Please join us this Wednesday at GDC for an educational session on ‘Promoting and Monetizing Your App: Finding Success in Mobile.’ This session is part of the iPhone Summit and Gamesbeat.

AdMob Senior Director of Sales Brendon Kraham and iPhone & Android Business Development Manager Charles Yim will share examples of gaming apps that have created effective business models. Brendon will share examples of game apps that have successfully used advertising to drive app downloads and boost app rankings. Charles will discuss tips for earning revenue from mobile traffic.

Later in the day be sure to stop by ‘A Sea of Mobile Devices,’ a panel discussion at Gamesbeat where Director of Business Development Aunkur Arya will share his thoughts on the changing landscape and monetization opportunities of mobile gaming.

Session time and location information is as follows:

Promoting and Monetizing Your App: Finding Success in Mobile
Date: March 10, 2010
Time: 11:15am – 12:15am
Location: Room 112, Moscone Center North Hall

A Sea of Mobile Devices
Date: March 10, 2010
Time: 4:30pm – 5:15pm
Location: Room 305, Moscone Center South Hall

Afterwards, please drop by our table in Room 303 in Moscone Center South Hall to learn more about mobile advertising and to get started with AdMob.

See you there!

Johanna W.
Marketing

I just read Rich Wong’s article in TechCrunch today and as usual, he had a great perspective.  I love the “deal with it” perspective and think that’s the key.

The mobile industry has established that the value is there in terms of audience, spending power, engagement and trackable actions.  The ROI is there on an investment in content (sites / apps) or an investment to build an audience.

I joined a shop.org event on Tuesday and retailers and ecommerce players are hard at work figuring out how to build their mobile presence and how to handle the complexity among handsets and OSes.  The ROI is there to justify the investment.

The ROI is the key to the decision to DEAL WITH IT.  In years past, the return may not have motivated many to invest to address the mobile opportunity. In 2009 and clearly in 2010, most businesses must build a plan for mobile or fall behind.

Mobile is complex and fragmentation is part of the equation. But most businesses can’t afford not to DEAL WITH IT.

Year of mobile questions be gone. Well said Rich.

Jason S
VP and GM North America

This Monday at digiday:Mobile in LA please come see us present our new case study: “How Universal and Ignited Unleashed “The Wolfman” in Mobile.” 

AdMob Regional Director Matt Shaw will share insights from a case study for Universal Pictures and their agency, Ignited, detailing how they promoted the release of the film “The Wolfman.” Universal and Ignited used AdMob’s Interactive Video Ad Unit to push the creative boundaries of mobile rich-media advertising. Learn how to make mobile a vital part of an integrated campaign from this proven example of success. 

Additionally, Tony Nethercutt, VP of Sales, will be speaking on the Redefining A Cluttered App Market panel. The panel will explore the future of the mobile app and its uses in the brand marketing ecosystem. 

See you there!

Ben C.
Marketing

We had our own version of Winter Olympics, better known as the AdMob Ping Pong Tournament. The semi-regular event was in full force last week with many AdMobsters partaking in a nerve-racking match or two.

Despite an abundance of talented players, there can ultimately be only one winner and the title went to Chetan from Operations. Showcasing his impressive ping pong skills, Chetan deftly rose above his competition and is now the reigning AdMob Ping Pong Champion.

Congratulations Chetan!

Anna K
Marketing

Geffen Records, a Universal Music UK label, wanted to engage the youth market and increase pre-orders of Mini Viva’s new single “Left My Heart in Tokyo” via iTunes. Targeting the right audience was very important to Geffen and AdMob was able to fulfill that request.

Geffen Records ran AdMob’s rich-media ads, exclusively targeting iPod touch users, to successfully reach their desired audience.

The AdMob campaign was instrumental in elevating “Left My Heart in Tokyo” into the UK top 10 track on iTunes, peaking at number 3 in the UK iTunes Top 100 chart.

Want more details on this campaign? Download the full case study.

For your own success story, fill out our contact form for more information.

Regards,

Jonathan A
Brand Sales Director, Europe

This month’s Mobile Metrics report is out and it’s full of interesting consumer insights. The AdMob team ran an opt-in survey to learn more about consumer engagement with applications housed on the iPhone, iPod touch, Android, and webOS devices. The survey included 963 respondents across all of the platforms and revealed some noteworthy points on app purchasing habits:

• Android and iPhone users download a similar number of apps every month and spend a similar amount of time using the apps. However, iPhone users continue to download more paid applications, with 50% of users purchasing at least one paid application a month compared to 21% of Android users and 24% of webOS users.

