The battle over the mobile advertising dollar stayed competitive throughout 2009, as advertisers still looked for the best ways to try and tap into this growing medium. While the economy stopped a number of companies from experimenting with mobile advertising in 2009, the technology to make it much more trackable has continued to evolve. Two companies who are positioning themselves to benefit from the growth in mobile advertising are Google and Research in Motion (RIM).
On November 9, 2009 Google purchased AdMob for $750 million in order to expand their mobile advertising offering. The deal is one of Google’s largest acquisitions behind the purchase of DoubleClick in 2008 for $3.1 billion. The motivation behind Google’s purchase of AdMob was to help better justify the value of mobile advertising. Google is now developing a number of new tools that help to create, serve and analyze mobile advertisements. The acquisition will also allow Google’s clients to target mobile users within several ad formats thus helping the company to stay ahead of the competition in the mobile advertising arena. Google has already created an advertising environment online in which they dominate the competition, look for the company to do the same within the mobile medium.
