A weekly wrap up of news in the mobile advertising world

Unexpected

Pampers advertises in Sex app

Procter & Gamble appears to have stumbled into the business of unintentional PSAs. TechCrunch caught this Pampers ad running on the “300+ Sex Positions” iPhone app. The iAd directs users to the diaper brand’s “Hello Baby” app, a tool to help you track your pregnancy. Because really, nothing sets the mood quite like the thought of a wailing infant with a loaded diaper.

Mobile Email Most Likely to Drive Purchase

Email was the most powerful form of mobile marketing in terms of driving purchase among smartphone owners in the US. More than half of smartphone owners who had made a purchase because of a mobile marketing message said they had done so after receiving a mobile marketing email.

Brands

Rovio names in-app advertising partner for China

Rovio- the Angry Birds developer and Madhouse- the largest mobile advertising network in China are collaborating to make the most of the growing mobile marketing in China.

Rovio names in-app advertising parnter for Phone/Android

Tired of being the showcase app for irrelevant in-app display advertising, Angry Birds will be using the Nexage Revenue Platform to improve costumer satisfaction and for the monetization of Angry Birds impression on Apple’s iPhone and Android.

Flipboard now a real magazine, has more ads than content

Flipboard’s new program will see selected brands that have a relationship with Conde Nast appear in full-page ads embedded in the streams of the publisher’s content, beginning with American Express  in The New Yorker, followed by Lexus in Bon Appetitmagazine and Wired.

Hilton Hotels launches the hospitality industry’s first iAd

Subway allows ordering via mobile app

Global restaurant chain Subway is increasing its digital offering with a new mobile marketing campaign, which will run across Velti’s mGage platform.

The campaign will allow consumers to order meals via their phone for pickup at their nearest restaurant. In addition, a new mobile app and mobile site will give them access to information about the menu, nutrition and store locations.

Technology

What’s New in Behavioral Targeting for Mobile Advertising

Behavioral targeting is important so advertisers can reach the target audience interested in their offer and most likely to convert. The cost of targeted advertising is more expensive but by reaching the most relevant audience, the ad spend is also more effective.

Some companies are creating technologies that will allow beharioral targeting and tracking even on mobile devices where online cookie based technologies do not work well.

Mobile advertising overrated

Just a decade ago banner ads were seen in the same light: ugly, annoying, and ultimately ineffective. More recently, however, display ads have made improvements in their designs and the way they’re targeted. Recent case studies have proven this. Smartly targeted and well-designed campaigns can work to increase brand visibility and purchase intent.

Research

7 in 10 Smartphone and Tablet Users Pay Attention to Mobile Ads When Surfing Web

Ads found while surfing the web on a mobile device appear to get the most attention from mobile users

Infographic: Android vs. Apple’s iOS in Mobile Advertising

Indian brands going the mobile advertising way

According to the third issue of The BuzzCity Report, 2011, India continued to maintain its top position of the first quarter, with a growth of 29% and 7470 million ad impression served.

The continued growth of user activity in India has been matched with advertiser interest thus resulting in an increase of 27% in banner ads.

There was a noticeable increase in activities amongst brand advertisers, particularly in the sectors of automobile, financial services and consumer health sectors.

More money flows into mobile ad startups

Venture capital firms have invested well over $100 million so far this year in rounds of $5 million or more for at least nine companies in the mobile ad space, according to peHUB’s analysis of data from Thomson Reuters (publisher of peHUB). Several more mobile ad companies have raised smaller early stage and seed rounds.

Mobile ad creation is a relatively new industry with new technologies and new creative design challegenes. As in all advertising, creative concept and art direction are still the pillars of an effective ad. But with all new mediums of communication, there are always new factors to consider in making a effective advertisement suited for the mobile medium.

In this article, the MobDis team has laid out 7 tips and ideas to help you in your process of making that mind blowing mobile rich media ad.

Control

Let your users be in control. Individually, each person’s top favorite may differ from another. In the Stay Hilton, Go Everywhere iAd, it allows users to find the destination that they would most like to visit.

This increases the interests and engagement as it allows your users the freedom to access content that interests them and at the pace that they would like. In addition, the element of exploration generates extra excitement within the environment. 

It is useful that you have a “skip” button for your users too, so they would not leave your ad entirely. Again, control is key.

