You're sitting on the couch with the TV on and phone in hand. As a commercial starts, a smartphone app hears what you're watching. AdAge reports.
It then serves up links, coupons or music downloads corresponding to what it hears on the tube through smartphone microphones. So if you tend to impulse buy, the next time you're watching one of those late-night infomercials you might want to set your phone aside.
In recent months, logos for music-identifying service Shazam have popped up in Procter & Gamble, Honda or American Express commercials. Progressive Insurance, Starbucks and Paramount have also linked to mobile content through Shazam tags in their commercials or web videos. The ads prompt viewers to launch Shazam with the company's logo or a call-out, and if they do, the app brings up links their websites, discounts or other goodies.
File under fun ad. The Wall Street Journal Mobile Reader for iPhone, Blackberry and other mobile devices delivers the latest global news, financial events, market insights and information to keep you ahead of the curve.
A fascinating advertising experiment has just got under way in the US: watch an ad on TV and get a free Pepsi Max. But you don't have to go to a website for coupons. All you do is point your iPhone at the screen while the commercial is playing, and hit the green button on the IntoNow (a free download) . [via The Drum]
Technology called audio-fingerprinting recognises the ad - and a coupon for a free 20-ounce bottle of Pepsi Max is downloaded to your phone instantly.
Pepsi is to honour as many as 50,000 such coupons as a way of getting people to try Pepsi Max - as well as (much more significant) the potential for interactive TV ads.
IntoNow's "fingerprinting" knows not only what consumers are watching, but also if they're watching it live or delayed on a DVR or other recording device.
If you think that your mobile phone is one place where you can get away from advertising, think again. The BBC reports.
The marketing industry has decided that mobile is the platform of the future and is rushing to send messages to your phone.
2010 was the breakthrough year for mobile advertising," says Kerstin Trikalitis, chief executive officer of Out There Mobile Media. "We've seen triple-digit growth rates in the last eighteen months and this trend is continuing through 2011."
... "We are at the start, there's lots of enthusiasm, and the industry is set to hit $20billion this year," says Marco Veremis, President of UpStream, a mobile marketing consultancy.
"But it's a bit like TV in the 1950s, it's still under development and we don't know what the killer format will be."
Google, Nokia and Orange are experimenting with pilot ad campaigns that allow people to use their mobile phones to interact with posters set up in bus stops and other transportation hubs in NY, The Wall Street Journal reports via NY Convergence.
The companies are using the posters to distribute wireless apps or ringtones., as Google’s approach is to advertise an app and let people download it through a WiFi router installed at the bus stop.
AdMob, the mobile advertising agency now owned by Google says that it is now handling in excess of 2 billion ad requests per day, more than quadrupling the daily rate over the last twelve months.
Today the company receives more ad requests in a single day than AdMob received for the entire month of December 2007. That's a magnitude of 30 times in just over three years.
According to Mobiledia, Apple plans to announce a list of companies that will advertise on European iPhones later this week, as the company expands its iAds service globally.
Advertisements for iPhones which rolled out in the U.S. in April, will now expand to Europe and Japan.
With iAds software, which will be in use on three continents, application developers will be able to share revenue with Apple from ads that are displayed on iPhones.
Mobile virtual goods accounted for 80 percent of revenue from Apple iOS4 apps in September, far outpacing advertising, according to new data from analytics firm Flurry.
Bloomingdale’s is advertising its mobile commerce site in its fall print catalog. The ad shows an iPhone with the site depicted on the phone’s browser and says, “Now our Web site fits on your phone.” Mobile Marketer reports.
The homepage prominently displays a clickable promotion for Bloomingdale’s Fall Style Guide, a search bar and links to a store locator and special offers.
Users can browse categories such as Women, Men, Contemporary, Shoes and Handbags by tapping on links listed lower on the page.
Within each category page, consumers can find new arrivals or narrow down their searches further by clicking on sub-category options and can shop for sales items in any of the categories.
Retailers are increasingly trying their hand in the mobile space and Bloomingdale’s has been an active player.
Last year, Bloomingdale’s tapped mobile for its fall fashion campaign – “Lights, Camera, Fashion” – and added an element of interactivity to engage with customers in a new way.
According to The Age, mobile advertising could make up 10% of Apple's revenue by 2012.
In its first eight weeks of selling iAds, Apple garnered $US60 million ($73 million) worth of commitments for mobile ads to run in 2010's second half, from 17 blue-chip brands including Unilever, General Electric and Citigroup.
... Just like the iPhone app store, there will be a simple revenue split. Developers will keep 60% of revenues, however, rather than the 70% they are awarded for iPhone apps. In return, Apple will host and deliver all of the iAds.
