The press and positive response to my upcoming white paper on mobile advertising has been overwhelming. Over 100 practitioners and professionals have already signed up to download the white paper, confirming my view that mobile advertising is a market waiting to happen. The impetus clearly came from major brands and agencies that got in on the ground floor with mobile marketing campaigns as early as 2000, but the real action will start when the Long Tail of advertisers gets on board.

For this reason, the singular focus of the paper is to provide these newcomers a blueprint and make sure we are all on the same page (hence the straightforward title: Mobile advertising for newbies).

I spent last week creating three campaigns (Google, Millennial Media and Mojiva) for the weight loss site Mobislim (one designed specifically by Bango to test ad camapigns) and inserting tracking code to measure results using AdMob and Bango analytics packages. I wanted to have a broad spread of ad networks and packages and chose Google (an obviously large ad network), Decktrade (more in the middle range), and Mojiva (a small ad network with- if the site is correct - just under 200 sites where it places ads). I chose Bango and AdMob as two best examples of analytics packages on the market today.

However, I would like to stress that the white paper also marks the launch of a dedicated blog at MSG where I plan to include and test other packages moving forward. (I’m thinking here of companies such as Mobilytics…) Likewise, I plan to test other ad networks. (I’m thinking here of AdMob, JumpTap and the scores of smaller ad networks making waves just under the radar - Admoda, for example).

A quick word about JumpTap and a big thank you to Julie Ginches and the support team she pulled together to walk me through the process and pinpoint just why I could not complete the sign-up process from the U.K. I’m confident they will solve the problem and have me up and running soon.

Not so with Yahoo, unfortunately. I called the toll-free number on Friday and was connected to the mobile office in Barcelona. Fortunately, Maria Sanchez, who is conducting her own tests and blogging about them here, is (of course!) fluent in Spanish. She left a VM that we are anxious to set up an ad campaign. No word back yet. Radio silence at Medio Systems as well. (Maria filled out the form on the site and sent off an email.)

The mobile analytics side of things is moving along well, although I have had some difficulties getting AdMob to track the campaign.

I have followed the procedure on the AdMob website, and added the Query string format to the ad URL, but there appears to be a disconnect somewhere. Fortunately, AdMob has also been more than helpful in this respect. Jason Spero and Nicole Leverich quickly mobilized a support team (and that despite 9 hours time difference) and we are quite close to solving the issue now. In fact, it may even be the landing page…It’s a bit more challenging than I had anticipated, but I am optimistic that AdMob will be set up to measure the effectiveness of my advertising soon.

The bottom line: I know many of you are eager to download the white paper this week. However, this minor delay will likely impact the white paper production schedule (I wanted to release it after gathering three days of data), so please look for it next week latest.

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG support and white paper sponsor.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Research. 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.