Smaato recently reached an important milestone in the mobile advertising industry – it reached the five year mark.  Celebrating its fifth birthday, the company announced it’s now serving over six billion mobile ad requests per month with over 7,000 publishers signed into its network.

The company has been busy despite its anniversary, also announcing a new whitepaper entitled “The Mobile Advertising Ecosystem,” which describes how app developers and mobile publishers can best navigate and monetize mobile advertising opportunities.  “Smaato has produced this whitepaper to help give an overview of the industry to those taking their first steps into mobile advertising,” said Harald Neidhardt, Smaato CMO and Co-Founder.  ”We hope that the information in this paper and the monthly Smaato Metrics help to educate and provide a benchmark to demonstrate that mobile ad-optimization can drive effective monetization on a global scale.”

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It’s not often a comprehensive industry report comes along that takes the simple approach of explaining where the industry has been, where it’s going and what the primary technologies and concepts are.  Today, mobileStorm has published just that, with the release of its “2010 Mid-Year Mobile Marketing Report.”

Utilizing 11 years of mobile marketing experience, combined with an extensive amount of data recently uncovered in a study the company commissioned, the report provides a comprehensive overview of the mobile ecosystem and its many attributes.  For each technology, mobileStorm also provides it’s take on the usefulness and future growth, with topics including SMS, mobile applications, mobile location,  the mobile Web, mobile commerce, social media, proximity marketing, mobile barcodes, augmented reality, near field communication (NFC) and much more.

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It’s sometimes hard to quantify the mobile advertising industry, let alone the many aspects therein.  That’s why I love infographics.  I came across one on PromotionalCodes.co.uk’s Money Saving Blog today that does a great job detailing the size of the mobile ad market, various usage patterns, various survey results, predictions and other information in relation to mobile coupons.

Mobile coupons, though a concept that has been talked about for a long time, is finally starting to gain traction as big players like Google and Facebook ramp up their efforts.  As QR codes, mobile coupon redemption technologies and smartphones in general continue to evolve, mainstream mobile coupons are getting closer every day.  Through the proliferation of LBS startups like Yelp, Foursquare, MyTown and many others, mobile coupons could very easily be a central aspect to the consumer rewards and loyalty programs each are perfecting.

Regardless, the infographic below details everything you need to know about the current state of the mobile ad industry and the growing importance of mobile coupons in relation to consumer sentiment…

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Call tracking service provider Mongoose Metrics has published its third and final installment in a series of whitepapers written by CEO Bradley E. Reynolds, in which he’s so far covered mobile marketing predictions over the next five years and mobile marketing technology trends and future predictions.

The latest in the series is titled “Optimizing Mobile Marketing Conversions,” whereby Reynolds discusses understanding how to effectively account for phone call conversions from mobile marketing campaigns.  It’s a unique approach to understanding an area of mobile marketing that’s ambiguous at best.

“Because phone calls are so simple to launch from a mobile device – and web forms often can be so cumbersome to navigate – the conversion value for the mobile channel is highly skewed towards phone calls and away from web form submissions.  That’s why it’s imperative that you understand how to account for phone calls from your mobile marketing efforts,” says Bradley E. Reynolds, CEO of Mongoose Metrics.

Overall measurement and ROI tracking is a huge benefit to mobile marketing in general, but some areas are easier to measure than others.  While most mobile campaigns can be easily attributed and tracked along the entire campaign process, true person-to-person engagement is hard to analyze.  Because of this, the new whitepaper aims to answer these three questions;

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The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) today published a new Whitepaper aimed at providing a comprehensive overview of the opportunities presented by oversized mobile ad units measuring 320 pixels in width or larger.

With the growing availability of larger-screened devices like smartphones and tablets- brands, agencies and other members of the mobile marketing ecosystem need to understand the potential of engaging an audience using larger, rich media ads that were once not available on the limited screen real-estate of feature phones and first-gen smartphones.

The new Whitepaper includes several examples of banner and full-screen ad units in use today on large-screen devices, and is intended to encourage further experimentation. The paper also invites companies to share best practices with the MMA’s Mobile Advertising Committee to influence future additions to the “Global Mobile Advertising Guidelines.” The MMA’s “Global Mobile Advertising Guidelines” are widely used in the market today and are based on best practices and optimal consumer experiences, currently on screen sizes of 300 pixels in width and smaller.

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A while back we covered the first in a series of three whitepapers written by Mongoose Metrics CEO Bradley E. Reynolds, in which he details where the mobile marketing industry is right now and its future predictions.

The first whitepaper dove into the fundamentals of mobile marketing, current industry statistics, examples of “what’s working now,” current drawbacks and future predictions for the industry as a whole, while the second in the series focuses more on mobile technology and its role in the current state, and the future of the mobile marketing industry.

Dubbed “Mobile Marketing Macro Trends,” the new whitepaper is an insightful opinion editorial that aims to answer the simple question “how will mobile technologies change the way we live today?”

“Mobile technologies — though still in infancy — are positioned to provide an incredible value to humanity by offering immediate interactions with meaningful content from anywhere on the planet,” the paper states.  ”Brands, corporations, political movements, religions and any entities which depend on interacting with the masses need to understand the progression and power of mobile.”

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In a rather insightful new Whitepaper published by Global Intelligence Alliance (GIA), the debate over Web apps as opposed to native mobile apps is highlighted in detail, covering several key points for each concept.

Dubbed “Native or Web App,” the new Whitepaper includes a study conducted by GIA amongst developers, publishers, service providers and design agencies that collectively serve millions of consumers over mobile media.

Among other conclusions, the study projects that web apps will become more viable as a mobile distribution platform, and will soon lead to a proliferation of  content distribution beyond typically tightly controlled App Store environments.

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