Brian Prows’ Interview of Mobiya’s : Sacha Vekeman

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Mobile advertisers and publishers continue seeking effective strategies and platforms to market products and monetize their websites. Advertisers seek new ways to increase lead conversion and sales through mobile channels as part of their overall marketing mix, while publishers increasingly desire to generate ad revenue on their websites. (SMS-based mobile advertising can achieve conversion rates between 32%-42%.)

In a recent podcast interview with marketing consultant Brian Prows and Sacha Vekeman, a found and and V.P. of Business Development of Mobiya in the U.K., Vekeman discusses lead generation and other mobile advertising applications in the U.K., Europe and the U.S., covering a variety of market niches including dating, real estate and auto.

Download the podcast here.

IM-Mobile

TexoMobile is please to announce the launch of « mobile performance marketing campaigns ». Through the affiliation platform MobPartner, mobile CPA campaigns (cost by acquisition) offers the possibility to advertisers and media agencies to control client acquisition costs and improve sales. Thanks to 30 000 (and growing) mobile affiliates in 130 countries, MobPartner is able to target campaigns per countries and phone models.

“Since we have launched a few months ago, our CPA campaigns show a direct and real return on investment to our first advertisers, and the popularity of MobPartner for affiliates is growing rapidly”, declared Guillaume Alabert, co-founder of TexoMobile.

One of the first customers, Olivier Chouraki CEO of MobiLuck, had this to say: “We are very satisfied with the affiliation program we have created with MobPartner, particularly the volume and quality of traffic generated across many countries, the availability of the team to provide support and the real-time reporting. The biggest advantage is being able to manage our target acquisition costs on a country by country basis, which guarantees for us the return on investment of our mobile marketing campaigns”.

TexoMobile helps advertisers from campaign creation to affiliates animation, tracking management, fraud detection and global reporting. “For a long time we have worked hard to manage and improve our own traffic. With MobPartner, we share our expertise by helping our partners to acquire more users and generate more revenue.” says Vianney Settini, co-founder of TexoMobile.

Following a successfull bêta-test period, TexoMobile is now opening his MobPartner platform to all who wishing to acquire new users with a cost-control method.

TexoMobile will present this exciting new opportunity at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona: Hall 2 Booth 2F49.

About TexoMobile, creator of mobile communities:

- Mobpartner, as our Mobile Affiliation Platform is branded, is the first offering Mobile Performance Marketing. We offer to advertisers and media agencies a way to acquire clients in a “cost control” method, based on CPA model tracking, fraud management, statistics and reporting. Thanks to our 30 000 mobile affiliates worldwide, we can quickly help your company to increase your user base and your traffic. We can also work together to offer a white labeled version of your service to our affiliates, to help you growing quickly.

- iGloo World is a mobile 2.0 portal with many community services and tools for worldwide users : email, blogs, photo sharing, directories, customized pages, dating, video sharing sites etc.
www.texomobile.com | www.mobpartner.mobi | www.igloo.mobi

Windows mobile have had a huge head start over the likes of the iPhone and lets not even talk about Google Android. Last year around 20 million Windows Mobile units were sold. That is a lot when comparing with other platforms.. but it is way under forecast !

In fact sales have tapered off significantly over the past 18 months. In the fiscal year ended in June 2008, Microsoft sold 18 million licenses, which missed its target by 2 million, but represented a 63 percent increase over year-ago period. But if the 5 million sold in the second quarter is any indication of what is to come, Microsoft might be looking at relatively flat results over the next year. That’s in stark difference to what they had hoped for. In May, Eddie Wu, the software company’s managing director of OEM embedded devices Asia, told Reuters: “50 percent growth is the minimum.”

The reality is that Microsoft should be not just selling more units than its competitors but kicking butt. The problem: Microsoft was quick to target the early adopters in the enterprise segment, but incredibly slow at providing a phone to the mass market. Beyond that their phones just never get that WOW factor that the iPhone has and seems that the new Palm, Blackberry and even the Nokias have.

In the year-plus that Apple has been selling phones, it sold more than 13 million; BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion has been very good at transitioning from offering corporate e-mail on-the-go to consumer-friendly services; and Google has entered the market with its easily personalized Android operating system. Palm has recently launched a new and very competitive operating system. All of these companies became new threats over the last year, right when you see Microsoft’s growth moderate. I am not putting down Microsoft.. quite the contrary I have been an early user. What I am is lamenting that they can’t get their act together. They need to be cutting edge, they need to surprise and make using a Windows Mobile easier, faster, more syncable, more services that are really cool that run on top of it, etc…

Many have asked… Where has the innovator..Palm been?” With all the buzz and hype surrounding the iPhone.. or as some have called it the “Jesus phone” and with the disciples like Samsung Player and other LGs and the never to be counted out RIM BlackBerry, Palm’s been under some heavy duty pressure to come up with something, anything, that could earn it some limelight.

But maybe we were too quick to count them out. Palm’s new intuitive operating system the WebOS and their new touchscreen Pre could very well be Palm’s comeback and why not their biggest seller to date.

