Happy Monday morning everyone. I hope you all had a great weekend. I know everyone is busy getting ready for the week ahead, so instead of giving you a few long posts I have decided to share some of my weekend reading with you.

Mobile ad campaigns 5 times more effective than online: InsightExpress study

“Far from being a one-trick pony, mobile is effective in rich environments like mobile video, minimal environments like SMS and the area in between covered by mobile display,” she said. “Add to this the findings that all verticals are seeing mobile impacts greater than online campaigns and the arguments for not adding mobile to a media plan fall away.”

NBC details aggressive mobile initiatives for 2010 Olympics

Through partnerships with several carrier networks and brands such as Coca-Cola, NBC Universal is bringing its 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games to the mobile medium.

NBC has launched several new mobile initiatives and rebranded its other wireless properties to promote the sporting event. The entertainment giant’s coverage of the Olympic Games spans its various television networks and content channels to bring as much programming and interaction to consumers.

Mobile Marketer’s Mobile Outlook 2010

It is quite clear from recent market activity – Google buying AdMob and Apple absorbing Quattro Wireless, Apple iPad and Google Nexus One launches, eBay’s record $500 million in mobile commerce last year – that mobile is no longer considered a niche medium.

An interesting post came up on Mobile Marketing Watch yesterday about the resurgence of application sponsorships. The post cites an article written by Steve Smith of MediaPost. I will let Steve do the heavy lifting, but in summary the article states that not every brand translates well into a mobile application. If you do not have an idea for a mobile app that adds value to your brand, don’t just build something for the hell of it! You will spend big money on an app that hardly ever gets downloaded and even if it does the retention rates will probably be so low that it does not justify the costs. Instead, find an existing mobile media application  - i.e. a newspaper app – whose retention rates are usually through the roof (74% after 30 days) and pay for a run of app sponsorship. You will be able to, at a fraction of the time and cost, leverage the eye balls that someone else has been able to retain and still embed actionable functionality that will give you all the benefits of having your own app. If you have any questions on what I mean about embedding actionable functionality please contact me. A number of the ad units that Spreed is helping to build can be considered apps within apps (actionable functionality) and when grouped together with the sponsorship costs are much less expensive and will provide much more bang for your buck! Here is the article from MediaPost:

The Lost Art of Sponsorship

Now that a bit of the fervor over branded apps has died down, it has become clearer to a lot of marketers that not every brand translates easily into the kind of utility consumers really want on their phone. Some publishers tell me that they are getting a lot of interest from marketers who want to be sole sponsor of new branded media apps. Instead of buying up a new audience for their branded app, they prefer to align with a tool and a media source brand that has already built an audience.

Mobile advertising has been a long time coming and advocates of its power have always been touting its ability to drive high level click through rates (CTRs) for advertisers. We saw a few of examples of these high CTRs in 2009, but Mobile Posse a mobile advertising firm based out of Virginia just posted some interested statistics that cannot be ignored. Mobile Posse has partnered with 5 of the major carriers in the United States to create opt-in (users have to agree to see the advertising) idle-screen advertisements. This means that when users phones are idle they are displayed an advertisement on their screen that they can then click on. If the user choses to click on the ad they are pushed to a mobile website with more information from the relevant advertiser. Over 1 million mobile users have opted into Mobile Posse’s service which allows them to view these ads.

In January Mobile Posse launched an ad campaign with Ford Motors, promoting the new Ford Taurus. The campaign displayed information about the new car on user’s idle screens and when they clicked on the advertisement they were taken to Ford’s mobile website which let them locate their closest dealer. This campaign saw a staggering 20% CTR. This means that 20% of people who saw this ad actually clicked on it and interacted with Ford’s mobile website. Typical web based ad campaigns see an average CTR of just under 1%, so a 20% campaign is not something to ignore. It is important to note that the numbers are slightly skewed because all of these users had initially opted in to see advertising on their phones, however these stats suggest that the power of mobile advertising is very real.

In an earlier post (here) we spoke about the future of mobile advertising and suggested where Apple and Spreed want to take the industry. If we can match motivated users with the type of actionable advertising capabilities that Spreed is building into our platform, it is not insane to think that by the end of 2010 we will see CTRs going well above this 20% benchmark. This is very exciting news and I would like to congratulate Mobile Posse on what appears to be a fantastic service. I know that we will be keeping an eye on them.

Admob, which was recently acquired by Google is always a great place to get useful stats on the mobile landscape. Marketers looking to understand the viability of a new smartphone platform in terms of potential ad revenue should always keep the Admob numbers in mind. I do have my questions about the validity of the Admob numbers. Nearly all of the ads it serves to smartphones are centered around Android and especially the iPhone. Therefore  it doesn’t give the greatest all-around snapshot of the mobile landscape.  Still, it provides insight into the long-term given the fact that smartphones such as Android and the iPhone represent the future of mobile devices and especially the future of the mobile Web and how to monetize it.

This months stats pointed out two very interesting items. Firstly, they noted that iPod touch numbers doubled after Christmas morning. This is to be expected (it also happened last year), but what are the implications? Publishers should understand that when building an application they must keep in mind the regularly offline iPod touch users. Spreed takes this into consideration when developing apps with our offline reading mode feature. All content is downloaded into the device when it has connectivity and reports usage back to the server when it reaches its next connection point. This means that iPod touch users (an increasingly growing market) can still use the app, download the content when in their Wi-fi network and read it on the go.

The second notable stat from this months report is that the iPhone accounted for 54% of all smartphone requests. Although it is important to take into consideration a multiple platform advertising strategy, it is clear that the iPhone is currently the best platform for displaying and seeing a return on your investment.

December 2009 Mobile Metrics Report

Today we released the December edition of our Mobile Metrics report, our monthly look at the data flowing through our network.  This month we look at several key metrics including manufacturer share, operating system share, top devices, and top smartphones for each region in our network.  At a glance, the data shows large regional differences in the devices that are accessing the mobile web.

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