Mobile Ads Become More Interactive

If you regularly peruse the portfolio companies of the nation's most prestigious venture capital funds, you will discover that there is a great deal of money moving toward mobile content and marketing. These companies are banking on the idea that growth of mobile web surfing is second only to aging baby boomers in the range of certain trends.

Mobile Ad agencies including Admob, Mobiqa and AdInfuse are working to quickly get a number of pilot programs and success stories out into the either to continue to add blue chip partners to the impressive list of companies that are already advertising directly to users mobile phones.

This summer, liquor maker Diageo launched a mobile video ad campaign that was fairly successful and exciting for the networks given the wealth of the ad budgets of the nation's largest liquor producers.

More recently, AdInfuse ran a couple of promotions around video clips and music video content in Europe. The company put advertising in either pre- or post-run video positions, meaning they tested placement of the advertisement around the content to check the tolerance level of mobile web users to both view the ads and pay for content. The results were fairly impressive:

Advertisement Consumption:
• 90% of the users said they viewed the ads. 52% of the users reportedly viewed the video channels when at home.
• 82% of the users viewed the pre-roll ads to the end vs. 67% for the post-roll ads.
• The length of the advertisement proved to be a big factor determining the likelihood of an ad being watched in its entirety. 10 second ads were viewed to the end by 90% of the users, 20 second ads were viewed to the end by 80% of the users, and 40 second ads were viewed to the end by 60% of users.

Bottom line: Effectiveness of Ad-supported Content
• 50% of the users claimed they would not have viewed the videos on the ad funded “Nur zum Spass” video service if it wasn’t for free.
• A 12-fold increase in uptake of ad sponsored premium music videos relative to the same clips priced at a premium on Swisscom Vodafone Live!.
• An 8-fold increase in uptake of ad funded comedy videos relative to similar premium channels on Swisscom Vodafone Live! portal.
• 50% of those who visited the ‘promo/landing page’ for the ‘50Rp music videos’ indeed purchased a clip.
• 85% of the music videos published on the ad sponsored “50p Music Video clip” service achieved higher revenue compared to the same video file being published on the premium streaming music video clips service on the Swisscom portal.



Direct Response Mobile Ads

Most fascinating for Mpayy of late is the AdMob advertisement that targets iPhone users and provides multiple levels of interaction including providing a zip code in order to get directions to the closest Land Rover dealership, and further to call or request a phone call from the dealership.

According to MobiAD, the results were:

The campaign, which has been running since late October, has had 400,000 impressions on the iPhone of which 1,100 users have entered their zip codes. This represents a higher click-through-rate of 0.3% on the iPhone than the average 0.22% for the entire campaign (2.5 million impressions to date. The mobile ads will run through the end of 2007).

• Of the users who clicked on the Land Rover ad, 23% responded to at least one call-to-action on the landing page.

• Of the users that responded to at least one call-to-action:
• 88% of them watched the video,
• 9% entered their zip code to find a nearby Land Rover dealership
• 3% used the click-2-call action.

• Of the 3% who clicked to call through the advertisement:
• 50% of the calls lasted more than 30 seconds
• 20% of the calls lasted for more than a minute.

Even more interesting is that AdMob hired away facebook's Director of Engineering and is now providing a platform for integration of advertising into mobile facebook widgets.

AdMob and Mpayy can empower advertisers to bring mobile commerce directly to users on their cell phones making mobile advertising immediately actionable. Mpayy launches on January 21st, and its widget is likely to be ready out of the gates. It will be available for mobile widgetization before the end of February, and it will make mobile marketing messages actionable in a way that no other medium or platform can. If only we could get a call back....

Boarding Pass on your Cell Phone

Continental Airlines is launching a 3-month pilot program at Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport to allow customers to present a WAP-enabled boarding pass after checking in through the company's wireless site, which is here. According to Continental's Customer Service, users are then presented with the boarding pass image that is the airline's equivalent of a bar code. They present both their phones and photo id to TSA people at the security queue, and then again at the gate to get on the plane.

This is the one image that is being used with this story, but it's not clear who took it as it is at TSA.gov, USA Today, the Houston Chronicle and Endgadget without attribution.




The company providing the enabling technology is not listed in any of the stories or on the Continental website that we can find. As best we can tell, it MAY be a company called Mobiqa that has a product that is IATA approved and presents the image to security.



IATA has set a goal of 100% of airlines having the capability to do Bar Coded Boarding Passes by 2008 and 100% usage by 2010. Air Canada was actually the first to implement IATA's 2D barcode standard and usage grew quickly according to theStreet.com. According to Eric Leopold, Project Manager at IATA, the organization thinks it can facilitate more than $500 million in annual savings.


Mobile Ticket Purchase & Presentment

Mobiqa also caught our eye in a deal it did with PayPal and their mobile offering. The case study discusses that Scotland Rugby fans were left stranded without tickets due to strikes by the mail service. PayPal's WAP site enabled the payment processing and Mobiqa provided the ticket validation.

Mpayy will be the best solution for secure mobile payment processing and we hope to work our way into verticals like event ticketing with a partner like Mobiqa.