This is also a potentially large opening for the mobile ad market. If the union of PC and TV is successful think of the opportunity for those in the mobile space – given that this innovation will be built on mobile operating systems. Some of the mobile ad networks could be well placed to make serious money. And what happens if peoples’ online habits migrate from PC to TV? Where would that leave the online display market? I found it interesting as to why some of the yield optimisers were looking to move into the relatively small mobile display market (worth only £35 million in the UK). And indeed why Google and Apple would shell out such large sums for mobile ad networks with relatively low turnovers. It now makes sense. Mobile ads served on TV to billions of eyeballs can justify the hype. Watch the big display ad nets move into the mobile space aggressively over the coming months.

» Hot on the heels of its recent announcement that it is to manage non-guaranteed inventory from owned and operated AOL sites in six European markets, Rubicon has announced that they are moving into the French market. The REVV marketplace is now available to French publishers as the yield optimiser looks to strengthen its position in the European market. There are no details of what publishers Rubicon will be working with. Publishers here always remain tight lipped about which vendors they’re using. At this stage though premium European publishers continue to test the three yield optimiser, as they try to figure which one best fits their business needs. Interesting to see how the French market will play out this year. It looks likely to follow similar buy-side trends seen in the US and the UK with publishers looking to increase their yield across non-premium inventory. [Rubicon]

Mobclix, the largest mobile ad exchange for the Iphone ad market, has announced it will re-sell audience profiles to its ad networks partners. The move will allow agencies and advertisers to better target specific audiences through the Mobclix exchange. The demographic segments will be provided from Nielsen’s PRIZM and ConneXions programs. Read more about this story here.

Greg Hills On Why He Thinks 2010 Will Be The Year Of Ad Visibility

In an interesting post about ad visibility, Greg Hills argues that this metric is becoming more important to advertiser and agencies – and 2010 is the year it will come to the forefront of the minds of media buyers. Many display ads never actually get seen and this, Hills argues, is a massive drag on campaign performance. He points out that DFA and Atlas allow unseen ads to gert credit for driving purchases, and cites a number of companies working in the space who have a big focus on ad visibility. More on that post here.

Facebook Moving Up A Gear

comScore released its year-in-review figures for the US, and it makes for interesting reading. Facebook is now the third biggest publisher of display ads in the US, serving over three hundred and thirty billion ad impressions annually. Facebook sells its display advertising at a much lower price than all of the other publishers in the top ten. And it’s presently only selling a portion of its ad inventory. If Facebook figures out a way of improving targeting and campaign performance, it will have found its illusive business model. TechCrunch has more on this story here.

There’s also been a big move towards more transparent and open buys. Agencies and advertisers are now looking for this when they are buying mobile ad impressions. Adfonic are looking to meet this demand head-on by launching its new open ad marketplace for premium mobile ad inventory. Paul Childs, Adfonic CMO, took time to speak to ExchangeWire this week to discuss the new offering from Adfonic and what effect the recent spate of acquisitions will have on the mobile display market.

Can you explain how the new platform works?

PC: We’ve just released the industry’s first open and transparent mobile ad marketplace for Premium publishers including mobile sites and applications (iPhone, Android, JAVA and WebOS supported). We are aiming this offering at established brands, digital plays and popular apps across multi-platforms, giving advertisers the choice of buying Performance or Premium via a single integrated platform and user experience. This builds on Adfonic’s state -of-the-art mobile advertising platform and demonstrates our strength and agility to deliver innovative solutions to the market quickly.

What are the key differences of this new version?

PC: The key differences are: offering a Premium Network that complements our Blind Network; and giving advertisers a truly open and transparent marketplace to buy high quality mobile media. For Premium buys we know advertisers demand full control over where they buy media coupled with real time reporting and analytics that enables them to track how their campaigns are performing across all mobile sites and apps.

Was the new launch motivated by a move by publisher and advertiser in the mobile ad market towards more transparent and open platforms?

PC: In other forms of digital advertising, like online, there’s an implicit expectation that total transparency is already built into platforms and advertisers navigate their way around choosing the best publishers that closely fit their media buying requirements. Other types of digital advertising follow the established world of offline advertising, where a media buyer would never purchase any time or ad space unless they knew exactly where their ad was going to be shown.

Brands and advertising agencies are now starting to ask for this level of transparency to match how they work online and offline.

What are the benefits to the publisher?

PC: For publishers the key benefits are: the ability to set minimum floor price for CPC and / or CPM; global reach; brand safety, as only approved agencies will get access to the Premium Network; the ability to set up a private network within the platform; and finally we offer publishers a white label option.

What are the benefits for the advertiser?

PC: For advertisers the key benefits are: media buying profile behind every publisher; the choice of sites and apps to advertise on; the option to track the performance of campaigns at publisher level using real time reporting and analytics; the ability to divert spend to sites and apps that are delivering results thereby optimising advertiser budgets; providing better accountability to advertisers; and we will work with larger ad units (e.g. 300 x 250)

Can you explain a little more about the targeting functionality of the new Adfonic platform?

