Mother’s day is, by now, the second largest shopping day of the year. This holiday is celebrated in big countries like the US, China and India during the second Sunday of May.

Other countries adopted another day. This elementary but key information, in terms of geographical target, can’t be not taken in consideration.
Mobile advertising work extremely well during holidays, here are some best practices for your Mother’s day mobile advertising campaign success:
For this holiday, consumers are not only giving present to their moms, but also to their wives (20%), daughters (10%), grandmothers (8%), sisters (8%), friends (7%) and godmothers (2%) as the chart shows.

• Campaign Planning:  Make sure your campaign reaches the right target audience.  Your creative should reflect the specific campaign goals as well (e.g. driving foot traffic to the store, increase mCommerce purchases)
• Campaign Targeting: Advertise across multiple platforms, devices and carriers. This is the best way to ensure you reach your target audience directly at the POS.
• Call-to-Action: Your creative should not display unnecessary images or vague headlines, use a strong call to action that stands out by using a color that contrasts significantly from the background. Clearly and boldly state your brand name, what your product does and why the user should purchase it in less than ten words.

1800Flowers gives a good example for a successful mobile advertising campaign around Mother’s Day. The company ran a mobile ad campaign through Adsmobi’s network to generate sales of flowers for Mother’s Day in two ways: One creative option contained a click to call action, the second option contained a click to website option.

The campaign helped to successfully increase flower sales around Mother’s Day, as well to promote brand awareness of 1800Flowers.

At the beginning of April, certain Internet ad networks were attacked by the ‘Chameleon’ botnet driving up false impressions and costing the industry millions every month. Mobile advertising has been plagued by false impressions for years, but for the majority these are not maliciously done but rather instead accidental.

The small screen on a smartphone guarantees that a percentage of people who open an advert do so by accident. This creates a problem because if we follow the standard pricing model for online advertising which is pay per click, then companies find themselves paying for accidental clicks. This makes return on investment difficult to track with accuracy, and causes questions as to the maturity of the entire mobile advertising process.

For those unfamiliar with mobile advertising it works as an interaction between a real time bidding (RTB) network, and a demand side platform (DSP). The DSP is given an advert by a client, and a budget to publish the advert. When a user accesses a page on a mobile device a notification is then sent to the RTB network asking for an advert to place on the page. This advert is called an impression. The RTB provides certain demographic information based on the site accessed, and other factors, and then the DSPs bid to see who is willing to pay the most for this particular impression. The winning bid is then displayed to the user.

The assumption is then that out of 100 people who see the advert a certain percentage will be interested. One of the main metrics used to measure advertising is the cost per thousand impressions, and we take this figure and weigh the cost per 1000 impressions versus the number of people who were interested out of those thousand – the more people that were interested, the less each individual ad costs. False impressions skew this figure as they drive up the number of impressions, without providing a reasonable rate of return leading to a larger cost for less end result.

In attempting to deal with the problem of false impressions and provide a more transparent way of measuring return on investment (ROI), Adsmobi has also rendered itself immune to a botnet driving up false impressions. The solution is a new technology – provided in partnership with Adgibbon – that enables a pricing model called ‘second click charging’.

The technology is straightforward; if you click on an advert then it opens a splash page, or the app store. The splash page gives some details about the product/service that is being advertised, but invites users to go to the main page to learn more information, which they can do by performing a second click on the advert. For the app store, an overlay is placed over the download button, so that a second click is registered with the system if the download button is pressed.

This system can register when this second click is made, either taking the user to the homepage of the advertiser, or letting them download the app. The new pricing model means that the advertiser is only charged when this second click is made, meaning that the rate of second clicks to interest in terms of downloads is closer to 100 per cent. By using this method an app producer could know almost exactly how many downloads were caused directly through the advert, and a store could know how many people displayed further interest whilst at the same time protecting itself from Botnet scams as we have recently seen.

Developments like this are crucial to securing the future of the mobile advertising market, and proving its maturity and security to brands, agencies and retailers is key to consolidating the huge steps it has taken over the last two years.

Read the full article at Retail Digital

mobyaffiliates did some extensive research around this topic and published a mobile app promotion market map which highlights the big players in the industry. It is worth have a look at the infographic:

While Google uses their many services as data points to serve you ads, Facebook is taking the opposite approach. Facebook Home is going to be the one thing everyone has been waiting for Google to become, by injecting ads into every inch of your mobile experience.

Read more at Geek

Facebook Launches Partner Categories, 500+ Generic Profiles To Target Ads Better, With Data From Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom

Facebook is taking another step ahead in its ad targeting strategy, which serves users advertising based on their location and online purchasing and browsing histories. The social network is launching partner categories: some 500 “unique groups”, with more to come, which are descriptors (one example: “buyers of children’s cereals”) that match up with relevant people among Facebook’s 1 billion+ users.

Read more at TechCrunch

Mobile Location-Based Advertising Estimated to Be Worth $8.5 Billion in 2017

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Berg Insight, the total value of the global real-time mobile location-based advertising and marketing (LBA) market will grow from EUR526 million in 2012 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 65 percent to EUR6.5 billion (US$8.5 billion) in 2017.

