Mobile advertising is seeing rapid growth and today’s campaigns are richer and more advanced than ever.  However, a lack of industry standards has made it difficult to build and run rich media campaigns across different ad networks and mobile platforms at scale.

To address this challenge, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) brought together a broad group of industry participants and created the MRAID (Mobile Rich-Media Ads Interface Definitions) project. Google fully supports IAB’s effort to create mobile advertising standards and is actively engaged as a member of the MRAID working group.

Last week, IAB released the first public draft of MRAID v1.0  for comments and feedback. The document provides definitions to help standardize the interaction between mobile ads and mobile platform SDKs.  We invite the industry to review this draft and look forward to finalizing this important mobile standard.

The effort to develop standards on mobile is reminiscent of a similar process on desktop years ago.  On desktop, Flash emerged as a standard which enabled advertisers to create ads that would seamlessly run across different ad networks and websites.

Today, the mobile industry has rallied around HTML5 as the preferred language to create mobile ads, yet several challenges remain before this can be instituted.  A wide variety of mobile SDKs have forced advertisers to develop platform or network-specific ads as opposed to a single ad that works across multiple networks and devices.  Having to customize campaigns for each ad network increases cost and pain of ad creation and hinders the growth of the ecosystem.  Imagine if a marketer’s TV ads worked on one channel and one type of television, but not others - that’s where we stand with some mobile ads today.

The first public draft of MRAID v1.0  is a significant step in the rapid evolution of mobile and mobile advertising.  We thank the IAB for organizing the initiative and other working group members for passionately participating in this important project.

Wook Chung
Product Management, Mobile Ads

We all know that consumers and businesses are going mobile. In fact, this was the first year that shipments of smartphone and tablets outpaced computers. This holiday season, we predict that mobile will become an even bigger part of consumer activity, with a predicted 44% of total searches in the US for last minute gifts and store locator terms coming a mobile device.

You’ve probably started to tailor your advertising efforts for mobile, and engage your users on these devices. But what’s next? How can you delve deeper in the mobile space? We want to give you the tools to get your business from the “Why?” to the "How?"

On Wednesday, September 21 at 11:00 am PT/2:00 pm ET, Sonja Lee, Product Marketing Manager and Angela Sherman, Mobile Specialist, will be presenting 5 key mobile advertising strategies for various marketing goals, including how to drive local traffic and mobile conversion volume, and how best to reach tablet users. They will also be showcasing the latest launches in Google mobile ads and discussing how to best incorporate them into your mobile strategy.

Are you ready to take your business and your clients forward with mobile? Sign up for our webinar today. To register, please visit this link: goo.gl/KFpeb

We look forward to seeing you on September 21st!

Posted by Sonja Lee, Product Marketing Manager, Google Mobile Ads

Leapfrog Online, one of the largest digital marketing companies in the US, helps Fortune 500 companies build digital channels that capture new customers at dramatic rates. Their expertise, coupled with Google Mobile Ads, has seen mobile campaigns that drive quantifiable, high-volume sales for big brands in the telecommunications, financial services, automotive, home services, and education industries.

The mobile opportunity is significant and growing at an exponential pace and Leapfrog is seeing strong results: mobile sales range from 15-125% of desktop sales across their clients. That means that some clients are now seeing mobile sales eclipse desktop. Additionally, Leapfrog launched its first mobile optimized site for a large client in the telecommunications industry in 2009. With this new site, sales through mobile campaigns skyrocketed by 35% and led to similar results across Leapfrog’s portfolio.

According to Leapfrog, it’s not simply about developing a mobile app or site, it’s about smart integration. That means engaging the customer via mobile and driving them to an easy-to-use experience from beginning to end on their mobile device to close the purchase funnel. This includes smart, targeted marketing, focused call centers, data-driven messaging and promotions, and top-notch brand marketing.

“We are always testing new and different approaches to deliver a transformative sales channel for our brands. Mobile has demonstrated unprecedented growth – we have not seen another approach deliver this much volume over such a short period of time, with no end in sight to the opportunity,” says Cass Baker, Executive Vice President of Leapfrog Online.

To learn more about how Leapfrog is measuring ROI on every mobile campaign, download the full agency testimonial here.


Posted by Mike Schipper, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Now that the final days of summer have come to an end, retailers are in the thick of planning for the busy holiday shopping season.  As you start to plan your campaigns, it's important to take a step back and look at how consumers are using their mobile and tablet devices to drive in-store and on-device purchases.  Here are a few insights that may surprise you:

• We project that this year 15% of total “Black Friday” searches will be from mobile devices based on historical growth rates.
• Many advertisers do not realize that mobile users actively search for last minute holiday gifts and to locate stores to purchase these last minute gifts.  In fact, we project that 44% of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices this holiday season based on historical growth rates.  
• In fact, looking back on the past two holiday seasons, we see a “double peak” in search volumes for retail brands around first Black Friday and then the week before Christmas as mobile users locate stores for last minute shopping.  These shoppers may have missed the deadline for free shipping and are motivated to locate and shop at brick and mortar locations.  Here is the data from the holiday season in 2009 & 2010 showing this double peak:

• The important thing to keep in mind is that these mobile searches drive in-store purchases: 65% of high end device users report that they have used their device to find a business, and then made a purchase at that business in person according our holiday retail survey of users in the AdMob network.
• Retailers should be sure to plan for the tablet audience when it comes to driving on-device conversions.  Ebay has stated that tablet users spend 50% more than PC users, have higher AOV, and have higher or equivalent conversion rates.
• According to our survey, greater than 33% of both smartphone users and tablet users plan to start their shopping before Thanksgiving, so smart marketers will start their campaigns early this year to reach these consumers.

