available a significant study on trends in the Global Digital market, and how it affects advertisers. more»

As reported in the UK newspaper Telegraph.co.uk, UK operators are in a massive shift towards flat rate data charging. T-Mobile has been offering a flat rate plan for several months, but recently put an aggressive advertising campaign behind the program. Rival operator Vodafone has indicated it will offer flat rate this summer, and Orange is also rumoured to be preparing plans in this area. more»

pdway, an israeli startup, has closed its first round of funding in order to finalize development of a mobile coupon application. more»

Following on from the Mobile Entertaining and Advertising Summit that was held in New York in late March, the GSMA has announced the formation of a new group to address issues related to mobile advertising. more»

Two of Belgium’s major mobile operators have selected ScreenTonic as their ad server platform. ScreenTonic will deliver ads to the PlazZza mobile search engine using its STAMP ad platform.

PlazZza is a mobile search engine that is available through the operator portals MobiStar (Orange World) and Proximux (Vodafone Live!). more»

VoiceIndigo and Samsung recently announced an agreement which will put the client software from VoiceIndigo onto Samsung mobile phones. The first model has already begun shipping on the innovative Samsung UpStage, a music-centric dual face phone which is available through Sprint. more»

Blyk, the first completely ad-funded mobile network, finally made public its choice of operator network. The agreement had been rumored for quite some time, but was made public by a formal public announcement. more»

Business Week has an interesting article about the mobile advertising business in China. Although the current spending for mobile advertising is quite small (BW estimates US$17million in 2006), the shear number of mobile subscribers – almost half a billion – makes the market attractive. more»

Hollis Thomases has written two interesting articles in ClickZ with her view of the key obstacles facing advertisers when looking at planning and implementing mobile advertising. Hollis is president and founder of WebAdvantage.net, an interactive marketing, promotions, and advertising agency. more»

The world market for mobile marketing and advertising is expected to be worth about $3 billion by the end of 2007, according to a recent study from ABI Research. By 2011, the value of this market will reach $19 billion, including mobile search and video advertising. ABI Research also expects some of the highest levels of spending to come in the broadcast mobile video space. more»

16 & 17 of May
The Dorchester, London

Mobile Media is finally about to boom, bringing personalised on-demand content straight to your phone. Organised by the Financial times, this conference will look into how mobile media will transform the mobile and digital media markets. more»

Incentivated is an independent, award winning marketing services agency and software developer which specialises in mobile (cellular) media. Our proprietary technology and specialist staff are well positioned to help brands, the public sector, charities and their partners to develop everything from SMS services (text messages) through mobile internet sites to server-side or handset applications for ‘smartphones’ like the Apple iPhone. Our independence allows us to work alongside many of the world’s leading advertising, media, sales promotion, direct and digital agencies.

Our clients use us around the world for customer acquisition, retention (CRM) and m-commerce campaigns as well as enterprise solutions. While much of this work falls within their marketing budget and is integrated with other media, e.g. direct response and sales promotion, we also help clients use the mobile medium as a sales channel, to generate revenue or disseminate information. They licence our technology to embed in their own code, outsource entire business processes to us and ask us to develop applications for them.

Given the unique characteristics of mobile your supplier has to have extensive business, marketing and digital knowledge and experience. What makes us special is that genuinely we are a flexible, full service organisation, with our own proprietary platform. We generate campaign ideas and creative execution, handle account management, post campaign analysis and insights. When members of our team offer consulting or campaign management services they use products designed, built and maintained in-house. This has enabled us to develop long term client partnerships, and to win many awards.

Our clients include: British Airways, Central Office of Information, Clara.net, Directgov, Glaxosmithkline, HBoS, Jaguar Cars, LBi, Marks & Spencer, Masterfoods, Mayor of London, PwC, Scottish & Newcastle, Scottish Power, Transport for London, Virgin 1, Visit Britain, and Wwav Rapp Collins.

Que Pasa develops branded mobile content services on behalf of network operators, brands, advertising agencies and media owners who may be keen to migrate an established brand over to mobile.

They are known for developing Virgin Mobile’s operator portal, BITES, Channel 4’s mobile platform (D2C and on-portal), Sony Ericsson’s “Soundtrack to Your Life” and the Galaxy FM mobile sites on behalf of Chrysalis Group. They have also worked on content projects with both Vodafone and T Mobile.

Their mobile media capabilities encompass campaign planning; content creation across editorial, video programming and alert-based services; video ingest, editing and encoding; and interactive services such as competitions, quizzes and polls.

