Myxer, which was started in 2005, now boasts a user base of 30 million unique visitors who download entertainment content from it regularly.

A ‘More Malice’ content channel has been created on Myxer to promote the album. It will provide behind the scenes content on mobile videos to promote the album. The Myxer URL is:

http://www.myxer.com/MALICE

More Malice is the sequel to Snoop’s previous album, ‘Malice in Wonderland’. The record is accompanied by a mini-movie based on the previous album and it features Snoop Dogg playing the central role of Malice.

While the presence on Myxer is central to the album’s release, it will not be limited to the site. Ring tones and wallpapers of the album will be available to interested users. Embeddable widgets will also be placed on various music sites and on Snoop Dogg’s social network profiles.

CEO of Myxer, Myk Willis says, “It is becoming clearer by the day, that artists’ fans want to use their mobile phone as the connection vehicle to their favorite artists. We recently launched MobileStage as a free, customisable mobile web site for artists, and the response has been great.”

Artists seem to increasingly recognise the value of connecting with their fans directly. Radiohead launched a very successful album solely online back in 2007. In the past couple of years most artists have built Facebook Pages and Twitter profiles, which they or their PR teams use to interact with fans, keeping their loyal customers engaged.

“These days its all about the artist interacting with the fans directly”, said Snoop Dogg. “I know what my fans want and now with Myxer I can give them what they want and need by delivering the best content straight into their hands, giving them exclusive content, and what they can expect to see on my upcoming More Malice album.”

A survey of 22,000 US consumers conducted by BIGresearch shows that consumers are increasingly expressing a negative attitude towards mobile marketing.

The percentage of people who are not in favour of mobile marketing has grown since June 2008.

67% of consumers surveyed said they dislike text ads, up from 64% in 2008. 60% dislike voicemail ads, also up from 57% in 2008. And 60% dislike video ads, up from 56% in 2008.

In fact, 52% of consumers surveyed actually felt that mobile marketing is an invasion of privacy. This number too is up from 2008.

The majority of users expressed the view that marketers should take prior permission before sending any such ads to consumers.

These findings are sure to give some sleepless nights to mobile marketers, who must now find a way to get their ads across to users without upsetting them, as that would defeat the whole purpose of advertising.

On a more general note, it was found that the mobile marketing audience consists of 58% males. The average age of these users is 39.2 years. These users also tend to access social networks in large numbers. 38% use Facebook, 23% use MySpace and 13% use Twitter on a regular basis.

AOL acquired Third Screen Media, a mobile advertising company, in 2007 for $80 million. According to sources in the know, the new CEO of AOL, Tim Armstrong, and the head of the advertising department Jeff Levick are planning to either shut down the mobile advertising network or just letting all their contracts lapse over a period of time.

It has been reported that AOL is not renewing the deals they have with their existing publishers for their mobile ad network. Instead, these publishers are quietly being allowed to go to AOL’s competitors. AOL has also not put out any new publisher proposals, which obviously means that they are losing a lot of clients, and surprisingly this does not seem to be bothering them, which again indicates an intention to discontinue the business.

A number of current employees of Third Screen Media are reportedly out in the field, hunting for new jobs.

It is believed that AOL will instead focus on developing mobile content and will also rebuild their mobile ad technology, which will then be able to service other AOL-owned properties.

This is certainly a good move at this stage, since AOL will be turning into a separate entity from Time Warner shortly. They will then have businesses like mobile web publishing, AOL Mail, MapQuest, AIM and iPhone apps, which they can monetise.

AOL could always rebuild their mobile advertising business again later with even better technology when the market turns and demand for mobile advertising really picks up.

Mobile phone users worldwide have been growing by the minute, and that obviously means that the mobile ad business will continue to grow further.

According to estimates by eMarketer, the total number of mobile users by the end of this year should be 280.8 million and according to comScore, the number of smartphone users should touch 29 million by then.

AdMob has stated that the number of smartphone shipments worldwide is projected to grow by 13%.

eMarketer also estimates that the mobile ad spend in the U.S. alone will increase from $648 in 2008 to $760 in 2009.

