Velti Report: iOS Regai...

iOS edged out Android in mobile ad marketshare last month, according to a new report from mobile marketing company Velti . The report is based on data collected from 33,405 apps via the Mobclix Exchange, which Velti acquired in 2010 . It says that at the end of 2011, iOS and Android both had 50 percent marketshare, but that iOS pulled ahead in March, with 53 percent marketshare for the month. March also saw the launch of the new iPad. Apple has already called it “ the strongest iPad launch yet ,” with 3 million units sold in three days. That’s reflected in Velti’s numbers too — the report says that the new iPad accounted for 2.2 percent of all iPad ad impressions this month, compared to 1.5 percent for the iPad 2 in its first month. The report also has data on the most lucrative ad formats and apps. Not surprisingly, larger ads made more money for publishers — a fullscreen iPhone ad saw an average eCPM (price paid per thousand impressions) of $1.22, compared to 59 cents for a standard 300 by 50 banner. On Android, the average eCPM was $1.14 for fullscreen and 33 cents for a standard banner. (The difference on the low end reflects “advertiser demand and preference towards iOS,” Velti says.) Weather apps had the highest eCPM ($1.24), followed by education ($1.17) and lifestyle ($0.89).

Millennial Media Report...

It was a good year for mobile marketing, maybe the first where marketers of every size felt comfortable taking a run at it. Millennial Media, the SMART report folks, have put together their year in review and it’s chock full of information about where we’ve been. It begins with a true vertical explosion. Triple-digit growth in mobile ad spend. Not surprisingly, technology is leading the way as the biggest spender in the mobile market. I would have thought Retail would be next, but Finance is going after all those busy people who live with a phone in their hands. Finance is actually the top global advertiser when ranked by spend. Health is a newcomer to the top of the chart. The report says that fitness companies made the most of those weight loss resolutions and bikini season. Wellness companies also used the seasonal changes to help people deal with allergies and the flu. More than half of all mobile campaigns sent users to a mobile website in 2011 but apps are coming on strong. Games took the number one spot for most impressions, away from Social Networking apps, knocking them down to third place. Music and Entertainment, which was third, popped up to second. The proliferation of TV Everywhere apps likely helped them climb up one spot. Communication, News, Sports and Weather landed on the chart in that order. Trending Millennial Media identified three trends as being the most influential for mobile marketers in 2011. First is local marketing. More advertisers used the smartphone’s ability to geo-locate in order to served tightly targeted ads. These ads were designed to drive traffic into local retailers to buy a product or to the cafe on the corner for lunch. Second, mobile video. A new generation of smartphones and tablets have made it easy for the user to stream video of all kinds. Studios released mobile trailers to promote their films and brands used video to show people how to use their products. Third is mass market reach. Kind of funny, since the first trend is all about getting small. Here we have the concept of driving traffic with social media campaigns that people want to share and videos that go viral. Mobile combined with social allowed advertisers to reach millions while they watched the Superbowl and the Oscars. In 2012, they’ll be taking what they learned there, to deliver even more of a punch when Olympic fever takes hold of the world. Overall, it was a good year for mobile advertising and we expect more of the same in 2012. More video, more social media integration, more apps and more consumers than ever turning to their phones and tablets instead of their computers when they want information. To read the full 2011 Year in Review SMART report, visit Millennial Media and download the PDF for free. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Quattro Co-Founder Laun...

Lars Albright, co-founder of Quattro Wireless, announced his new company SessionM  nearly a year ago. Now he’s ready to talk about what it actually does. Quattro, of course, was acquired by Apple , which used the mobile ad network as the foundation for its iAd program. Albright, who led business development for iAd and is now SessionM’s CEO, describes the startup as an attempt to tackle one of the biggest problems he saw in the mobile industry — engagement and retention. He says that mobile consumers now have “so many choices, so many different options to choose from,” that can be hard for any one app to hold their attention. SessionM’s solution? Game mechanics and rewards. Specifically, SessionM customers can create different achievements, which are then unlocked by users as they visit an app and perform specific activities. Those achievements confer status within an app’s community, but they’re also worth mPoints, which can be redeemed for gift cards, discounts and other rewards. Initial publisher partners include Viacom Media Digital Networks, The Weather Channel, Demand Media, Fox Sports, and Glam Media. SessionM works as an HTML5 layer on top of an app, so publishers don’t need to change their designs. Albright says the goal was to make it “lightweight” and customizable for publishers. The publishers decide what kind of activity they want to reward, and they can even integrate it with other mobile platforms like gaming social network OpenFeint. Albright says he also wants to create a compelling environment for advertisers, offering them units like video ads and branded mini-games. Honda, Tyson Foods, and Volvo have all signed on as advertisers. That sounds good for publishers and advertisers, but mobile consumers might be less thrilled to find that an extra layer of interaction and ads has been introduced to their favorite apps. Albright says that the initial response has been positive, with high engagement rates. If you don’t like it, you can opt-out, and there are even automatic opt-out capabilities for users who don’t engage with the SessionM features after a certain number of times. SessionM is backed by Highland Capital Partners (which also invested in Quattro) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (where it’s part of the iFund).