Read more at cellular-news

China Is Finally Becoming A Lucrative Market For App Makers

Two years ago, while traveling in Beijing, the big surprise for me was how badly local mobile developers wanted to get U.S. customers. They wanted out, not in. Fraud, piracy, way too many Android stores and a still small installed base of iOS and Android devices made the local Chinese market financially nonviable for many developers. Today the picture is starting to look very different. Why?

Read more at TechCrunch

UK Mobile Advertising Reaches 10% of All Digital Spending

In 2002 less than £200 million was spent on UK internet advertising — 10 years later, digital advertising spend crosses the £5 billion mark. Just as digital spend crossed the £5 billion mark in 2012, mobile spend reached its own half billion pound milestone. Fuelled by smartphone ownership hitting almost two-thirds (64%) of the UK population in December 2012, mobile advertising grew like-for-like by 148% to £526 million in 2012 from £203 million in 2011.

Read more at cellular-news

From the largest agency or global brand right down to the SME and entrepreneurial start-up, it is crucial that mobile advertising optimisation disposes of its previously ‘elitist’ epithet and be viewed for what it is – an accessible tool for all to use as part of efficient and effective audience targeting.

Over the last two years mobile advertising has undergone something of a technological revolution in an attempt to drive performance and increase return on investment. The greater usage of data has been the enabler, ensuring that mobile advertising can now be driven by real-time data allowing for more targeted and personalised campaigns. Recent research revealed that optimising mobile advertising campaigns in real-time is critical for approximately 75 per cent of all small-to-medium businesses, and demand side platforms (DSPs) are a key element to being able to optimise mobile advertising campaigns.

DSPs are the industry’s response to managing multiple ad and data exchanges through one interface for purchasing online display inventory in real-time across multiple publishers, and their introduction made the purchasing cycle of online inventory significantly easier.

DSPs have introduced transparency and control to online advertising campaigns, from the beginning of the bidding journey through to the actual end-user targeted ads themselves. To this end, DSPs are evolving mobile display advertising into something akin to paid searches, such as cost-per-click and cost-per-action.

In the relatively short time they have been around DSPs have already transformed the online advertising space. In just a decade the online advertising spend has increased from £9.3 billion in 2002 (source: Jupiter) to over £65.5 billion by the end of 2012 (source: GroupM).

This growth in online ad spend attracted a flurry of ad and data exchange companies and significantly simplified the online campaign management process, in turn allowing more brands to spend increasingly larger sums of money far more quickly. As a result, online advertising now represents almost a fifth of the total global advertising spend so it should come as no surprise that mobile is next in line for the DSP revolution.

With the introduction of mobile DSPs, reporting can work in unison with the real-time data provided to produce more targeted and personalised ads, thus guaranteeing the best results for individual campaigns.They enhance campaign planners’ ability to plan strategically and deliver increasing revenue through monitoring and adapting their campaigns based on real-time trends.

Ultimately, the value of a DSP is to allow mobile planners and buyers to deliver turbo-boosted performance-managed mobile ad campaigns that brands can manage and track to make sure they are crucially delivering a strong ROI and delivering the right message to the right audiences when it is most relevant to them: be that when they’re at home, working, traveling, at events, or simply socialising.

From the buyer’s perspective, they have the control to purchase ad impressions at a pre-determined rate based on the campaign’s objectives. Furthermore, if the buyer discovers that they are not achieving their target audience mid-campaign, they can amend their purchasing criteria and increase the amount they are willing to pay for the impression to achieve a greater impact.

Another point of consideration is the fact that mobile advertising campaigns have become regional and not just national – by applying automated campaign management a DSP can ensure the campaign is relevant and active in different markets at the most relevant times.

The right data means buyers can set campaign parameters based on who they are targeting and real-time reporting allows buyers to monitor the performance of the campaign and tweak accordingly, based on the real-time behavioural responses to the ad by their consumers.

Transparent reporting is equally important to the whole process. It not only reveals the price you are paying for an ad and subsequent click-through rates (CTR), but where the interaction occurred: whether over WiFi or a3G/4G network, with which operator, which device had the most success, and so on.

The more informed the purchasing decision, the more targeted the ad.This targeting leads to the increased performance of a site/app,a mobile ad campaign and ultimately a greater ROI for the brand implementing it.

The function of a DSP is to make mobile advertising increasingly more efficient and effective, and will encourage brand advertisers to increase their investment in mobile campaigns not only in the length and frequency of campaigns, but also the level of creativity involved. It will come as no surprise that rich media increases the average click-through rate of a campaign to around seven per cent, thus encouraging agencies to be more creative from the very outset of a campaign.

Once a brand has formulated a brief, developed the creatives and is ready to run, the implementation phase of a campaign can now take as little as two and a half hours – a significant reduction on the one to five days this could take only 18 months ago. And, with the optimised performance and transparency afforded to both advertisers and brands by DSPs, along with the speed and accuracy at which they can be deployed, campaigns now have a greater chance than ever before of demonstrating significant results from the outset.

It is human nature to exceed the reach of our grasp and the mobile advertising space and its corresponding new technologies are no different – the success of every technological advance in history has hinged on the education of its target market and this is also true for those brands that chose to use DSPs.

Mobile advertisers offering DSP capabilities must take this on board and play an active role in the ongoing educational process of brands and agencies, and it will be absolutely crucial for them to maintain a dialogue between the start point technology and its end users, if they are to prevent the chance of such a disconnect between the two ever occurring.

Read the full article at Figaro Digital