• 73% of Android users are male, compared to 58% of webOS users, 57% of iPhone users and 54% iPod touch users.  The iPhone, iPod touch and webOS have similar gender distributions, with just over half of the users on all devices being male.

• 16% of iPhone users said they intend to purchase an iPad, compared to 11% of webOS users and only 6% of Android users.  Approximately the same percentage of Android users were interested in purchasing the Amazon Kindle as were interested in purchasing the iPad.

For more information about the survey or to download the full Mobile Metrics report, please visit the AdMob Mobile Metrics Blog.

Harsh S
Product Marketing

Last week saw AdMob head to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, the mobile industry’s largest event of the year. MWC 2010 was attended by 49,000 mobilists, up about 2,000 on 2009, according to figures released by the GSMA.

Overall, the feeling was more upbeat than last year, when many people’s thoughts were about the recession.

MWC is an important event for AdMob and we’ve been attending since we started in 2006. We not only see it as a great opportunity to meet potential new publishing partners, developers and advertisers, but also to catch up with existing ones and see industry friends at the exhibition as well as at various events taking place throughout the evening. It’s also a time when our partners can provide feedback to our Product and Engineering teams and discuss new features and developments they’d like to see.

This year we had a higher profile than ever with a great stand in Hall 7 (officially known as “App Planet”), a keynote at the Mobile Premier Awards and at the main conference. We also sponsored the legendary Swedish Beers (where about 1000 people attended during the evening) and chaired an excellent Mobile London panel on the future of media – plenty of food for thought in that one.

2010 is definitely a year when mobile advertising feels like it’s growing up and it’s an exciting time to be a part of what’s becoming such a vibrant industry.

Some photos of the AdMob team at MWC:

Russell B

Last week AdMob’s GM of North America Jason Spero was on NBC Press:Here, a Bay Area Sunday morning technology news program. Jason joined NBC’s host Scott McGrew and panelists Laura Sydell of NPR and Maggie Shiels from BBC for a roundtable discussion on recent developments and upcoming trends in the mobile advertising space.

Watch the video and find out what Jason has to say:

Anna K
Marketing

I’ll be presenting an overview of AdWhirl, our open source mediation layer, at the Silicon Valley Developer February meetup this Wed, Feb 24th in Santa Clara.   We’re excited about launching AdWhirl for Android and I’ll be there to take answer any questions you may have and get your feedback.  Sign up for the Meetup group to RSVP and attend the event for free.

Nat C
Product

We are really excited with the market reception since we launched the open source versions of the AdWhirl iPhone SDK and AdWhirl Server in December.  Since the launch of the open source SDK, the number of new apps installing AdWhirl every week has increased by 40% and there has been a 78% increase in daily impressions.  There are now over 1,300 apps actively using AdWhirl daily.  This warm acceptance has reinforced our belief that transparent mediation is a great tool for the developer community and we remain fully committed to expanding its functionality across platforms going forward.

Today we are very happy to announce the launch of a fully supported Android SDK for the AdWhirl Open-Source mediation layer.  Our goal with this release is to enable application developers to take advantage of the exciting growth of the Android marketplace – and maximize their revenue through an open, neutral, and transparent mediation layer.

The AdWhirl Android SDK is completely open-source and offers feature parity with its iPhone counterpart, except for a few platform specific limitations.  It is managed through the same easy Web UI as the iPhone version, making it easy for developers to track all their applications across platforms.  The first version of the SDK includes support for the two ad networks with publically available Android SDKs, Quattro and AdMob, although users are free to add support to any other ad network they choose.

The AdWhirl team worked closely with the entire AdWhirl developer community throughout this project and the SDK has been field-tested by real AdWhirl users. We believe that this collaborative approach will make better mediation available to all.  We will continue to encourage active participation on part of AdWhirl users, developers and ad networks to the development of future generations of the project.

Visit the AdWhirl website for more information.  The new SDK is available for download on Google code under the Apache Software Foundation license. We would love to hear your feedback and questions at support@adwhirl.com or through our AdWhirl forum on Google Groups.

Nat and the AdWhirl team