Two years ago at CTIA, only a few companies would even mumble the words “mobile advertising,” but now it’s a part of everyone’s vernacular. Truthfully, that makes it a lot more difficult to weed through the announcements to see what is real and what is not. The skeptics say mobile advertising is in its infancy because no meaningful revenues are being made on it compared to the broader advertising market and the proponents are saying that it will be a huge success if you give it time.
Here are a few advertising tidbits from this year’s CTIA:
— Vodafone: The company’s CEO Arun Sarin covered a ton of subjects in his keynote, but I bet a lot of people missed his one-sentence comment on the mobile advertising business. He said they are exploring the idea of sharing advertising revenues with their customers through a brand campaign involving a customer’s demographics. I asked Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) about this since they are Vodafone’s (NYSE: VOD) advertising and search partner in the U.K. Yahoo uses demographics there, including age, location and gender, to better place ads. But as far as returning some of that revenue to subscribers, whether it’s cheaper apps, or more minutes, who knows? Yahoo’s VP of mobile advertisers and publishers Gary Roshak, said: “That’s the first time I’ve heard that.”
— Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) USA: I had a few minutes to talk to Sir Richard Branson before he went on stage to deliver an interesting keynote at CTIA that covered everything from his ventures in the airplane and train business to an April’s Fool joke. Since he doesn’t play a heavy role in the mobile business, he didn’t have much to share on the topic, except for one thing: price. He was acutely aware of people’s limited spending budgets, and how wireless needs to be affordable. To that end, I asked for an update on Sugar Mama, Virgin’s advertising program that awards free minutes for watching ads. They said about 1,000 people a day are signing up for the service, and they have an attractive click-thru rate of 5.5 percent on ads for companies such as Subway and Playstation. Not too shabby.
— Forum Nokia: The group encourages developers and provides tools for building applications on Nokia (NYSE: NOK) devices, and now through Nokia Interactive, they will try to be connecting mobile developers with advertisers as a way for them to monetize those applications. Forum Nokia’s director for the Americas Rob Taylor said that a lot of consumers have been hardened by the Internet, and don’t want to pay for things. In the next six months, they’ll allow advertisers to publish an ad in an application. This is made possible by Nokia’s acquisition of mobile ad firm Enpocket in October 2007.
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