There’s no suggestion yet that there’s any exclusivity agreement (i.e. the offer extending only to apps for Samsung devices), although this is hardly prohibitive – with 42.5% of the world market share for Android phones last year, Samsung are by far the largest company in this area.

The 100% indie programme kicked off on in March, and will fast track the first 3000 developers to sign up.

It’s a smart move from Samsung in particular: it’ll give incentive to developers to premiere their new apps through Samsung rather than Google Play or Amazon Appstore, and could give the company a big boost in the software market.

This could spell trouble for Google though, with the Wall Street Journal already reporting its concerns over Samsung’s success and fears the latter may use its new power to renegotiate existing arrangements and eat into Google’s lucrative mobile advertising business.

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!

Samsung entrusted media communications agency Starcom and mobile media agency Enrich Mobile with this task.

“If Samsung wanted to make an impact with the launch of Galaxy SII, they needed something that was globally relevant, highly engaging and easily scalable across dozens of local markets,” explains Kristen Kelly, VP global business director of Starcom.

On top of the special Galaxy level, Samsung created an online area with special images, videos, contest to win Angry Birds merchandising and an exclusive Golden Egg that could be won through the evel.

In order to promote the special level, which happened to be the first Angry Birds level to be played in zero gravity, Angry Birds characters were placed in mobile rich media units and video and placed within the Angry Birds game.

Samsung bought more than 14,000,000 impressions that drove consumers to a Samsung owned mobile landing page, which acted as a hub for the campaign. In addition the existence of the special level was highlighted via social media with posts on the official Angry Birds Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The Golden Egg

Attracting players to the hub was just the start, with Rovio designing a gameplay so that the Golden Egg would be virtually impossible to find without watching the video or being told via social media.

Results

Rumours of the level spread quickly thanks to the viral buzz with Starcom reporting high click-through rates to the Samsung SII page from the Hub and thousand of entries to the competition allowing Samsung to communicate directly with them.

Furthermore, users spent more than 12,800,000 minutes engaging with the Samsung Branded level at an average of 8 minutes per user. This campaign has no doubt contributed to the Samsung Galaxy SII becoming Samsung’s best ever selling phone having sold over 5 million units in its first 3 months.

Justin Lello, CEO of Enrich Mobile, said: “The Angry Birds/Samsung Galaxy SII campaign was a classic demonstration of how an integrated sponsorship campaign created positive viral buzz from devoted Angry Birds fans around a very slick Samsung owned environment and game play,” says Lello.

A recently released market forecast shows Smartphones accounting for more than half of the world’s phone market by 2015!

In comparison, in 2011 there will be about 478 million Smartphones shipped, representing just one third of the total volume. And in 2009, Smartphones were only about 16% of the total market.

Much of this growth will be due in part due to the increasing sales of low-end Smartphones that are now becoming available. Shipments of low-end smartphones are expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 115.4 percent during the period from 2010 through 2015, compared to just 16.4 percent for mid-range to high-end smart phones.

As an example, Vodafone has announced the “Smart”, an Android-based Smartphone built by Huawei that will be priced at about €90.

And then there is Samsung, which posted the strongest growth of any handset company in the market with a 600 percent sequential increase in shipments. Samsung’s industry-leading performance was driven by its line of low-end smart phones that appeal to consumers in China and Latin America.

“Samsung seeks to expand market share in the emerging market with models costing around $200, as those markets have lower smartphone penetration rates compared with advanced markets,” a Samsung group spokeswoman

“With their affordable prices, low-end smart phones are attractive to first-time users and to consumers in emerging economies where subscriber levels are rising at the fastest rates of all regions of the world, such as China, India, South Asia and Africa,” said Francis Sideco, senior principal analyst, wireless communications for IHS.

Overall, this rapid growth of Smartphones is quite amazing, and very good news for mobile marketing.

Many people still feel that mobile marketing has a limited usefulness due to the limited capabilities of early phones. As advertisers care about reach, they believe they need to cater only to very simple devices.

But this information shows that fairly soon smartphones will be the norm, and advertisers will be able to target very capable, high quality devices and still enjoy a large reach.