The war of words between Google and Apple over mobile ads sharpened on Wednesday, writes New York Times Bits Blog.
AdMob, the mobile advertising start-up that Google recently acquired, said Apple’s new terms of service for the iPhone 4 and iPad, if enforced, would prevent it from putting ads inside mobile apps. That could be crippling for AdMob, which is the No. 1 seller of ads in iPhone apps. Omar Hamoui, the chief executive of AdMob, said the policy could hurt developers too.
Deals for advertising on iPhone and iPod Touch apps represent almost half of forecast US mobile ad spending, Apple says, reports The Guardian.
The service – which will offer advertising inside mobile apps, initially on the iPhone and iPod Touch – promises to combine the emotion of TV advertising with the interactivity of internet advertising. Apple says the deals it has already secured represent almost half of the total forecasted mobile ad spend in the US for the second half of 2010.
The other day, comedian Ellen played a funny spoof of the iPhone commercials -- or at least what she thought was funny. Apple wasn't thrilled with it, and now Ellen's in hot water! Watch what she had to say about...
The biggest takeaway from a report published by Millennial Media today is that smartphone users are consuming more content—and therefore more ads—on nearly every smartphone and connected device available in the market. [mocoNews]
-- Android ad requests grew 72 percent in March month over month.
-- iPad impressions increased 713 percent in the first full week the device was available.
-- Apple ad requests grew 20 percent month over month.
-- RIM ad requests grew 25 percent month over month.
Apple revealed its plans to get more directly involved in the mobile advertising business. It announced a new service called iAd, which is built into the upcoming version 4.0 of the iPhone operating system. MobileBeat reports.
Chief executive Steve Jobs said iAd will allow advertisers to deliver an unprecedented combination of interactivity and emotion in iPhone ads, according to Gdgt’s liveblog. By “emotion,” he seems to mean the high-quality, media-driven experience that you might get with, say, an iPhone ad. He showed off a Nike ad with high resolution video as an example.
Apple has told developers it will not accept iPhone applications that use the smartphone's global positioning system to distribute location-based advertising. Information Week reports.
The company did not give a reason for the ban, but in an announcement posted Wednesday on the iPhone Dev Center, it said that applications with features based on an iPhone user's location must provide "beneficial information."
Real-time Web search provider OneRiot on Tuesday announced a new service that will offer developers of Twitter apps, IM clients, and iPhone apps a way to monetize their efforts.
The service, dubbed RiotWise Trending Ads, works by displaying video ad links relating to Twitter's trending topics.
One company claims that there's a significantly higher ad clickthrough rate on the iPhone compared to traditional Web advertising. Those results seem to go against a previous study on the topic, though. [via arstechnica]
San Francisco-based mobile advertising company Greystripe says that it sees 10 to 20 percent higher clickthrough rates (CTR) on the iPhone than with traditional Web advertising.
... This news is practically the opposite of results from a study we wrote about in September. That study, by Chitika, claimed iPhone users were the worst of all mobile users at handing out the clicks at an abysmal 0.3 percent rate.
Volkswagen of America is launching the newest-generation GTI exclusively on an iPhone game app, a cost-efficient approach the automaker said is a first for the industry. AdAge reports.
How cost efficient? When the marketer introduced the GTI in 2006, it spent $60 million on a big-budget blitz with lots of network TV. By comparison, an executive familiar with the matter estimates the annual budget for mobile AOR services is $500,000.
And while an iPhone-only strategy may seem limiting, consider this: In September, Apple reported there are more than 50 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide. By comparison, CBS' "NCIS," the most-watched show for week ending Oct. 18, reached 21 million viewers and commands an average price of $130,000 for a single 30-second spot.
... For driving that demographic to discover and download the app, Volkswagen is banking on PR, viral pass-along and some paid search for consumers looking for iPhone apps and information on the GTI.
According to The New York Times, a study conducted by Chitika based on 92 million impressions, reveals that mobile users are only about half as likely to click on an advertisement vs. non-mobile web users. The mobile click-through rate was 0.48 percent vs. 0.83 percent on non-mobile advertising. And iPhone users were found to be the least likely to click on mobile ads.
In their own words: While the recent growth in ’smartphones’ has sparked a renewed interest in mobile advertising, it appears given the numbers that mobile users are not receptive to advertising – a phenomenon that is not surprising, given the mobile users’ propensity to be searching for quick answers or directions.
Apple announced a “Top Grossing” category in addition to existing “Top Paid” and “Top Free” categories on the store. That change responds to developer complaints that expensive apps get buried in the “Top Paid” category because that ranking is based on the number of downloads, rather than total revenue generated from distribution of a piece of software.