Mobile App Marketplace ...

Mobile component marketplace (and Disrupt finalist ) Verious is announcing the launch of its App Services platform and Mobile Developer Network today, as well as a number of new partnerships. With the new platform, the company is introducing several pre-built software modules created with APIs from its new partners, which can be used by app developers in their mobile applications. This platform includes components from partners like CityGrid Media, The Sports Network and Weather Decision Technologies, whose data has been included in the software components. According to Verious CEO  Anil Pereira , the moves represent Verious’ evolution into supporting enterprises and service providers targeting mobile as a growth area. “After our launch out of beta, we received a ton of interest from larger companies–everyone is trying to crack the mobile opportunity,” Pereira explains. “So we started to focus on ‘supply’ from larger companies while still keeping the ‘demand’ and distribution side of the equation focused on the broader universe of mobile developers (the independent ‘app store’ developers as well as enterprise developers at larger companies). Add to this the millions of web developers that are going mobile and you have a pretty big demand side,” he says. The first new components being introduced today include Local Search and Branded Store Locators, both built using CityGrid’s APIs, Sports News (from The Sports Network), and Weather Conditions and Forecasts (from Weather Decision Technologies). Like mobile backend services, the idea in providing these modules is to help developers speed time to market by providing bits of commonly-used software code, so they don’t have to write their own. For developers attempting to build cross-platform applications, time saved is maybe one of the biggest benefits in using pre-built code. Had they wanted to build similar modules themselves, Pereira explains, a lot more work would be involved: “A developer would first need to understand the schema, figure out how to parse a feed, then write code to handle it, integrate it into an app, display it appropriately, etc. And for each mobile platform, they would need to create separate libraries (Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android, etc.),” he says. “Each Rich API component represents thousands of lines of code, months of development effort in some cases, plus putting together the business’ side of things.” All of the modules are being made available to developers as free trials, which can later be licensed either on an annual or lifetime basis, if the developer chooses. The announcement coincides with Verious’ other big news: the arrival of its Mobile Developer Network . Launched in partnership with iStockPhoto, iPhoneDevSDK.com, Conference Hound, Wireless Industry Partnership Connector and others in the mobile community space, the network allows app component sellers who list their software on Verious to target a larger audience through a syndicated network of websites, forums, as well as through relationships with direct e-marketers and conference organizers. This network provides developers selling on Verious the opportunity to reach a larger audience than they would if only relying on website visitors to Verious’ marketplace. The agreement allows Verious to market its components, SDKs and other listings on the partners’ sites, and also includes co-marketing agreements where it can feature listings, promote sellers in e-newsletters, etc. The company tells us that the combined reach of the network is over 1 million mobile developers at launch, including 500,000 combined in e-newsletters. These are outlets that focus on iOS, Android, and HTML5, Pereria says, and the company expects to reach 3 million developers by the end of Q2. All the new features are rolling out starting today, including  an updated homepage which now houses over 30,000 app components.

Mobile Advertising Is T...

