A new report was released last week by Smaato outlining the success of mobile advertising in 2009. One very surprising highlight of their report was the fact that Symbian is the leading mobile platform when it comes to engaging end-users in mobile advertising. This surprises me as I was under the impression that the iPhone was by far the leader in CTR’s. Today, Symbian released a statement responding to this report.

Symbian Dominant in Click-Through

Some new December data from the mobile advertising company Smaato suggests that it’s actually Symbian that kills both the iPhone and Android. Now, I know what you’re thinking: that’s because Nokia, despite the buzz surrounding the sexier smartphone devices, remains the biggest mobile player in the world. But actually, the numbers are for the all-important click-through rates on the various platforms.

Smaato Index - Operation System CTR's Worldwide - Dec 2009

As part of our 2010 marketing strategy we are going to begin sharing interesting articles from around the mobile marketing/advertising space with all of our readers. Over the weekend GigaOm (a publication I have a lot of respect for) posted and article about how small mobile ad startups are going to fuel an M&A fire this year. Although the two biggest ad networks were recently bought up by Google and Apple, there are a lot of smaller companies that are pursuing very interesting niches in the mobile ecosystem. The article argues that these startups are going to be very attractive to some of the big boys in the next year.

Smaller Startups to Fuel M&A Fire in Mobile Ads This Year

While we may see one or two more big-budget acquisitions in mobile advertising this year, most of the M&A activity will center on smaller startups. Entrenched firms with deep pockets will look to fill out the holes in their mobile ad businesses, and independent players will forge alliances to better compete with their larger counterparts. Those deals won’t make headlines, but they will reconfigure the landscape of mobile advertising in 2010.

In the past few months we have seen some major moves in the mobile advertising industry by two of the biggest tech titans. In November Google acquired mobile ad network Admob for a reported $750-million in stock and in January Apple acquired another major mobile ad network Quattro wireless for close to $300-million. Now a Business Week article has been released stating that sources close to Steve Jobs say he is planning big things for Quattro. According to these source Mr. Jobs is planning to “revolutionize the mobile advertising industry”.

If any of you have used Admob before you will know that the majority of the ads that are served up on their network are pretty much replicas of traditional online banner ads and in most cases not well targeted and un-actionable. Mr. Jobs see’s this hole and knows the true powers of both mobile and more specifically the iPhone. Mobile advertising has the potential to be much more valuable than web based advertising both to end-users and brands. Instead of simply serving up two-dimensional banner ads that click to a mobile website, Jobs see’s the potential of utilizing the vast functionality of these smart phones to engage end-users.

Take this scenario for example. A user is checking their Yahoo Fantasy Sports app on the iPhone during Football Sunday. The phone knows which app is being used when and knows to serve up a Domino’s Pizza ad. The ad shows the latest deals from Domino’s and then lets the end-user make a call directly from the ad. The user is also then able to download a coupon from the ad directly into their phone’s photo gallery so that when the delivery boy arrives at the door they can redeem their discount. In cases like these the advertisement is adding loads of value to the end user and because they are so engaged the brand (Domino’s in this case) is happy.

Spreed believes in this methodology and is actively building these types of ads for our publishers’ advertising partners. In addition our ad platform has advanced targeting capabilities. Because we analyze every action that goes on within our apps we can begin profiling users and serving them the right ads at the right time.

These are very early days for the mobile advertising industry, however we believe, just like Steve Jobs, that this industry needs to go a lot further than simply pushing a random banner ad to an unknown end user.

We had a tremendous year at Spreed, with the support of our partner digital media properties, successfully launching mobile apps to millions of mobile consumers. Whether setting in motion trial experiments, producing first-of-a-kind mobile apps in the market, or acting as sub-contracted developers with end-to-end service delivery expertise, we were able to accelerate our partners’ time-to-market on all mobile media platforms. In doing so, we rapidly delivered certified mobile app downloads, exponentially improved media property pageviews and significantly increased advertising revenues for them, especially when benchmarked against 3rd party builds currently in the market.

For example, some of our most notable successes were:

The launch of The Globe and Mail, Metro News Canada (1st Bilingual mobile app featured by Apple), Sing Tao News (largest Asian market newspaper in Canada), Guardian Media, Scripps’ GoVols mobile sports app for the University of Texas and more.

This resulted in:

• Cumulatively spawning millions of page views per month per app while driving new mobile media brand and revenue opportunities for each.
• Some mobile apps now are attracting more page views per month than on their branded Internet websites; with loyalty to the brands and mobile apps extremely high on a daily basis.
• Some partners seeing more than 2% CTR’ s on ad campaigns ran and sold by their in-house sales teams; as well as upwards of $15 average CPMs for mobile ad sales — much higher than industry norms for these premium media properties.

With proven successes like these in the market, along with our proprietary service delivery innovations for mobile analytics and advertising at Spreed, it is with complete confidence that we believe that our partners will significantly increase pageviews and revenue streams from their mobile media properties in 2010.

We are going to make a major push in 2010 to share our industry findings with everyone. Please keep coming back and do not hesitate to contact me at dave[at]spreedinc[dot]com if you have any questions about building or monetizing mobile apps.