Whether your goals are branding or direct response, Google Mobile Ads can help you with strategies to reach and engage your target audience and drive customers to convert on tablets, on mobile devices, and in your stores.  Contact your Google Mobile Ads sales representative to learn more.

Posted by Johanna Werther, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads

Between AdMob, which we acquired last year, and Google AdSense, we help mobile publishers make money and grow their businesses through ad-funded apps and web content. Some of our customers have asked us whether they should use AdMob or AdSense, since there's some overlap between the two. Our teams have been working hard to combine the best of both products and make life simple and seamless for our customers, while making sure we have a broad range of products and features to suit all our customers' needs.

Earlier this year, for example, all AdSense for Mobile Applications beta participants switched to AdMob, which is now our primary, specialized solution for app developers.

We're now pleased to offer a unified, specialized service for mobile web site publishers – AdSense, which we encourage AdMob mobile web publishers to move to. AdMob support for older WAP mobile web sites will stop on September 30. For sites and ads made to be viewed on high-end devices (like iPhones and Android phones), the AdMob product will be around for a little longer, but we wanted to give mobile web publishers plenty of time to start the transition.

The net result of all this is that if you're an app developer, AdMob is your solution for monetizing, measuring, and promoting your mobile apps. If you're a mobile web publisher, AdSense can help you monetize your mobile web content, and you can get started here. (If you're an AdMob advertiser who wants to reach users on WAP mobile devices, AdWords can help you reach hundreds of millions of users across the Google Display Network.

We know that these sorts of transitions can cause our customers some extra work, but we are absolutely confident that by having products to suit the specific needs of app developers and web publishers we’ll be able to offer the best technology and reporting, the easiest to use tools, the highest quality ads, and the most revenue possible.

Mobile advertising is evolving at lightning speed, and our engineers have been working at the same pace to help drive the growth of our clients' mobile businesses: we released new tablet user experiences, targeting options and creative formats; we announced integrations between AdMob and the DoubleClick products with rich media ad serving into apps and mobile support in DFP Small Business. We even tried to push the boundaries of what's possible with mobile rich media with our innovative "Uncover Your World" campaign.

We're excited about partnering with you on this journey, and have a lot more coming soon. Stay tuned.


Posted by Clay Bavor, Product Management Director, Mobile Ads

Here on the Google mobile ads team, we’re big fans of pushing the limits of what’s possible with our products. So when we were thinking about the best way to promote the Google Search app on iPhone, we wanted to see what we could do with the latest in AdMob rich media.

The answer, it turned out, was a whole lot. We worked closely with our marketing team and its agency, Grow Interactive, to create “Uncover Your World,” an interactive mobile experience that takes full advantage of AdMob’s rich media capabilities.

Here’s a preview:

(l-r): User clicks on an in-app animated HTML5 banner; They watch an in-line intro video; While exploring the ad, users can unlock secret games

And here’s a video where you can see how the ad actually works:

“Uncover Your World” invites you to explore a virtual cityscape and learn via a self-paced storyline how the Google Search app can “uncover” facts about the world around you with features like search with your voice and search with your phone’s camera. We highlighted this functionality by combining many of AdMob’s custom rich media features, including:

• Animated HTML5 banners
• Interactive HTML5 interstitials and expandables
• Extensive video content
• In-line video and audio, so the users stay within the ad while experiencing sight, sound and motion instead of being directed to the phone’s media player (e.g., Quicktime for iPhone)
• Unlockable games where users tap, touch, and tilt to play

The preliminary results of the campaign have been impressive. On average, users spend over a minute and a half interacting with the ad, and of those, 50% go on directly from the ad to download the app.

As excited as we are about these results, we’re even more excited to see how “the pros” – our advertisers and their creative agencies – make use of the technologies behind the “Uncover Your World” campaign. As the campaign showed, the tools are all now there to build really innovative new mobile experiences that make use of the touchscreen, location, audio, video, interactivity, and more.

Designers... start your engines!

Posted by Clay Bavor, Product Management Director, Mobile Ads

Update: You can also view the ad experience directly at http://www.uncoveryourworld.com on your iPhone browser.

We recently went out into the streets of Seoul and looked around for people with smartphones in their hands - it wasn’t hard - and asked them questions about how they use their smartphone, how often they use it and what their life would be like without it. We heard from people young and old, and their answers were unsurprisingly consistent: they can barely imagine life without their smartphones.

We thought the video would be interesting to a global audience interested in the changing dynamics of a fast-growing Asian economy, so we subtitled the video in English for you:
 

We also recently completed a study, in collaboration with Ipsos, of over 1,000 South Korean smartphone users and found some of the following stats to be interesting:

• 100% of South Koreans have a mobile phone, 27% of them smartphones. This smartphone penetration is higher than countries such as Germany, Italy, Taiwan and Russia, and comparable to the U.S., France, and the UK.
• 85% of smartphone users report that this is their first smartphone, one of the highest proportions of any country in the world that we studied.
• South Korean smartphone users report an average of 42 apps downloaded on their phone, the second highest # of any country for which we currently have results.
• 72% are using search on their smartphones on a daily basis, one of the top 3 countries out of the 30 we studied.
• Koreans are more likely to say they’ve used their smartphone at home (98%) than on the go (90%) or at work (79%) showing that the smartphone is a primary, not just supplementary, gateway to the internet.

We’ll be making many more statistics on Korean smartphone users publicly available for your own analysis within the next few weeks - including mobile search, video, social networking, mobile advertising attitudes and more - so stay tuned.

Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Manager, Google Asia-Pacific