Serious Knowledge is an organisation that works in mobile technology and beyond. Although their area of consulting expertise is broad, their technology focus is more specific, namely the ability to put information on commonly available mobile phones, using standard infrastructure. They call this MiniPack.

The MiniPack is sent over a normal network (i.e. Vodafone, Orange, 3, O2, T-Mobile) and can then be received by the end user on their mobile phone. Once on the phone, unlike WAP or mobile sites, the user can reference the content as often as he likes without incurring any charges.

Any content can be put into the MiniPack. They provide the vehicle for you to be able to put your information on someone’s phone which they can then repeatedly use at no cost.

Harris Interactive recently announced the results of new research into consumer acceptance of mobile phone advertisements. The research examined current levels of consumer interest in mobile phone advertisements, preferred advertising formats and the willingness of consumers to be profiled. more»

Harris Interactive released a report which reviews the current state of development for Location Based services, and looks at their implications for the future. more»

CMM Intelligence has just released a “snapshot” of the Chinese mobile market, a market where there are over one half a billion mobile users, and growing at over 10% per year. more»

MobVision develops and delivers mobile solutions for a global market.

Our primary focus is the Mobile Internet which is enjoying a huge growth period with millions of people discovering WAP, and the services and entertainment it can deliver.

MobVision’s core DNA is bringing mobile innovation to this mass market. At the heart of our strategy is the need to hide the enormous complexity of mobile application delivery from both our clients and the end user.

Hovr Inc is a New York based mobile media company that marries the needs of advertisers with the desires of mobile users. Hovr provides users with free ad-supported mobile content such as mobile games. The Hovr MobileSpace social network lets users connect, compete and interact with their friends and other players in a community environment.

By embedding advertising into games and other mobile applications Hovr delivers ad-subsidized content. Hovr’s AdLogic Platform places targeted and interactive advertisements into mobile content allowing advertisers to target ads based on demographic and personal profile information. Hovr enables advertisers to reach the 13 to 34 age group by using a new medium: the mobile phone.

Position: Mobile Advertising International Development Manager
Company: Vodafone
Reference: STG1194
Location: Newbury
Salary: Depending on experience + excellent benefits
more»

Yahoo! made another major move into the mobile industry recently, announcing the formation of an ad network and the availability of several tools for mobile content publishers. more»

At a CTIA keynote, Philippe Dauman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Viacom unveiled a series of partnerships and programming move related to mobile content and mobile advertising. Specifically, Viacom’s MTV Networks announced the debut of several new mobile sites and will for the first time sell advertising across its mobile portfolio. more»

Blyk, the ad funded MVNO set to launch this summer, announced a set of world renowned brands will be the first companies to advertise on the network. more»

M:Metrics has announced the launch of their new service, MeterDirect. This service is based on a downloadable application that runs on a smartphone, and measures how owners use mobile content such as games, videos and music. more»

JumpTap, a mobile search and advertising company, announced that Boost Mobile, a subsidiary of Sprint Nextel corp., has deployed JumpTap’s mobile search solution. more»

MobiTV, a leader in delivering mobile television, announced that they would be one of the founding partners of the Yahoo! Ad network. Yahoo! will sell the ads through their worldwide ad sales force, and will be responsible for delivering the ads across MobiTV’s range of live television and premium content. more»

Orange UK is said to be ready to roll out banner ads to all of its customers on the Orange World portal, following a successful trial of mobile advertising that started in September last year. more»

Zagat, a worldwide provider of consumer survey-based leisure content, announced that that it will launch an ad-supported mobile website later this year. The site will feature restaurant information as well as nightlife content, and will cover all the cities that Zagat covers in the US and abroad. more»

V-Enable of San Diego California announced the commercial availability of the Mobile411 product, an advanced voice activated mobile search solution that also supports advertising. more»

uVuMobile (smarTVideo) announced that it has signed an exclusive agreement with Westwood One, a leading supplier of audio content and programming, to distribure via mobile phones the daily talk show of Emmy award winning Dennis Miller. more»

Entriq and MoPhap have announced a joint solution that should allow content publishers to derive more revenue from their mobile sites by providing improved advertising. more»

Third Screen Media and Amp’d Mobile announced that they would be working together to include advertising into the video offerings of the operator, using Third Screen’s MADX technology. more»

Admob, a leading mobile ad serving company, recently closed a $15million round of financing, led by Accel Partners, and including previous investor Sequoia Capital. Admob also announced some statistics on the targeting of the ads served. more»