Two announcements this week underline the growing importance of the Apple iPhone (or more correctly the influential and affluent demographic that it delivers marketers).

JumpTap, a white-label mobile search and advertising company, has tied up with Pinch Media, an analytics and advertising company for iPhone applications, to launch an ad network allowing developers to monetize their iPhone App Store applications.

In practice, developers can insert advertisements into their applications, and advertisers can reach the iPhone’s desirable demographics via the immersive in-application environment. (A quick call to JumpTap tells me that the focus here -and perhaps the edge over similar schemes – is the level of targeting JumpTap can offer.) Rather than guess, MSG is going to the source. Paran Johar, chief marketing officer of JumpTap, has agreed to a briefing early next week to spell out the significance of this partnership and explain how (and why) JumpTap’s search and advertising strategy has evolved.

The JumpTap announcement came on the heels of news that AdMob had launched a global iPhone marketplace, complete with a line-up of interactive advertising formats that take advantage of the iPhone’s capabilities and ability to deliver more contextually-aware advertising.

By way of background, AdMob has been tuned into the iPhone since the start – a smart focus that will no doubt now begin to pay some serious dividends. MSG reported last September that AdMob had established an AdLab to harness iPhone features to deliver more effective and immersive advertising.

The new ads that AdMob is making available to iPhone developers include so-called Brand and Performance formats that function in the browser environment as well as the native applications built for the iPhone. Put simply, the ads blend graphical display with the iPhone features and functions to provide one-click access to the following eight actions:

· iTunes: Open the iTunes store where users can purchase music or video content from iTunes

· App Store: Visit the App Store and download applications

· Audio: Listen to recorded or streaming audio content

· Video: View video and share video with friends

· Call: Initiate a voice call

· Maps: Launch maps and display relevant locations near that user’s location

· Web: Visit iPhone websites

· Custom: Interactive user experiences

Launch advertisers working with the new ad formats include brands such as Ford, Electronic Arts, Land Rover, Jaguar and Universal Pictures (The Mummy) and publishers such as AaccuWeather.com, MovieTickets.com, Mippin, Flirtomatic and Loopt.

As Brian Bos, Senior Vice President, Convergence Director for Mindshare, ad agency for the Ford, Lincoln and Mercury brands, said in a statement: “AdMob has leveraged its mobile expertise to deliver these users rich, interactive and engaging ads that Ford is excited to utilize to reach these consumers.” By way of background, AdMob reports it served 51.8 million iPhone ads in June 2008 alone, a 30 percent month-over-month increase versus May, and has served 249 million ads to iPhone users since launch. More than 1,000 of AdMob’s 5,500 publishers served iPhone ads in June.

Read between the lines, and it’s all about better usability and taking the pain out of buying, browsing, experiencing and interacting with content and apps. Common sense (and my now frequent and invigorating exchanges with Ogilvy’s Jonathan MacDonald) tells me users won’t mind the ad pitch as much if the message and the medium are in synch. (It also helps if the brands are communicating with – not talking at – users…)

However, to be effective and valuable, relevancy must be baked into these marketing messages. AdMob’s not there yet (neither is anyone else), but Jason Spero, AdMob VP Marketing, tells me the company has made some significant progress in segmentation and analytics.

During my pre-briefing last week Jason and I discussed ad targeting, the nuts & bolts of the new advertising solution and the highlights of the latest AdMob Mobile Metrics Report. (MSG has tracked these fact-filled monthly reports from the start, so please browse the archives for coverage. You can also find the complete reports here.)

iPHONE IN PRACTICE: Interactivity is king and advertising is content. This is the thinking that lies at the core of AdMob’s launch (as well as its decision to give $1 million in advertising to developers to promote their iPhone apps, sites and services). Some cynics argue this gesture might be a way to offload some leftover inventory, but Jason dismisses this as hearsay. The aim is to jumpstart the growth of a new wave of mobile publishers and make sure they benefit from the “strong demand AdMob has fielded from advertisers for iPhone ads.”

How will it all fit together? “An advertiser will come to us and they’ll say we want to run an ad that drives traffic to iTunes, for example, and then we’ll work with them on the creative. Overlaid on their creative we’ll have an icon that explains to the users, really educate the users, about what the ad actually does. Based on our kind of mobile expertise, we leverage the tight integration of all of these functions on the device because it’s all about mobile. When Google takes an ad from the PC Web and brings it over to the iPhone, it’s just that. It’s an ad from a Web page that fails on all counts to take advantage of the unique mobile context.”

SAFARI: Another part of AdMob’s solution is aimed squarely at making its ads available to the Safari browser. “Anything accessed through a browser is a place where AdMob’s investment in our algorithms, and our liquidity of ads, makes us a strong option to monetize content. What about Android & Co? The way we architected our ad units for the next-gen platform is with the expectation that iPhone will not be the only next-gen platform.” RIM launching BOLD, Symbian devices going strong and the spread of Palm and Windows devices are all positive signs from AdMob. “It’s good for the user, it’s good for mobile browsing, it’s good for application developers and it should be very good for AdMob.”