PC: Adfonic offers advertisers a comprehsenive range of targeting options for reaching specific audiences, including geography, mobile operators / WiFi, mobile devices, mobile platforms (iPhone, Android), mobile browsers (excluding Opera Mini), demographics, day parting, tags and language

What differentiates this from the multitude of ad networks, yield optimisers and indeed mobile ad exchanges on the European market?

PC: What differentiates Adfonic from other players in this space is three key areas: our comprehensive set of self service tools and features; giving advertisers and publishers more control over campaigns and inventory; and our shift towards openness and transparency starting with our Premium Network.

Publishers can set a floor price and can choose the buyers they want to trade with. Is the control offered to publishers a key feature of the new Adfonic platform?

PC: The Adfonic platform gives both advertisers and publishers the control they are demanding. The demands of premium publishers are different to those of performance publishers and we have give premium publishers a flexible solution via our self-service platform.

Do you think the $750 million takeover of Admob represents a seminal moment for the development and growth of the mobile display market?

PC: I think we have reached a tipping point in the evolution of the mobile advertising industry. This is highlighted by the following three key milestones.

First, the recent wave of mobile advertising acquisitions including Google (Admob), Apple (Quattro Wireless), Amobee (RingRing Media) and Opera Software (AdMarvel).

Secondly, a rapid shift towards performance based marketing models and demand for better quality publisher inventory.

And finally, brands and traditional media buying agencies are now starting to look at mobile as an additional channel to market. 2010 will be the year when innovative brands action their mobile strategies and start to implement monetization strategies.

The acquisition of Admob provided the market with the first valuation of a successful mobile advertising business (subsequently followed by three further acquisitions). Now investors will start to look seriously at players in the space.

Exchanges and ad network optimisation are now emerging in mobile display. The latest mobile ad net optimisation service to be rolled here in Europe comes courtesy of Improve Digital. Janneke Niessen, COO of Improve Digital, took time this week to speak to ExchangWire.com about the new offering for European publishers.

Can you provide more details on the new new mobile ad optimisation service?

JN: Improve Digital’s mobile ad optimisation platform will connect to the optimal mix of mobile ad networks according to the publisher’s content, audience and brand safety requirements. From there it makes decisions in real-time about which of these networks can best monetise each impression, and then selects the highest paying network to serve the advertisement. Basically it will undertake the same as we currently do for web display but take the specific requirements of mobile into account.

Will the optimisation service be radically different for mobile?

JN: Improve Digital’s mobile ad platform will offer the same ad network optimisation techniques (outlined above) as its web-based service, which sees premium publishers in the UK and Europe increase their advertising revenue by anything between 50 and 300 percent. Mobile specific data points such as device, user location and user demographics will also be considered as part of the ad network and exchange selection process.

The mobile display market is a lot smaller than online. Do you see big growth in the market?

JN: Compared to its online equivalent, the mobile display market appears small. However, the more important figure is the growth that the mobile advertising market is seeing. Among the key findings of the IAB UK’s mobile ad spend figures published in 2009: £28.6 million was spent on mobile in 2008, a figure almost double the previous year. Looking ahead, recent study by GroupM forecasts that mobile advertising spend will increase 19 percent to $3.3 billion in 2010.

Will it be available on the same platform?

JN: Yes – Improve Digital’s mobile offering will be integrated with its current platform. This sees various advantages including the same comprehensive brand control capabilities that protects Improve Digital’s web publishers from unwanted ads, channel conflict and ad latency. There will also be a consolidated dashboard so that publishers can manage and review reporting and analytics from both their web-based and mobile ad sales.

How is this going to benefit the publisher?

JN: The huge increase in the number of people using smartphones has assigned vast revenue-making potential to the mobile internet. However, despite the increasing need to monetise the mobile web, publishers have very few tools with which to do this. The Improve Digital offering will tackle this issue, and premium publishers will be able to maximise their advertising revenue regardless of the device on which their site is being viewed.

How is Improve Digital going to help publishers maximise revenue from their mobile ad inventory?

JN:Through our advanced algorithms we optimise eCPM’s and revenue for our publishers, and the different ad placements on mobile do not limit this. The web offers many different buying methods and the technology calculates everything back to eCPM – again, that will be the same for mobile. In addition we take the specifics of mobile into account in the optimisation as mentioned above.

Is this the start of a convergence between mobile and online display?

JN: We believe it is important to retain a distinction between mobile and display. As long as the screen sizes and use of applications differ as much as they currently do between web and mobile, advertisers will regard them as separate channels. However, from our perspective, it does not matter how people view content We will optimise revenue for the publisher across all digital devices and platforms.

The most interesting thing about the new iPad though is the app market. Like the iPhone, this latest bit of Apple hardware will have an app store of its own. The official SDK has been released to developers today, and applications developed specifically for the iPad should appear in the coming weeks.

Apple also revealed that existing iPhone apps will work on the new platform. So will similar mobile ad formats work on the iPad? Mobclix has confirmed that all existing iPhone ad formats will work on the new platform.

