At Spreed we are strong believers in mobile advertising and we know that the early days of this market are going to be filled with trials and tests. The market is still very young and filled with banner advertising and non-actionable landing pages. The next step is to leverage the unique opportunities made available by mobile devices. These opportunities include actionable banner ads that allow users to download coupons directly into their phone (similar to your physical wallet), call companies directly from their ad or even get directions to a stores location using the phones internal GPS.

Actionable advertising that creates value and provides high levels of emotion are important, but it also needs to be paired with best of breed targeting. The most unique form of targeting on mobile phones is their ability to pinpoint a users exact location no matter where they are. Location based advertising will be a huge success when paired with actionable advertising. Imagine seeing a banner or receiving a popup offering you directions to or coupon for a store that you are extremely close to.

Web based advertising was able to pinpoint you to your city, but this new breed of location based advertising will allow stores to draw a geometric shape around their location and push and advertisement to users that come anywhere within their desired parameters. Given that mobile phone users are constantly moving around their respective cities, this opens up lots of potential for local and more importantly retail advertisers (the bread and butter of newspaper advertising).

In Finland, a recent trial in conjunction with McDonalds and Nokia’s Ovi Maps tool advertised discounts on cheeseburgers when they were close to a McDonalds restaurant. This campaign saw a whopping 7% CTR. Once users clicked into the ad they were presented with the option to download a coupon or get directions to the restaurant. Amongst the users that clicked on the advertisement 39% went on to request even more information and interact with the ad.

These are clearly much higher than the CTRs for standard digital ads on the web. “Location is the new demographic. It’s no longer just about age, gender, and socio-economics, but about reaching mobile users who are in a geographic position to buy,” said Chris Rothey, vice president, NAVTEQ Media Solutions who helped put together this trial. “These findings show the power of LPA in helping advertisers find location-relevant consumers and guide those consumers into stores.”

Spreed believes in both smart mobile targeting and fun and ‘emotion rich’ actionable advertising. Our CleverAds platform is now able to target based on exact locations. Advertisers can draw a line down a street, a circle around a store with a given radius, or any other geometric shape. Contact us or any of our publishing partners if you would like to run a location based trial with your brand.

MediaPost submitted an interesting article last Friday regarding the Audit Bureau of Circulation and their decision to include mobile page views into their new data points for newspaper readership. For those who do not know the ABC measures the readership of newspapers both offline and online. The inclusion of mobile readership into these numbers bodes well for the growing importance of mobile in the daily newspaper distribution mix. We at Spreed are very excited about this and knew that it was about time. Clients of ours like Metro Canada are seeing mobile readership that is about to surpass their website traffic and these figures need to be included in any audit of their success. Read more about this decision below:

ABC To Audit Newspapers On Mobile

Acknowledging the growing number of readers who interact with newspaper content via mobile devices, the Audit Bureau of Circulations said its interactive unit, ABCi, is set to begin measuring newspapers’ mobile audiences, including readership on e-readers, through mobile Web browsers, and through free and paid apps on smartphones and Apple’s new iPad.

This morning at the NAA MediaXchange Rishad Tobaccowala gave a provocative keynote session on the future of marketing and advertising and how traditional media companies must leverage new platforms to more effectively serve advertising to customers.

As the Chief Innovation Officer of Chicago-based Publicis Group Media, Rishad is one of the most influential thinkers in the North American advertising industry. It is therefore no surprise that the audience was on the edge of their seats listening intently to Rishad`s advice.

We at Spreed found his talk very interesting considering many of his recommendations push newspapers in the direction of a number of the products and services that we provide (mobile platforms, mobile advertising, location based advertising, etc).