TARGETING: AdMob is not yet able to do behavioral targeting, so there is some credence to the observation that ad accuracy is not always on the mark. However, Jason points out that AdMob can deliver the levels of targeting ad agencies require for their campaigns.

To start AdMob knows “mobile context.” This allows the targeting of certain classes of devices. “Is this a device that can play video or a Java game? We know this because maybe Adidas wants someone to download a Java game, or maybe we’ve got a lot of campaigns that drive the user to watch video…We can also target by operator because some people want to reach a younger audience. That second level of mobile context is what we get from the network.”

Then there are two levels of demographic targeting that AdMob delivers. “The first is what I would call targeting based on research. What we did is  a primary research study where we put ads on all of our sites, and the ads recruited people to rate the site in exchange for an incentive. When people clicked through – and 7,500 people clicked through – they filled out demographic surveys before they were eligible to win the prize we offered.” As a result, AdMob has a “demographic profile of all of our sites.” AdMob conducted this research in December and is gearing up to re-run it this summer. “For a particular site, AdMob can tell you age, gender, household income, ethnicity and education of the people who frequent it.” AdMob also knows the demographic profile of every device. “So if an agency or publisher comes to AdMob and wants to reach high net worth individuals, we can pick the 20 devices that reach the most affluent.”

Finally, AdMob has fine-tuned its code to allow publishers to pass on much more than device information. “They have the ability to pass us any metadata they have about you. So if you’re a registered user on a social networking site, for example, the site owners may have already collected your age, your gender and your preferences. They can pass all that to us so that we can target ads to a deeper demographic level.”

And what about spam control? While some may claim that AdMob doesn’t do frequency capping because it does not recognize unique users, Jason stresses that AdMob does indeed offer frequency capping. “We identify unique users. We’re not perfect at it, so this is one place where there’s some truth in what’s being said. Because we don’t work with the operators, and because cookies are inconsistent in mobile, we’ve had to build proprietary systems and make investments in technology to be able to identify unique users – and we can identify 65-70 percent of the unique users accurately.”

MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKS: These sites are driving much of AdMob recent growth. “They are growing incredibly quickly and that means more inventory for us.” At the other end of the spectrum AdMob has also seen “really rapid growth” in news and sports sites. A special surprise has been the rise of mobile directory services (clear-cut and effective alternatives to mobile search). This development is quite unexpected, and I would have missed it if Jason hadn’t clued me in on it. I’ll check in with some companies in this space to get the inside track on off-portal mobile directories…Please check back regularly.

MOBILE WEB: A key data point from the June AdMob Mobile Metrics report (a report that offers a snapshot of the data in AdMob’s network of over 5,000 mobile websites to provide insights into trends that matter in the mobile ecosystem). To gauge the growth of the mobile Web, AdMob measured the organic growth reported by a group of publishers that were with AdMob a year ago. (In practice, an examination of growth reported by these publishers allowed AdMob to estimate a 12-month growth rate for the entire mobile Web.) Among the key findings: Traffic from the publishers (a total of 437 sites) grew 104 percent from July 2007 to June 2008. In short, traffic more than doubled, a growth increase that implies a 6.1 percent month over month compound growth rate. In addition, the U.S. and the U.K. grew substantially faster than the worldwide rate.

Where’s the growth now and in the future? Jason tells me key markets for AdMob are Singapore and Indonesia, countries where the “traffic has gone off the map” thanks to a partnership with a new publisher whose identity I agreed not to disclose. South Africa is another market to watch, a major reason why AdMob now has a formal presence and staff there. AdMob also plans to ramp up its U.K office. AdMob recently sealed a deal with Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) to resell AdMob ads to brands and agencies in the U.K. “That has significantly accelerated growth for AdMob in the U.K….The advertisers are interested and the inventory is there, so that’s a big part of what’s going on with AdMob.”

ANALYTICS: Since taking the wraps off its analytics product in May AdMob reports around 750 sites – not all AdMob publishers – have signed up to be private beta partners. By end-July we plan “to have most of them live or provide them with the code that will [allow them to] start seeing results.” Jason adds: We’re happy with the scalability of the back-end, which is why we chose to go slow. We are also happy with the feedback. Publishers have insight into where the traffic is coming from and how much [traffic] comes from search versus links on other sites. They can also measure the effectiveness of any advertising they are doing, whether it’s with AdMob or with someone else.”

Analytics is, and will remain, separate from AdMob’s ad serving business. “The reason we built it, to be clear, is so that everyone that spends with AdMob, from the Madison Avenue agencies down to the little guys, can track what they’re doing and measure the effectiveness of their spend. Frankly, we’re hoping that they use it to compare the effectiveness of their spend with us versus the effectiveness of their spend with other companies – because we’re willing to bet on our network. That’s our Pepsi challenge moment, if you will.”

MOBILE SEARCH: Jason tells me AdMob will indeed have “some things to say about search in the next couple of months.” However, he made it clear that AdMob is “not going to be a search company.” So what will AdMob do? Not sure yet – but it’s bound to be “about helping search companies to monetize.” Again, watch this space…

Disclaimer: AdMob and JumpTap are MSG supporters.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 9:46 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Research, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.