Apple has opened yet another platform for agencies and advertisers to run mobile-specific campaigns across. And given the hype and hysteria surrounding the launch, you’d expect Apple to sell a shed load of these devices. This makes the recent acquisition of Quattro all the more prescient.

Apple clearly had a strategy when it bought Quattro: namely, to strengthen its influence in the app display market on the iPhone and the-soon-to-be omnipresent iPad. This massive revenue opportunity is going to make Quattro look like a bargain buy.

Is this of the end to the wave of takeovers sweeping through the mobile ad market? There could be a few more big moves to come.

Microsoft does have some presence in the mobile display market – but might feel that it too needs to acquire an established mobile display player. Yahoo might also want to improve its present mobile ad platform and buy.

Some of the handset manufacturers might want to expand into the mobile ad market – or simply beef-up existing operations.

It would seem incomprehensible that a company like Nokia, who runs the biggest platform in the mobile market, would consciously let its two biggest smartphone rivals, Google and Apple, steal the march on it in the mobile ad business.

Nokia does have a mobile ad network business – and added Enpocket to build out its platform – but its operation lacked the real market clout of Quattro and Admob in the smartphone market. And now both are in the hands of Nokia’s biggest smartphone competitors.

Maybe Sony Ericsonn sees opportunity in the mobile ad business, and to get the right company will engage in some serious M&A action.

And we shouldn’t forget the mobile operators. They too might be looking to grab market share. It is possible. Amobee, who bought mobile ad network RingRing last week, are owned Telefonica. And Telfonica are the parent company of amongst others O2.

Here is a list of some potential acquisition targets:

Millenial Media
Mojiva
Webmoblink
Nexage
Smaato
Madvertise
4th Screen
Inmobi
Zest-Adz
Buzz City

And the list of those companies who might be shopping round:

Microsoft
Yahoo
Nokia
Sony Ericcsonn
Any of the large mobile operators

And of course last week Amobee, a mobile ad serving platform, purchased London-based RingRing Media for an undisclosed sum. Amobee’s intention is to build out the industry’s largest ad exchange. The market is looking more and more like online display.

It follows then that yield optimisers, Admeld and Pubmatic, have also made their way into mobile display, sensing the market is now ready for their ad network optimisation service. How long before we see the arrival of a buy-side DSP for mobile?

Why has all this happened? Well it’s down to the explosive growth in the smartphone and mobile app market. A report released by Gartner Research this week suggests the global mobile display revenue from smartphones will be worth around $600 million globally in 2010. This is expected to grow to several billion dollar by 2013, as the total downloads of ad-funded mobile apps increases.

So, how do you make sense of the mobile display market? What are the trends? Who are the key players on the buy and sell side? What are Google and Apple likely to do? Will online and mobile display converge?

To keep abreast of the latest news and developments from mobile display, why don’t you sign up for our new weekly newsletter?

ExchangeWire Mobile Display aims to keep readers up-to-date with all the latest news and analysis from the growing European mobile display market.

This news comes on the back of a similar move by Admeld. Both clearly see opportunity in the growing mobile display market. And both are now looking to work with existing publisher partners to improve yield on their mobile ad inventory. But will it be as easy to onboard mobile ad networks as it is in online display? The market is still evolving, and there is still a lot of growth to be had. Ad nets might think they’re better off working with publishers directly.

The yield optimisers (or publisher exchanges) will probably get most traction in monetising international traffic for premium publishers. Dealing with global ad nets requires resource and time – and pubs will gladly partner Admeld and Pubmatic to optimise and manage those relationships.

With all this action on the sell-side, will we see a DSP enter the market and give advertisers and agencies the opportunity to buy mobile ad inventory across multiple sources. Who’ll be first to dip its toe in first?

What’s Google planning to do once its acquisition of Admob gets the all-clear from regulators? Will it put all non-guaranteed mobile and online display on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange?

And what about Apple? Does anybody really have any real idea what they’re going to do with Quattro?

Whatever happens, more growth and M&A action is likely to happen in 2010? Admeld and Pubmatic have spotted an opportunity to optimise their publishers’ mobile ad network relationships. It is clear that they’ll be having a bigger influence on the supply-side of mobile dispaly over the next twelve months.

More recently Theerman worked for Smaato, the market’s leading mobile ad network optimisation platform. Doubtless it was this optimisation experience with Smaato, which attracted Admeld in the first place.

Theerman will lead the mobile ad optimisation service, as Admeld looks to help clients optimise both mobile and online ad inventory.

The new Admeld exec believes that convergence of mobile and online display is now a reality, and will ultimately lead to premium publishers demanding a more integrated offering:

The convergence of mobile and web advertising is happening faster than anyone predicted. As this trend accelerates, premium publishers will increasingly require a fully-integrated toolset to manage and optimize their inventory across all platforms. As the leader in ad network optimization for premium publishers, AdMeld is uniquely positioned to provide its customers with this groundbreaking functionality, and I am thrilled to be leading their mobile initiatives.