On Tuesday, Medialets – a mobile-centric media advertising platform – launched Medialets Private Marketplace. According to the company, this “fully transparent buying platform” lets advertisers directly plan, buy, execute and measure brand advertising on the mobile properties of the world’s top publishers.

Medialets currently supports more than 20 billion monthly impressions.

Consequently, the savvy firm is promising with no shortage of credibility to deliver significant efficiency to buying premium inventory at scale, uniquely providing agencies and advertisers with a platform that supports direct, guaranteed and reserved buys in addition to real time bidding (RTB) with full transparency on a per placement basis.

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The following is a guest post by Dan Trigub, VP Business Development at Blue Bite.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending OMMA Global West 2011 in San Francisco. OMMA Global West is part of an annual conference and event series put on by MediaPost Communications, with a focus “on the user-generated disruptions that are forcing all media and marketing institutions to rethink and reorganize,” as stated by its official website.  Unlike most conferences, OMMA speaks to the media buyers and marketing institutions, arguably the most important audience of the mobile marketing ecosystem. One thing that we in the mobile space tend to forget, no matter how great our technology and value proposition, the media buyers and agency people often drive innovation and adoption through their checkbooks and budgets they control.  With that in mind, I came away from the conference confident that we as an industry have forced those with the checkbooks to rethink what media channels are important.  However, the major media agencies still need to reorganize for the mobile marketing industry to advance.

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Greystripe, a provider of rich media mobile advertising solutions, today announced they’ve expanded services into Europe through partnerships with European ad networks.

Preceding the announcement, Greystripe said it’s already run over 50 campaigns with marquee brands across every European country, including the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.  In Germany, for example, Greystripe partnered with madvertise — a leading network for mobile banner ads in German-speaking markets — and has since already realized many successful rich media campaigns, including ads for “many popular blockbusters,” according to the release.  Other ad networks the company has partnered with for the expansion include Hi-media Advertising and Mobile Ventures.

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Millennial Media recently announced in a blog post the availability of a new mobile advertising SDK tailored for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform.

“Although we have been providing monetization services for current Windows Mobile developers, we have now extended a toolkit for developers to much more easily integrate ads into their applications, while providing rich and engaging experiences to the advertisers across all Windows Phone 7 Applications,” the company said in its post.

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The following is a guest post from Jeannette Kocsis — senior vice president of digital marketing at The Agency Inside Harte-Hanks.  She has contributed to Social Media Marketing for Dummies and Mobile Marketing for Dummies.  She was named to Mobile Marketer’s Women to Watch 2010 list and serves on the DMA Mobile Marketing Council.  Harte-Hanks, Inc. (NYSE:HHS), San Antonio, TX, is a worldwide, direct and targeted marketing company that provides direct marketing services and shopper advertising opportunities to a wide range of local, regional, national and international consumer and business-to-business marketers.  Contact Kocsis at (845) 339-0022 or via e-mail.

While mobile is best viewed from a multichannel perspective, the relevance and value of the channel in and of itself is clear.  Mobile, as a delivery mechanism, may be exactly the right way to communicate specific offers.

While many brands are moving from test campaigns to mobile messaging as a way to reach customers with relevant communications, marketers are often challenged by the complex rules of engagement and various options available through mobile.  What are the trends and best practices for ensuring that mobile is an effective marketing tool?

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In an attempt to help the mobile advertising industry learn more about the creative process associated with rich media ad-units, Medialets — a company that has a long history dealing with rich media mobile advertising — has introduced “Create,” a new certification program “that puts the knowledge and tools for mobile rich media ad creation into the hands of agencies and in-house creative teams.”

The idea behind the program is to “empower the creative community to build high impact mobile rich media ads for the most widely deployed ad platform by giving advertisers the creative control they want, while enabling scale for this rapidly growing space.”  The new program is launching today in beta with some impressive agency and creative companies on board, including AKQA, AvatarLabs, The Hyperfactory, MRM Worldwide, Ogilvy North America, Razorfish, Southern Realm, Theorem, and The Visionaire Group.

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Mobile marketing and advertising provider Hipcricket today announced impressive growth figures for the year, saying the network has grown tenfold in 2010.

The company says its services are used by brands in over 15 industries, with focus on quick service restaurants (QSR), retail, travel, technology and consumer packaged goods (CPG).  In terms of campaign mix, Hipcricket revealed that more than half the brands it works with chose SMS as a primary means to reach an audience (55%), with nearly half (45%) choosing display through mobile Web and mobile application banners.  The company also said that over 50% of its mobile campaigns are from repeat customers.

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