Rishad left with 10 recommendations for newspapers to follow in the future that we would like to share here:

1. Be schizophrenic – Only the schizophrenic will thrive. Run two or more business models at the same time but make sure they are very separate. Do not make a big mesh of all your models.
2. Embrace technology – Tech is the new magic. Make sure the follwing ive things are done by the end of this week.
   1. Use an RSS reader and start following your passions through it
   2. Get a Twitter account
   3. Get on Facebook
   4. Get on Foursquare
   5. Go to someone in your company who is younger (probably 2-3 levels below you) and make them your mentor. Take them outside of the company every two weeks and get them to teach you about what is new and upcoming
3. Embrace the blur – Church and state are too separate within news organizations. All elements of a news organization (sales, editorial, technology) need to work together in the same group.
4. Learn fast, iterate faster, make mistakes and don’t be afraid to fail.
5. Do a massive outreach to young people – You want to make the industry exciting. Don`t be swamped with old people. Get youngsters into the industry.
6. Think about what curating, combining and editing really is
7. Platforms – Every company needs a platform strategy. How do you attract new partners? What’s your device strategy (iPad, iPhone, etc)? What’s your search strategy?
8. Make sure that you celebrate the software and technology folks at your organization. Don’t hide them in a room somewhere even if they are strange. Tell them about the business and ask them to solve business issues
9. Think about  the future of your organization. Thank about your organizational design, incentives, benefits, etc.
10. This one was a bit odd and I am not sure exactly what he meant by it, but the industry is not anyone but you. there is not industry but yo, embrace the “muchness”. “This is my dream and I am going to decide how it ends”

This is a guest post from Kirk LaPointe, the Managing Editor of the Vancouver Sun, blogger at themediamanager.com and adjunct professor at the UBC School of Journalism.

The routinely strong Seeking Alpha site features a somewhat conciliatory post from media corporate financial advisor on the impending coexistence of the Apple iPad and the newspaper industry.

Dan Ramsden has some tough words for Google. He sees its recent encouragement of the newspaper industry to experiment as self-serving — the more papers try to do things online, the more Google’s search engine technology benefits.

But he makes an interesting choice in where to place the technological bet. While recent media coverage has suggested Google’s open-source design of its Android smartphone offers the greatest opportunity for old media to succeed, Ramsden begs to differ.

He is firmly in the Apple camp. It’s the technology of choice by consumers, it’s the technology company that has figured out (through iTunes and the iPhone) how to exact a premium for content, so it’s the technology the newspaper business should focus on serving.

“Newspaper and magazine owners, who are struggling to redefine their business models for a new online and mobile environment, would probably be well served to align themselves with the platform that can offer a revenue model, and a mobile marketplace, and leave the experimentation and iteration stuff to young entrepreneurs and startups that do not yet have a franchise to protect,” he writes.

He suggests: “Style, design, quality control, are all characteristics that will do much more to facilitate the popularity of paid content than one more colorful website that may or may not show up at the top of Google’s search results.”

Flurry, a mobile analytics company known for their strong industry statistics released their February report today. The report is interesting as it relates to the consistent surge of iPhone developers and their unique demographics. What is interesting to our readers is the specific attention it gave to the news category. As expected traditional media sources are dominating the news category. This is mostly due to the fact that it is not easy to simply start publishing the news and creating content. What it does point out though is that the iPhone and other smartphones are very useful channels to distribute content very inexpensively and target a very attractive demographic.

Possibly, more interesting is the rise of online news sources on the iPhone. Flurry believes that with the release of the iPad we are going to see an even strong supply and demand for blogs and other online media sources. It is therefore essential that if your newspaper does not have an app now, to act fast. If you wait too long, the online media sources will own the real estate on users phones and other mobile devices.  More below and in the report.

Like gaming, the creation of compelling content in News is a specialized and costly operation. To source and report quality news, companies often have to span various media such as TV broadcast, radio and print, which further increases cost. It’s therefore no surprise that Traditional Media dominates the News category, controlling nearly two thirds. For traditional media (e.g., New York Times, ABC News, NPR, etc.), the iPhone represents a large channel through which to distribute their existing content. The small incremental cost of expanding the distribution of Traditional Media’s core content, and the attractiveness of reaching an educated, affluent and tech-savvy audience, makes iPhone the perfect platform through which to serve news. Looking forward, the iPad creates an even greater opportunity to increase reach because its larger screen size works better works for newspaper and magazine layouts, as well as TV broadcast.