20th Century Fox has tapped Tapulous, the company behind the most popular iPhone game, "Tap Tap Revenge," to run what it says is the first user-generated-content campaign on the Apple handset and help it target a demographic "sweet spot." Adage reports.
To plug the darkly comedic horror flick "Jennifer's Body," the campaign asks people to come up with the best visual theme for "Tap Tap Revenge" using images from the movie.
For the game's background, users can choose from a gallery of movie stills, most of which feature the film's provocative star, Megan Fox, plus a palette of colors and shapes to help fill in the rest of the game's visual canvas. The more artistically inclined can download a file containing additional movie assets.
Popular vote will decide the winner, and the finalists will be crowned a day before the contest ends on Sept. 10. Besides bragging rights, prizes include computer hardware such as a large tablet and a portable hard drive.
Over the weekend The New York Times has started running roadblock interactive ads on its iPhone app (attached screen capture), possibly the first such by a big publisher. Rafat Ali reports on PaidContent.
Still early days on the ad, but since NYT’s one of the bigger media apps, would be interesting to get the data on interaction later down the line. The upside is this is as good a captive audience you can get in a digital medium, but risk of course is that these ads are pretty intrusive and risk irritating off some users.
The Central Office of Information (COI), the UK’s biggest advertiser, has called for industry bodies to offer guidelines on advertising in mobile apps as the format becomes increasingly popular. Mad.co.uk reports.
It comes after advertisers expressed concern that ads in iPhone apps which link to sites not optimised for mobile could damage brands’ reputations.
Last month Google launched AdSense for Mobile Apps to capitalise on the growing sector and began serving ads into iPhone and Android apps for brands such as BlackBerry, Compare the Market and O2. But some ads direct users to online websites that don’t render on phones, rather than to mobile-enabled sites.
It’s estimated that up to 30% of ads within mobile apps link to Flash sites which can’t be displayed on an iPhone; just 5% link to a mobile-enabled site.
Intomobile reports on the first iPhone application marketing book (actually it’s an ebook) called “Secrets Of iPhone App Marketing: How To Get Your App Noticed & Increase Your Sales.”
The purpose of the eBook is to teach App Developers the importance of a strong marketing strategy and how to create one for their application. Developers will learn the best websites for iPhone App reviews, step-by-step instructions for how to prepare and submit their app to each site, how to write an effective press release, and tips on how to keep the public’s attention. Over 1000 hours of research have been condensed into an eBook, which is on sale now, and for a limited time is priced at $49.
In a megastore as big as Apple’s iPhone App Store, the secret to success is getting noticed. With more than 65,000 apps in 20 categories, app developers have come up with different strategies to accomplish that. The Wall Street Journal's Digits Blog reports.
One focus is getting on Apple’s ranking lists, to be one of the top 25, which people regularly comb through to find apps they want and can accesses via iPhone. The next 25 can still be viewed on iPhones, but numbers 51 through 100 can only be accessed through computers. Apple doesn’t rank beyond that.
And now for a few tricks of the trade:
-- Word-of-mouth campaign. Send out promotional codes for new apps
-- Advertising. Advertise on the Internet and in other iPhone apps through ad networks run by firms like Greystripe and AdMob
-- Choose a smaller category amongst the 20 categories of the App Store
-- Set a target release date. Weekends and Mondays are the most ideal launch days
-- Cut prices. It seems to work
-- Creat free demo versions. Offer free trial versions and label them “lite.”
-- Keyword searches. Straightforward app titles work better than creative ones
-- Copycat apps. Create an app that is similar to a popular existing app
-- Become one of Apple’s featured apps. A dream come true when it happens
-- Target specific regions. Like the iTunes music store, the App Store has a different interface for each market.
It then serves up links, coupons or music downloads corresponding to what it hears on the tube through smartphone microphones. So if you tend to impulse buy, the next time you're watching one of those late-night infomercials you might want to set your phone aside.
A fascinating advertising experiment has just got under way in the US: watch an ad on TV and get a free Pepsi Max. But you don't have to go to a website for coupons. All you do is point your iPhone at the screen while the commercial is playing, and hit the green button on the 
Google, Nokia and Orange are experimenting with pilot ad campaigns that allow people to use their mobile phones to interact with posters set up in bus stops and other transportation hubs in NY, 
According to 
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The war of words between Google and Apple over mobile ads sharpened on Wednesday, writes New York Times 
Apple has told developers it will not accept iPhone applications that use the smartphone's global positioning system to distribute location-based advertising. 
Volkswagen of America is launching the newest-generation GTI exclusively on an 
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20th Century Fox has tapped 