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Frank Barbieri, the SVP of Emerging Platforms at YuMe . You can follow him @frankba I had dinner last week with a senior exec from a global advertising holding company who asked what I often get asked these days, “What’s going on with mobile advertising?” it’s a timely question as last week Apple announced they were lowering the buy-in price for iAds from $500,000 to $100,000 and increasing the publisher revenue share from 60% to 70% . The move seems innocent enough, but with a little inspection is actually very worrying for a segment still struggling to shake off it’s inferiority complex, and potentially chilling for many innovators and entrepreneurs. You would think that the Flurry data posted late last year on exponential mobile adverting inventory growth late last year would correlate with an industry finally reaching maturity. But a couple weeks after that data posted I had a conversation with a Fortune 100 senior media buyer who became bearish on mobile ad spending in 2011. This person has a total media budget in the tens of millions annually, and for the first time since she started buying mobile, she decreased her spend over the previous two quarters and expects to decrease even more in 2012. Why? Perceptual and brand attitudinal data consistently comes back as not even outperforming search engine marketing. Mobile advertising has become the Baby Huey of the media world: it’s huge and lumbering, but not mature. Analytics, measurement and targeting have not caught up to where online is, exactly when we’re hearing inventory volume is set to surpass online. Neither Comscore nor Nielsen rank the top mobile apps like they rank the top online properties by category and unique users. Nor do they rank ad networks. Phone and operating system manufacturers as well as the carriers have created fragmented and feature poor cookie environments on phones. What is seen as standard operating procedure online, the use of cookies to target users and understand usage, is treated as heresy in mobile . This lack of basic advertising infrastructure means it’s hard to manage and measure brand campaigns. Performance is a different story as you just spray massive volume and pay for the converted. But with brand advertising you have to tune the campaign to give the right audience the right message the right amount of times in the right context to move the needle on campaign objectives. All this becomes near impossible without the simple help of a cookie. Only in isolated cases is buying brand advertising on mobile valuable. For instance buying direct from content brands with huge audiences and registered targeting data, like Pandora and The Weather Channel. Or buying video where brand studies still consistently show attitudinal value. Otherwise it’s just too hard to buy quality at scale. Look at the summersaults Millennial Media, the largest North American “independent” ad network undergoes just to try and replicate simple cookie functionality to target a unique user (from their S1 filing): MYDAS then runs a proprietary set of algorithms to analyze multiple data points from the device, carrier and app to statistically determine, on an anonymous basis, the likely unique user of the device and the app requesting the ad. Seriously. Enter hoop, commence jumping. Ad platform managers I’ve spoken with now are worried that even this will get worse as Apple deprecated unique phone identifiers in iOS 5 and is poised to cloak UDIDs from apps in iOS 6. This is one of the data points Millennial surely uses as do many ad platforms and it means there will be one less credible way to ensure a unique user is targeted. This means brand advertisers will again buy less at lower prices. No doubt consumers have strong opinions about companies using and storing data on their phones, and they should have controls and transparency. But shouldn’t the browsers at least shoot for parity with the web? Isn’t that a better experience for consumers in the end? Where cookie infrastructure feeds a revenue model and users always have the option to turn cookies off. That revenue model in turn allows great content and apps to flow. Simple unique user targeting is foundational to online ad spending and in mobile we’re using magic potions to describe a “likely” unique user. Ad spend will never catch up to online with these constraints. That will eventually hurt developers and end users’ access to great content and apps. Apple’s strategy now is to help itself while it hurts the industry. iAds can identify unique users through iTunes registration and maybe they’ll even reserve UDID information for themselves as a trusted steward of consumer privacy. It just so happens that that stewardship creates an unfair advantage in the ad network space where networks will have trouble competing. Machiavelli would have noted with glee the timing of the announcement and Millennial Media’s expected upcoming IPO. Frankly Apple doesn’t care as much about advertising revenue as they do about happy publishers. As the lack of ad infrastructure depreciates the value of developer inventory, Apple is providing a life support alternative in the form of higher revenue shares. This is a short term fix and bad for the industry as buyers like the one referenced at the beginning of this post want to see a vibrant ecosystem of sellers and selling technology to increase their spend to online levels. The move is bad for most publishers no matter what the revenue share. Apple could have easily taken a position to build quality and value in the mobile brand advertising ecosystem by addressing the infrastructure problems rather than pretending that they alone can support the segment. As one platform product manager put it to me, They could have designed a “reliable, and privacy conscious third-party tracking mechanism” that all networks and developers could use. This would help networks and brands to better track and target users and ad usage across properties, web and app. It would lead to a well spring of new ad innovation on iOS devices. This would have started to build the infrastructure for brand buying at scale with confidence and credibility. Users would get higher quality advertising. Developers get more dollars and Apple wins by having happy developers. What they did instead is tell advertisers they are slashing prices and opening up the bargain bin. And they told developers that they’ll be happy with the new benevolent ad dictatorship and sole innovator. Shame. Mobile advertising was very close to its Cinderella moment, and Apple just decided to keep the glass slipper and close the ballroom doors.