The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has named its Regional Officers and Global Board of Directors and Officers for 2009-10.

Individual boards were named for Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America, and are made up of representatives from companies such as iLoop Mobile, CNN, The Hyperfactory, Ogilvy, Isobar, comScore, Mobilera, AdMob, Microsoft, Hanzo, Wunderman, Nielsen, Millenial Media, and Coca-Cola. more»

Have you ever wished that you could really understand how people used the internet today, how they interact with various media, and what impact the trends we see today will have in the future?

For the past 15 years, the Center for the Digital Future at USC has been studying exactly these issues. In this interview, we talk with Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center on a range of topics, including the evolving media habits of teenagers and the emerging “new rules” for advertising and marketing. more»

At the Mobile Entertainment Market gala event on June 23rd, the winners of the 2009 Meffy competition were announced.

This years winners came from a wide variety of countries, including America, Britain, Denmark, Finland, India, Norway, Russia and Turkey, highlighting the growing international flavor of the awards. more»

International ad network mKhoj has launched a new feature of their advertising service that lets brands communicate in different markets in different languages.

Local language capability should lead to more effective advertising through improved relevancy, as well as increasing the value of publishers’ mobile properties through greater localization. more»

Last week at the Mobile Advertising UK Conference, a new study was presented that took an in-depth look at the progress mobile advertising is making in the UK market.

As well as looking at overall spend and comparison among media channels, the study examined consumer attitudes towards mobile marketing and found that 70% of UK consumers would give permission for mobile ads if they were in control and received some sort of incentive!
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David Rosenberg has written an interesting article over on CNET news.

He describes how the new Wii-no-ma service that Nintendo has launched in Japan is being used to promote a combination of gaming, family social networking, and advertising. more»

BuzzCity has launched a web-based mobile media planning tool to help mobile marketers get better returns for their ad spend.

The online tool includes traffic and demographic data from each of 200 markets where the ad network operates. more»

New tool helps marketers plan mobile ad campaigns on BuzzCity ad network

London (June 2, 2009) – BuzzCity (www.buzzcity.com), a provider of global wireless communities and consumer services, today released a first-of-its-kind mobile advertising campaign planner for users of its BuzzCity Global Mobile Advertising Network. The tool allows marketers and brands to better plan their mobile advertising campaigns with traffic and demographic data from each of the 200 countries included in BuzzCity’s network.

The BuzzCity Campaign Planner helps mobile media planners, researchers and strategists to overcome the challenges they face when planning the strategy and tactics behind successful mobile advertising and marketing campaigns. With an intuitive and easy-to-use interface, the Campaign Planner provides key data that will help companies get maximum results from their advertising spend.

The BuzzCity Global Mobile Advertising Network is one of the world’s largest mobile internet advertising networks. It includes more than 2,000 mobile internet publisher sites in 200 countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, along with the company’s myGamma mobile social networking community.

The BuzzCity Campaign Planner includes a map display coloured to denote the mobile internet advertising page views available in markets around the world. Darker coloured countries have more inventory relative to the lighter coloured ones, allowing advertisers to quickly identify where they would like to advertise. When users roll over each country with their cursor, a pop-up window displays the number of ad impressions available per month and the average cost-per-click recorded for that market. Other information accessible through the tool include carrier and network information, handset information—including brand, model, operating system and features, and user information—including gender, age and location.

“Each of the millions of ad impressions served across our network daily tell us a little more about the mobile internet landscape,” said KF Lai, BuzzCity CEO. “The data accrued is a trove of valuable insight for advertisers and media planners, and also paints a coherent picture of mobile internet trends—what markets are expanding, who is engaging and the types of handsets they are using to surf.”

The result is a tool that instantly puts an unprecedented amount of data in the hands of advertisers that want to run campaigns on the BuzzCity Global Advertising Network. Generally, mobile carriers and networks tend to release very little data on their users, leaving mobile advertising and marketing professionals with no real insight into the markets that they are dealing with. The Campaign Planner provides information that can take much of the assumption and guesswork out of the task.

“BuzzCity’s advertisers are now able to do away with much of the trial-and-error of planning, and can establish effective campaign metrics upfront,” said Lai. “There is no other advertising network that provides this amount of data, enabling marketers to better set goals based on their target markets, optimize their campaigns, continue to adjust performance to achieve the best click through rates, and ultimately achieve the best conversion and customer acquisition rates.”

The BuzzCity Campaign Planner is available at http://www.buzzcity.com/f/campaignplanner in easy-to-understand graphic format, free of charge for all.

Juniper Research has released a new study which estimates that by 2014, total adspend on mobile services will exceed $6 billion annually. This represents a 34% annual growth rate.

They also have a very interesting analysis of which mobile channels will benefit from this spend over the coming years. more»

Network equipment vendor Alcatel-Lucent has teamed up with location based advertising firm 1020 Placecast to bring a new, location-based advertising service to brands and mobile operators.

The service will deliver targeted SMS and MMS ads to opt-in subscribers when they enter pre-defined location zones. more»

Market research firm GfK has released its latest quarterly “Mobile Advertising Report“, which shows that awareness of mobile ads in the UK has dropped since the last quarter.

However, awareness continues to grow in the US, as does the breadth of mobile advertising channels. more»

The Coca Cola Company has long been committed to experimenting with new approaches for building engagement with their consumers.

Recently, one of Coke’s major soft drink brands, Fanta, teamed up with Ogilvy Advertising to bring out a mobile application for teens using a new technology that (as far as we know) has never before been used for mobile marketing.

The Fanta Stealth Sound System brings teens together by letting them talk in secret, without adults even knowing that they are communicating. more»

Telefonica Mobile Group has announced the launch of a new mobile marketing service built around the LiveScreen Media idle screen advertising platform from Celltick. more»

To great fanfare, Apple recently released details about their new mobile operating system – iPhone 3.0 – and the newest handset, the iPhone 3G S.

New features such as in-application purchasing, push notification, access to location based information and a built-in compass mean that this new combination can provide an even more powerful means for brands to communicate with consumers.

Luke Janssen, CEO of mobile agency TigerSpike, has reviewed the new iPhone from the perspective of mobile marketing – read the review to get a good understanding of the implications of this major announcement. more»

TeliaSonera and Ericsson have announced a new, personalized mobile advertising system to be launched in Sweden later in 2009.

The system will send “pod casts” out to consumers overnight to be viewed the next day. more»

Gameloft, a leading international publisher and developer of video games for mobile phones, has announced the launch of a “performance-based” advertising campaign to build distribution of its popular game titles. more»

The Fox Mobile Group is part of News Corporation, one of the largest media companies in the world. News Corp owns such well know assets as 20th Century Fox film, FOX TV broadcasting, National Geographic cable channel, part of B Sky B and Sky Italia, newspapers such as The Times and The Sun in the UK, The Wall Street Journal, and social networking site MySpace.

With such a wealth and diversity of media assets, understanding how to monetize them in new channels such as mobile is very important. In this interview, we talk with Mauro Montanaro, CEO of Fox Mobile Group about branded content, mobile advertising, and how Fox is setup to take advantage of this emerging distribution channel. more»