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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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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Mongoose Metrics, a call-tracking and analytics provider, today published the first in a series of whitepapers detailing emerging trends and prediction for mobile marketing over the next five years and beyond.

Dubbed “Mobile Marketing for Business – Part One – An Overview,” the new whitepaper does an excellent job at detailing 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.

The whitepaper details stats such as that mobile devices will surpass desktop Web browsing within five to ten years, citing the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) who states cell phone use is far higher than Internet use.  At the end of 2009, for example, there were 4.6 billion cell phone subscriptions worldwide (76 percent of the world’s 6.8 billion people) while only 26 percent of the world’s population uses the Internet.

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A key decision to make when planning which platforms to target in term of application development and deployment is which platform(s) make the most sense for your objectives.  With a thriving development community surrounding more than just the iPhone OS, how do you know which platforms will generate the highest ROI for your mobile apps?

These and more are questions r2integrated aims to help answer with its new whitepaper titled “US Smart Phone Platforms: A Comparative Analysis,” in which all leading smartphone platforms in the US market are compared using a variety of data points in hopes of helping businesses make better decisions when it comes to mobile app development for smartphones.

Based on market analysis, the whitepaper identifies the six most popular smartphone platforms in the US, which include iPhone, Android, Palm’s WebOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS and RIM’s Blackberry.  In terms of market share, while Symbian dominates worldwide share of smartphones, with 46%, it’s a far different picture in the US.  As of October, 2009, RIM held the majority of market share in terms of smartphone usage in the US at 41%, while the iPhone was a distant second at 25%, followed closely by Windows Mobile in third at 20%.  This is significant for decision makers wanting to target the US market over a worldwide audience.

One of the most interesting data points analyzed in the whitepaper was a survey conducted in October and December of 2009, which looked at what smartphone platforms consumers were most interested in buying during their next purchase, giving a clear picture of what platforms are most popular with consumers.  32% of respondents indicated their next purchase would be an iPhone in October of 2009, but that number dropped to 28% in December.  Android, however, showed the most improvement in terms of consumer willingness, with only 6% indicating Android was their next purchase choice in October, rising to 21% when asked again in December.

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Pretty recently usshortcodes.com (aka the CSCA) announced a deal where you get 10% off on short codes. Sounds great right? Here are the program details:

Program: If a Customer registers ten (10) or more New Codes during the Program Term, Customer shall receive an account credit in the amount equal to ten percent (10%) of the amount of all new codes registered.

Look CSCA, don’t get me wrong we appreciate the effort but seriously, 10% on 10 short codes? I consider my company to be a pretty well known player in the mobile space, we work with some very large brands and we host lots of short codes on behalf of these brands. The most codes I believe we have ordered at any given time is 2, 3 tops. We help businesses launch their mobile marketing strategies on a daily basis and I have never in 10 years in business been in a situation where we needed to buy 10 codes at the same time. Not every business needs or can afford a short code. We do mobile deals all day long and not that we are not good at sales, but bringing on 10 clients at the same time, that all need short codes might be a record for a mobile marketing company. I am just saying… Continue Reading