The unit (due on Sprint in the first half of this year) will offer a 3.1-inch 480 by 320 touch display, weighs in at 4.8 ounces, and comes with a curved, slide-out keypad. It will offer both Wi-Fi and 3G (EV-DO Rev. A, to be exact), as well as GPS (with turn-by-turn directions courtesy of TeleNav), stereo Bluetooth, 8GB of internal storage, a 3MP camera, a 3.5mm headset jack, and a removable Li-Ion battery.

Kara Swisher from All Things D does an upbeat interview of AdMob’s Omar Hamoui and they talk about the iPhone and a general overview of the mobile advertising industry.

While there are very few bright spots to look at in the start-up space in Silicon Valley these days, especially those relying on online advertising, the San Mateo, Calif.-based AdMob is at least slightly shiny.

The mobile advertising marketplace, backed by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, just got a big slug of funding-almost $16 million-to keep pushing to get ads on mobile phones, which has gotten a huge boost from the popularity of the iPhone.

The number of ads AdMob is serving on the iPhone jumped to more than 100 million in September, compared to 35 million the month before, for example.

The massive data usage by users of the popular mobile device by Apple (AAPL) has clearly turbocharged AdMob’s prospects, which were already on the rise. Compared to a year ago, the company said, the number of ads it served more than tripled the number of ads served on a monthly basis to 4.5 billion.

Excellent article from our friend at :

If the big story in the mobile web in 2008 was the growth of CPC and CPM based mobile advertising through platforms like admob the NEXT BIG THING for 2009 is looking likely to be the emergence of critical mass in mobile internet affiliate marketing or CPA (cost per action) based advertising.

Affiliate marketing is well established on the PC web with a number of big networks like Xanox, Trade Doubler, Affiliate Window and Buy.at linking publishers to thousands of merchant programmes across sectors including Travel, Electronics, Finance and so on.

Believe it or not the mobile web has had affiliate programmes since the early days of wap and mobile internet. For example, there were several adult services and personalisation content providers who developed affiliate programmes in the early 2000’s.

However, with the growth in usage of the mobile internet, mobile affiliate marketing is now really beginning to develop. As the mobile payments and services company Bango have noted, mobile web is now becoming the key sales channel for mobile content and services, whereas previously a lot of transactions and customer acquisitions were driven off PC web-based channels.

Also the emergence of new types of mobile content and services such as mobile casino games is also driving new growth.

Here are some examples of mobile affiliate marketing programmes currently available.

Mobile affiliate platforms

A couple of companies have started to emerge to provide mobile focused affiliate aggregators similar to Trade Doubler and others on the PC web.

MobPartner is probably the most advanced mobile web affiliate platform out there with links into a range of merchants including Jamster, Wild Jack Mobile Casino and Nexva (mobile games). Mobpartner provide all the mobile web XHTML store-fronts and links and tracking and manage payment settlments with the various merchants. If you are looking to start off in mobile affiliate marketing then signing up to mobpartner is the first place you should start.

Belboon is a German affiliate platform that mainly serves the PC web but it is now moving into mobile web affiliate marketing services. At the moment they have a couple of mobile web services available including Jamster but unfortunately only in the German language and market at the moment.

Media Plazza

Casino

The emergence of mobile casino applications is a major driver of the current wave of growth in mobile affiliate marketing. The mobile marketing agency Welovemobile have written an excellent blog post about this which is worth a read. Here are some of the casino mobile affiliate services currently available:

Ladyluck’s is run by the mobile games specialist Probablity Plc and they have an affiliate programme which looks to be one of the best of the bunch as it is backed by a really solid company.

Others include:

Euro partners Casino Max – http://adv.europartners.com/index.php?Casinomax

Gold mobile casino – http://www.incomeaccess.com/registration.asp?mid=32

Wild Jack/ Brightshare – http://www.brightshare.com/index.php?bTag=bsaff3118_6

Gobetya – http://www.gobetya.com/

Adult

There are a number of adult affiliate programmes out there. It is worth noting that you need to be careful adding this sort of content to your mobile site even as a link as it risks getting caught in content filters. Also mobile ad networks like admob often state in the terms and conditions that you can’t run them alongside adult content or adult links. However, if you are interested in running this kind of affiliate service then here are a couple of examples of available programmes – warning some of these links are not worksafe:

Sex Goes Mobile – https://www.sexgoesmobile.com/

Xobile – Not Work Safe – http://www.xobile.com/pc/webmaster.cfm?

Sexobile – Not Work Safe – http://www.sexobile.com/web/?__redir=1

Ringtones, games and personalisation content

Playfon – http://www.playfon.com/ have a fantastic affiliate programme for ringtones, games, video and screensaver content – they pay out monthly via paypal – recommended

The major aggregators like Jamster, Celldorado and co. all run web based affiliate services through the likes of Xanox and there are no doubt a few of them moving to offer mobile web extensions of these. This is something we are currently investigating – if you know any that do offer mobile web affiliate services let us know in the comments!

So that’s the current state of play. What will really help to grow this market is when new sectors like retail, travel and finance start to open up on the mobile web. There are already some signs of this with companies like Digby emerging (provides mobile commerce stores on Blackberry).

If you know any other mobile web affiliate programmes please let us know in the comments – we will be updating this list on an ongoing basis.

Update 1: Arran from the mobility.mobi forum pinged me about his new forum Pocket Affiliates, which is dedicated to mobile affiliate marketing – a great resource and well worth checking out.