Think Outside the Rectangle

What lies within the rectangle is important, but you have to think of what other features you can include to your iAd to increase the interactivity of the application. Add music, videos to your iAd or leverage on tools like tap, swipe, spin, shake, & more!

You can even make your ad feel like it is a part of an experience. Tap into the similarities between your product to the functionalities of phone, you can illustrate and make known to your viewers the features of your product.  Additionally, you can integrate it with tv commercials and print ads just like in the AXA ad.

Social Factor

Your ad should be able to share your great message with other individuals. Include a sharing function into you ad to increase the virality of your message. An example is seen in the Liberty Mutual ad where viewers can share their deed to a poll, this is a great tool to encourage other users to do a good dead through the idea of competitive altruism. 

Words

Place important and strategic content to the users but go easy on the words. We know you love writing, but users don’t like reading too much on phone. Instead of writing your address, have an interactive map, or instead of listing your phone number, integrate a “add to contacts” / “call now” button. 

Call to action

-to-action button serves the purpose to the objective of your advertisement. Ask yourself what do you want to achieve, if is a coupon deal, include a button for users to redeem this.This is the best way to ensure response a to your message.

Optimize

Always put out variations to test on the responses of your ads before you roll out all your resources. There are many tools to track the user engagement level. Good indicators of a good advertisements are the number of exits of the ad, engagement time and the amount of clicks to call-to-action.

Load Time

Make sure your ad is not too media heavy that users would click out of the ad before the ad shows. A guide is to assume a download rate of 100kB per second for your ad. If you need to have media heavy ads, a method is to show a splash screen while the ad loads. Additionally, good programming habits can help you optimize the load time. Good tip for keeping the loading time low is to put your javascripts and css into one .js and .css file.

All in all, we hope these 7 tips will help you create a great mobile advertisment. Of course, a bit of creativity helps!

AirDrop is an incredibly simple drag-and -drop file sharing system that allows you to swap files with other Macs over WiFi.

Apple has introduced a handful of features meant to address security and privacy, including sandboxing.

Some features that I found useful in the past were apparently gone — until I did some looking.

Spotlight magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner now extends beyond system search.

Resume, Autosave, and Versions will likely be the most important additions for many of you.

You’ll find more than enough features amongst the 250-plus to justify that modest price tag.

You can easily go back to the old ways in scrolling, mail layout, unhiding the library.

The resume feature is great, versioning is a must have once you start to rely on it.

Auto Save and Versions are likely to save a lot of heartbreak for a lot of users.

We didn’t notice any major hangups on our clean system when installing Lion.

Things seem snappier and for me. Mission Control is a great addition.

Full screen apps — was sceptical at first, but yes, they’re good news.

Apple executes airdrop with typically user-friendly panache.

Apple promises fewer crashes in this build of Safari.

Safari (v5.1) gets some nice upgrades here.

Install and upgrade was easy and flawless.

Don’t have to stand in line to buy it.

Works with office 2008 and above.

VMWare Fusion works fine.

Pretty!, No scroll bars.

Costs only $29.

NO

Safari is very buggy so far. Keeps dropping my wifi connection, stalling, cutting and pasting seems to spin the beach ball for no reason, freezing pages that are sort of out-of-focus…will almost certainly end up going back to Firefox.

Mail – I was really looking forward to this after watching the Keynote, but in practice it’s visually confusing and nowhere near as clean, neat and efficient as the old display.

I’ m getting the annoying spinning cursor all the time while doing basic tasks like browsing the web with safari.

Mission Control is a waste of time for power users; the old 4-finger swipe app switcher was far more efficient.

I know Launchpad is used to attract new iPad-but-not-yet-Mac users, but for old Mac hands, a waste of time.

Had to force quit Finder at least 3 times during the past 4 hours, dunno why it stops responding.

Transfering anything on airdrop through com-2-com wifi is slow and drops regularly.

Rosetta programs , AppleWorks, Quicken, Microsoft 2004 does not work.

A few features are missing like the ability to add things to Launchpad

Hate the new left-panel display in finder, not as clear as the old one.

I’ve no idea what the other 240 some other “improvements” are.

Natural scrolling is difficult due to years of muscle memory.

Full screen doesn’t free up a ton of formerly unused space.

I am not amused. So many things changed, broken or missing.

A working Mac is required to download and install.

Depends on the age of everything on your system.

