The search for the golden goose

One vendor trying to wring greater value out of the mobile ad market is Quattro Wireless, which on Jan. 21 unveiled the new GetMobile mobile advertising network, designed to mirror in some ways the success of Google's AdSense online auction format. Quattro has built a network of online mobile sites — from content providers including Playboy.com, the NFL and TheStreet.com. Now, it is providing the same tools it used to mobilize those sites — dubbed the GetMobile Juicer to any publisher that wants to create its own mobile site — for no cost.

While that effort aims to drive up the number of mobile sites — and available locations in which to place ads — Quattro also is introducing the GetMobile exchange, a marketplace where mobile advertisers can bid for keywords for targeted mobile ads. In a formula that Google mined online to great success, the approach will target “the long tail of mobile ads,” said Eswar Priyadarshan, chief technology officer for Quattro.

Also tracking with the Web is the emergence of video on mobile devices. And as mobile video arrives, so will mobile ads. Hoping to take advantage of that trend is QuickPlay, which today runs off-deck mobile video services for ESPN and MTV, among others, and is looking to leverage that expertise to address the burgeoning mobile video ad market.

While some operators have begun to deliver video “channels” on their devices equivalent to existing TV channels, QuickPlay sees greater promise in an Internet-style consumption of mobile video — essentially “five minutes of fun” with potential for a click-through to more information, said Wayne Purboo, CEO of QuickPlay. To that end, QuickPlay has built a platform for targeting and inserting video ads onto video devices and networks, with targeting enabled via extensive tagging of video content, Purboo said.

Mobile experimentation also is leading to some very offbeat approaches as well. For instance, how about a local ad solution that uses the camera phone as the trigger for a so-called “closed-loop marketing exchange”?

That's the message from Mobot, which has built its own image database and solution that lets users take a picture and send it via multimedia messaging service and then have a marketing message sent back to them. For instance, one particular campaign had users clicking their camera phones away at a Bourne Ultimatum movie poster and receiving two-for-one movie passes in return. Russ Gocht, CEO of Mobot, calls this process “mobitizing” an area, noting that “when it comes to getting pertinent and useful information to people, the lower the effort, the greater the benefit. Pointing and clicking a camera phone is simple, with a potential big payoff.”

Whether “clicking” for ad dollars ever takes off remains to be seen. Regardless, it's that equation that Gocht mentions — effort or attention in exchange for benefit — that all mobile advertising must strive to fulfill. As operators experiment with new mobile ad approaches in 2008, that's an important equation to keep in mind.

STATE OF MOBILE ADVERTISING

40 of Web sites have a mobile version

22% plan to have one in the next year

29% of mobile sites have user profile info for advertising

3% of advertisers were advertising on mobile Web sites

4% of advertisers were advertising on carrier portals

Source: JupiterResearch

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