Wireless Advertising Advances
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.
The second company developing new technologies to improve the overall mobile advertising environment is Research in Motion (RIM), creator of the popular BlackBerry mobile device. The company is launching a new service to allow developers of apps for its BlackBerry range of smartphones the ability to place advertisements within the apps they are developing. The technology is supposed to be in effect within the first half of 2010. The service will help to make mobile advertisements more quantifiable by giving access to data on ad impressions, clicks, conversions, and earnings, as well as integration in the Omniture Online Marketing Suite for more advanced analytics. RIM’s next moves include integrating the ads and applications so that people can initiate calls from an ad, add a calendar event and contract entry.
These two companies both understand how large the potential market is for mobile advertising. One common complaint as to why companies have not started to place more dollars into mobile advertising was its inability to be measured. Now, a number of companies have started to develop advertising platforms that offer both advertisers and companies a direct way to measure the ads they place within the mobile environment. An important trend that continues to evolve with new technology is finding additional ways to justify advertising dollars. Both RIM and Google view this trend as an important opportunity and they are investing a lot of dollars into technology that shows the effectiveness of mobile advertising because they know if you can prove it, you will profit from it.
Tags: AdMob, Google, Mobile Advertsing, RIM, Wireless
