Madvertise’s RTB feature comes as part of its new madPlus platform, revealed on Monday. The platform also comes with a campaign-planning tool called madPlus Trading and is, according to Madvertise global partnerships chief Vincent Pelillo, fully compliant with the OpenRTB 2.0 technical standard.

All of which is quite similar to what Smaato, a U.S. competitor that also has a European office in Germany, announced just last month. So what’s the difference here?

As previously, Madvertise is heavily touting its core targeting tech. While Apple scratches its head trying to figure out a successor to the unique device identifier (UDID) technology that recently hit headlines again thanks to the mysterious actions of hackers at Anonymous, tracking user behaviour has become a complicated business.

And Madvertise reckons its secret-sauce algorithms, which correlate dozens of data types from rough location to browser and app choice, give the company a fighting chance in targeting specific demographics.

As Pelillo put it:

“We have the ability to do some interesting things due to our experience as a network. We get to start with all the data, experience, and traffic that comes from our network business, and the partners we integrate can immediately benefit from that. Since we are integrating the supply, the demand, and the exchange, we offer a turn-key solution for anyone interested in doing business with us. As a result improved targeting and machine learning techniques can result in higher eCPMs for publishers and better campaign targeting/delivery for advertisers and agencies.”

The company already seems to be making impressive headway. When we last caught up with Madvertise in May, the company was touting two billion monthly impressions – and that was taking into account the impressions it was buying in through its purchase of Turkish rival Mobilike.

Now it says it’s scoring six billion monthly impressions. That’s 200 percent growth in five months.

According to Pelillo, the sudden growth spurt is down to a few factors: footprint growth in Spain, Italy, the UK and Germany; the aftermath of the Mobilike acquisition; and a huge amount of supply-side partnership-inking over the last four months, in anticipation of the madPlus RTB launch we see today.

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Given the relatively slow sales start of Microsoft’s mobile platform, I was a bit skeptical of the data. However, since the numbers measure the rate of click-throughs on mobile advertisements, they shouldn’t be impacted by actual handset sales. I reached out to Smaato for more insight as to why Windows Phone 7 owners are clicking on more ads than their iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Symbian counterparts and heard back from Harald Heidhardt, Smaato’s CMO, via email:

Even though Windows Phone devices  from Microsoft are not that successful yet in terms of market penetration it is possible, that the novelty factor of new Windows Phone devices is contributing significantly to the higher mobile advertising performance measured in Click-Through rates.

Microsoft’s own SDK is not delivering ads outside the USA yet, and it might be possible that overall there are less mobile ads presented in Windows Phone devices – therefore more attention is given to the ads in apps or mobile websites.

The metrics are looking at click behavior of anonymized smartphone OS owners that are averaged out over a large number of worldwide mobile inventory and therefore give an indication on what advertisers could expect from campaigns targeted to different smartphone OS.

Heidhardt’s explanation makes sense to a degree, although I’d like to see how this plays out over the long haul as Windows Phone 7 devices will lose any “novelty” factor throughout the year. I’ll also be curious to see if the trend holds true as Microsoft handsets are offered in more countries around the world. For now, though, Smaato’s data indicates that advertisers should be targeting Microsoft’s mobile platform

What say you to this news, and how many of you guessed it was Windows Phone? Bonus points if you did!

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The timing of this swap is rather serendipitous as Apple’s latest developer terms appear to block the use of Google’s mobile advertising platform as well as AdMob’s ad measurement service — which Google purchased in November — although Google is unlikely to accept Apple’s actions without a fight.

Meanwhile, Symbian phones still lead the pack when it comes to high CTRs, just as they did last month, which prompted my suggestion that developers consider targeting apps at the Symbian platform, even though iPhone and Android are considered the hot handsets these days. Smaato reinforces my suggestion:

“Symbian remains the leading OS in terms of click through rates worldwide, this month with almost three times the click through rate of iPhone. Putting this into perspective, we have to consider the sheer number of Symbian devices compared to Apple devices, but it should again also serve as further proof to advertisers that the iPhone is far from the be-all and end-all in mobile advertising.”

Indeed, the biggest ad generation threat to Symbian is neither the iPhone nor Android — the lowly feature phone is on pace to topple worldwide Symbian clickthrough rates as early as next month, with continual CTR gains in every month of 2010.

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Smaato summarizes the observation by saying:

The performance of different operating systems in April shows Feature Phone handsets continue its consistent rise in CTR’s (134 up 9 from March), closing the gap on Symbian (157 rising just a point from the previous month). The remaining operating systems saw drops in the index, as CTR’s decreased across the globe. The Index consists of the average CTR of all devices and this number is set to 100.

Despite Feature Phone’s gains, Symbian’s remains the leading OS in terms of click through rates worldwide, with more than double the click through rate of iPhone. Putting this into perspective, we have to consider the sheer number of Symbian devices compared to Apple devices, but it should also serve as further proof to advertisers that the iPhone is far from the be-all and end-all in mobile advertising.

The same clickthrough trend applies to the rest of the world, too, although not as dramatically. Globally, feature phone clickthrough rates are a close second to Symbian handsets followed by Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android, Palm and BlackBerry. But while it’s easy to assume that there are more clicks on Symbian phones simply because there are more of them, that line of thought doesn’t apply when talking about the clickthrough rate, which is a user-driven activity. And in fact, it’s marginally more difficult to click an ad on a Symbian phone than it is on an iPhone — very few Symbian handsets are touchscreen devices.

Smaato’s report is based on data from 40 mobile ad networks that served more than 6 billion ad requests in the month of April, making for a sizable pool of information. So why the heavily skewed clickthrough rates for Symbian, especially in the U.S.? My thought is that Symbian is a more mature operating system in terms of age, and both advertisers and developers have used that time to optimize mobile advertising on the platform. Apple’s iPhone OS is a relative youngster compared to Symbian, having only initially launched on a product in June of 2007. I have little doubt that Apple will figure out how to get the best return on investment from its iAd platform launch later this year, but as of today, Symbian can claim a little victory in the mobile ad space.

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