Can only be installed on Core 2 Duo (or later).

Autocomplete not exactly welcome assistance.

New gestures are hard to use and adjust to.

Not the polished upgrade I expected.

Problems with crashes and iMovie.

Can’t run PowerPC applications.

No longer beginner-friendly.

Mail don’t work.

Source: http://www.brafton.com/news/web-experience-vital-to-mobile-marketing-success

Admob is a mobile advertising platform founded by Omar Hamouri in 2006, offering advertising solution to Android, iOS, webOS, Flash Lite, Windows Phone 7 and all standard mobile web browser. Google has acquired Admob on November 2009 and today Admob is the world’s largest mobile advertising platform serving more than 700 billion worth of impression since its launch.

What is a Admob House Ad?

An Admob House Ad is your own advertisement that you could embed on your own app for free. It is a great avenue for you to generate extra revenue from your free app and also to encourage your users to upgrade to the paid app. Admob’s seamless UI also make the creation of your house ad a breeze. A house ad could be set within a couple of clicks and you can also easily setup targeting options like geographical location, demographic profile and devices version. This ensures that your advertisements reach to your intended audience.

A house ad is a great source of backlink for your website(if your app have one) as it will generate more traffic to your website and give more information to your audience where the mobile screen could not deliver.

If so happens that your app do not have a website, the house ad could double up as an advertisement medium where you could earn extra revenue from it. There are 2 options for it, look for a potential advertiser who is willing to pay to advertise on your app or simply use the generated advertisement from AdMob.

How do I sell my ad space

Say if you are looking to generate some advertising revenue from your mobile app. There are a couple of ways:

1. Use Ad Network (i.e AdMob)

Once you have embedded a AdMob SDK into your App, AdMob will automatically run whatever ads they have and share the revenue with you.

2. Sell your own ads
a. Sometimes for premium publishers, you might not want to run ads from anywhere because you might not know what ads will show up.
b. You might also want to position your ad space as premium in line with the content that your app is providing.
c. In this case, you can sell your own ads directly either through a sales person who already exist in your organisation and who is probably already selling ads for your website.
d. You can also list on your website that you are open to having advertisers for your app and people can contact you for your advertising rates.
e. You can even create a house ad to promote that you have space available for sale!

How do I add Admob House Ad into my App?

1)     The very first step of building your House Ad is of course to have an account with Ad Mob, but not to worry, you could tie your Google account with Ad Mob so that you will not have to re-enter your credentials again. After having your account in place, the next important step is to place the downloaded AdMob SDK into your application to ensure that advertisements could be pushed in to your application successfully.

This is done in many ways and it differs according to the mobile OS you are building. Check out AdMob’s documentation here: http://code.google.com/mobile/ads/docs/

AdMob SDK and code being embedded in a iPhone App via XCode

2)     The next step is to create the content of the advertisement where you could choose a text ad or a banner ad. Choose whichever deem correct to you and click Finish.

Choose the creative type for the house ad banner

3)     Next, you will have to choose which platform you wish to publish your advertisement to. Additional options such as Target Country and Device Version is also available.

Targetting options for your house ads

4)     The last step is to create an action when users click on your advertisement.

Defining the post tap action. Landing site or App download

This is usually either a App Download if you are promoting another mobile application or a URL to a website. We highly recommended that your URL is mobile optimized. Mobile users are picky and will not navigate the website if it is not mobile optimised.

In fact AdMob has found that campaigns with mobile optimised pages increased signifcantly the average length of visit. You can easily design and launch mobile websites via a MobDis (http://mobdis.com) which empowers designers and advertisers to design, launch and share engaging rich media mobile ads and sites. Designers use a visual drag and drop interface to design the microsite allowing them to design a mobile microsite up to 5 times faster and with no development knowledge .

If you have a great creative you can even charge more for your ads because users who see the ads are more engaged and advertisers are willing to pay for the extra effort in making a great ad.

5)     Voila, you are done and the advertisement will be pushed to your application soon.

how it looks like on an app

Conclusion

AdMob house ads give you the ability to insert your own ads into your app. Now you just need to position yourself as a premium publisher and get advertisers to buy ads from you. To get started, try running a House Ad with a Ads space for sale text and link it to a enquiry form that you can build with MobDis. then once the advertiser has contacted you, you simply just need get their text/image from them and run it as a house ad.