Big sporting events always mean big advertising budgets, and brands trying to go the extra mile to capitalize on the fans’ enthusiasm.

The biggest sporting event of 2014 is undoubtedly the World Cup in Brazil, and McDonald’s has launched a new campaign using augmented reality to engage fans while they are eating. more»

Several recent studies have confirmed that gaming continues to dominate as one of the most popular activities on mobile, and therefore represents a clear opportunity for marketers.

According to one, nearly 70% of tablet owners currently use their device to play games which many buy it here, it predicted that over 50% of the US population will actively play games on their mobile device by 2015. more»

Mobile Marketing has usually been an “early adopter” of all new mobile technologies: agencies and brands have been good at figuring out how some new technology can be used to increase engagement, demand attention, or build loyalty (think about AR, mobile apps, accelerometers, location, etc.)

Here is a really interesting new technology demonstration from Google, showing off one of the features of HTML 5 that is in Chrome. We don’t think we’ve seen this in a mobile marketing campaign yet, but we’re sure some innovative agency will start soon!
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As part of the US launch of Marvel’s The Avengers in cinemas, the promoters have teamed up with Walmart in order to offer Walmart shoppers access to a super hero Augmented Reality game. more»

When Samsung launched their new Galaxy SII handset they were faced with the usual marketing conundrum of how to create a buzz around the launch of a Smartphone in an overcrowded and over-hyped marketplace

Having identified that their target audience spent more time on social games than they did watching prime time television, they came up with the idea of creating an exclusive level of the Angry Birds game.

And the results were spectacular!
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Kiip is a start-up company focused on in-game mobile advertising. Their differentiator has been offer consumers real word rewards for virtual achievements.

Now Kiip is about to up the ante by launching a new service called The Swarm, with Walt Disney Studios as the first advertiser. more»

Mobile entertainment company RockLive, had a lot of success in 2011 through launching sport star branded mobile games.

Recent games include Mad Chad (Chad Ochocinco), Main Event (Mike Tyson), and now Heads Ups featuring Christiano Ronaldo. more»

Augmented Reality (AR) is an interesting technology that has been rapidly adopted by mobile marketers over the past couple of years.

This campaign from Cadbury is based around a fairly simple AR game – the clever part is that the game is triggered simply by pointing the phone at a Cadbury product! more»

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Mobile ad platform Tap Me has launched new advertising formats specially designed for mobile in-game advertising.

The new formats aim to pass on brand messages to consumers in a far less intrusive way than current in-game ads. more»

Istanbul is one of the most vibrant cities in Europe, and the Beyoglu district is the heart of the city. What a perfect place to launch an innovative mobile marketing campaign that brings together a brand message of love and fun with leading edge mobile technology.

Last summer, mobile agency Mobilera teamed up with media agency Outeractive to do just that for Unilever’s Cornetto brand, bringing an outdoor audience participation multi-player mobile game to the millions that pass through this neighborhood on a daily basis.

The Cornetto mobile game campaign won the 2011 GSMA Award for “Best Mobile Advertising & Marketing Campaign”! more»

A recent report from market research firm Juniper Research has found that global ad spend on mobile games will be multiplied by 10 over the next five years.

The report predicts that the global adspend will reach $894 million by 2015 up from $87 million in 2010. more»

App Stores are the real hub of activity in the mobile world these days, and having an up-to-date understanding of the key trends in this area can be crucial for a business.

Distimo is an app store analytics company built to solve the challenges created by a widely fragmented app store marketplace. This latest report from Distimo takes a look at in-app billing, as well as reporting the highest ranking paid and free apps from the Apple App Store, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace. more»

A recent survey of iPad users in the UK has shown that the iPad is users’ favorite device for reading newspapers, magazines, and books.

However, only 16% of iPads are regularly used outside of the home.
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Quite a few people have wondered if the income stream from mobile advertising could be sufficient to run a business, as it is usually very difficult to get actual data about the revenues from publishers.

Now mobile application and games developer MobilityWare has announced that it earned $300,000 during June 2010 from ads in its various titles on Greystripe’s advertising network. more»

One of the hardest things to judge is who your users are, but a recent survey of Mobile Gamers by Buzz City sheds some light on this all important question.

The survey was conducted during May and June 2010 and involved almost 1,500 consumers from 10 countries in the top 20 traffic generators on the Buzz City network. more»

BuzzCity has announced the launch of a new tool which will allow the thousands of free mobile games available for download on the Djuzz mobile site to be syndicated and let partners to create there own branded games portals. more»

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Volkswagen has launched its fourth iPhone game called “Volkswagen Think Blue Challenge.”

In keeping with today’s greater awareness of environmental impact, the game aims to promote the fuel-saving capabilities of VW’s Polo and Polo BlueMotion cars. more»

CPA – Cost Per Action – is a relatively new type of ad pricing that is starting to make some headway in the mobile world. In CPA, there is no risk for the advertiser, as they only pay when a consumer completes an agreed transaction.

Recently Greystripe ran a special CPA ad program for mobile app developers, where they charged $0.99 per download, regardless of how many impressions or clicks it took to get the download. more»

Mobile advertising company Greystripe has announced that it has secured a further $2 million in funding from NBC Universal’s Peacock Equity Fund. This brings Greystripe’s round C investment to $7.5 million, following a $5.5 million investment from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, Incubic Venture Capital, and Monitor Ventures. more»

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»

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»

Gamevil, the LA based mobile games publisher, has announced an extension of their partnership with the Coca-Cola company.

A new version of their best selling Baseball Superstars game will include Coke ads throughout the stadium.
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Ad-funded games company Cellufun seems to have a talent for coming up with unique, topically relevant mobile games.

Last year they released the world’s first “Mobile Political Boxing Game” for the US presidential election campaign.

And now they are releasing what must be the world’s first Mobile Scam Simulation, called “Made Off” (as in “I made off with your money”).
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Metro and 123play.com have announced a partnership to bring more ad-funded mobile games to the UK market. Metro is the UK’s largest free urban daily newspaper, with a combined paper, online, and mobile readership approaching 5 million people daily. more»

Even in these difficult economic times, Greystripe has raised an additional $5.5 million in Series C round funding. The primary purpose of this funding will be to enable Greystripe to integrate mobile advertising into existing online media buying systems. To date, Greystripe has powered over 160 million ad-supported mobile downloads. more»

With over 100 million game downloads, ad-supported mobile games distributor Greystripe is uniquely positioned to share consumer insights metrics.

These statistics have been collected from Greystripe’s internal database of users, and reveal a deeper look at the consumers playing their games, along with mobile gaming demographics, click-through rates and exclusive iPhone statistics. The results provide a meaningful inside look into the advertising potential of mobile games. more»

Radio Shack and ad-funded mobile games company Greystripe recently released the results of a new full-screen ad campaign on Greystripe’s mobile advertising network. The results show a very significant increase in both unaided brand awareness, as well as an increase in the number of respondents who agreed that RadioShack is a “Top Wireless Store.” more»

Tomi T Ahonen is a Hong Kong based author and consultant who worked previously for Nokia and mobile operator Elisa in Finland. He is a prolific writer, and his sixth book is entitled Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media.

In this opinion piece, Tomi talks about the 7 key benefits of mobile, the need for “engagement marketing”, and some of the advanced trends that he sees coming out of the Asian countries. more»

NBC Universal, one of the world’s leading media companies, has announced a partnership with ad-funded mobile games company Greystripe which will see Greystripe’s full catalogue of ad-supported games coming to the NBC mobile web sites. more»

This seems to be the week for iPhone news. Just as Apple launched their 3G iPhone and the iPhone App store (where iPhone users can go to find, buy, and download iPhone applications), Greystripe announced they are bringing ad-funded gaming to the iPhone platform, and making it easy for iPhone game developers to tap into Greystripe’s distribution network. more»

One of the most frequent comments one hears from brands and agencies about mobile advertising is the need for good case studies with solid measurement of results – especially case studies about the impact of brand advertising.

For the launch of the recent film “The Golden Compass“, New Line Cinema joined up with Greystripe to run a mobile marketing campaign aimed at engaging movie-goers and raising the awareness, interest, and intent to see movie. Market research firm Dynamic Logic was brought in to measure the branding impact of the campaign. Read about the survey results, and how mobile compares to typical online advertising for films. more»

Sega has launched marketing plans for several new games that will be released this summer. Having started making mobile games in 2007 Sega plans to release 10 titles by the end of the year. more»

Research published by PQ Media has showed that despite a slowing economy, branded entertainment marketing has continued to expand. During 2007 it grew by 14.7% to reach $22.3 billion. This means that over the last 5 years, this market segment has almost doubled as brand advertisers shift spending away from more traditional 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»

Mobile advertising solutions company Amobee and games publisher Exit Games have signed an agreement that will place ads in multiplayer handheld devices. more»

A new ad-funded gaming community was recently launched by Hovr, Inc. The service includes over 100 game titles all of which will be available for download at no charge. more»

Greystripe, a major distributer of ad-funded mobile games, recently added additional games to their portfolio, as well as adding additional distribution channels.
Greystripe announced that 6 new mobile game publishers have agreed to distribute their games on the ad-supported mobile game portal GameJump.com, offering consumers over 400 games titles
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Games company THQ has said they will run a campaign for hit game Worms on the wap site of FHM, which claims to be the world’s fastest growing mens magazine. more»