One of the main reasons for this growth in mobile ads is the availability of better mobile websites, which have been optimized for use on mobile phones. Thus users find it easier and more interesting to access the net through their mobile phones.

AdMob which was founded in 2006 with just one employee, and has grown to 85 employees in January 2009, has done very well for itself, particularly in the last year due to these changes in the mobile internet experience. Since June 2008 their monthly ad requests has have grown to 8.3 billion.

According to the analytics firm Nielsen, AdMob is now the third largest mobile ad company in the U.S. after Millennial Media and Third Screen Media.

Their mobile ad revenue is expected to go up by 18.1% this year to $1.3 billion.

When these figures are compared to that of newspaper ad revenue which will be down by 18.7% to $35.5 billion, radio ads which will be down by 11.7% to $15.8 billion and TV ads down by 10.1% to $43 billion one can get a true estimate of how well mobile ads are doing.

Tag technology helps to convert physical media such as print ads, billboards and product packaging into direct communication links. Users can photograph the tag with a mobile phone camera and use Tag reader software, which is available for free from Microsoft (see link below), to instantly access the encoded information.

gettag.mobi

In order to create Microsoft Tags, businesses can log on to the site using a Microsoft, Hotmail or Live ID and then fill in a simple form providing a bit of detail about the information that needs to be encoded within the tag.

tag.microsoft.com

Microsoft Tags use a technology called High Capacity Color Barcodes (HCCBs). They have been evolved from QR Code technology, which has been widely used in Japan for years now.

QR, which stands for “Quick-Response” is made of 2D matrix codes by which information can be encoded and read by mobile phones with cameras. A standard QR code can record up to 7,000 numeric characters.

Because Tags use 4-colour barcodes, each individual square can record 8 bits instead of the 2 bits on QR Codes. As a result, Tags are just ¼ the size of QR Codes and yet store the same amount of information.

Tags can be used to show a message on the phone, dial a number, scan a vCard and save the details to the phone’s list of contacts, link to maps with driving directions and, of course, link to a website.

The technology will be available for now on Apple iPhone, Blackberry 81xx, 83xx and Bold, J2ME based handsets, Symbian S60 3^rd edition and Windows Mobile 5 and 6 handsets.

For mobile marketers, Microsoft Tags provide the added advantage of easy measurement of campaign success through a selection of six reports that allow tracking the number of scans over time and comparing success of various tags and category groups.

Sample report of Microsoft Tag scans per day

Japan is of course the world’s most advanced country for mobile marketing, as about 80% of its 100 million mobile users, use mobile data services, and Japan accounts for 40% of the world’s mobile data revenue.

According to a report from Seed Planning, the market which was worth about 81 billion yen, last year, is expected to cross the 100 billion yen ($1 billion) mark, by the end of the year, i.e. a 22% growth in a span of just one year: and if this expansion continues in the same manner, it may even cross 250 billion yen by 2011.

This sudden growth spurt in the mobile advertising market, is inclusive of banner ads, affiliate advertising, paid search and mailing ads.

Affiliate advertising in particular, has crossed the 17.9 billion yen mark, which is a rise of 184% over the previous figures. This will be welcome news to the directory industry, which is of the opinion that affiliate advertising on mobiles is a good way to increase their mobile online business.

Though similar ads are available for desktops and mobiles, they may not be equally successful on both the versions. What works for one need not work for the other. For instance it has been shown that email ads have been more successful on mobiles than on PC’s.

Thus it is necessary for an advertiser to be very watchful, in order to decide which form of advertising will give him the best results on each platform.

Microsoft acquired mobile advertising firm ScreenTonic in May 2007. The motivations behind the move were obvious – Microsoft intends to be fully armed for the next battle for dominance against Google – on the mobile space. However, the lack of any visible offering for such a long period of time has been disappointing to say the least.

This latest bit of information is a sign that they at least intend to fight the fight and not just give up and walk away from the mobile search advertising market. Delays in entering the space and making quick decisive moves will hurt them though.

Now would be the right time for Microsoft to capitalise on the souring relations between Google and the operators and form partnerships with the operators, allowing them to provide a superior advertiser experience compared to the Google AdWords system, which has recently been found to lack some fundamental tracking features on mobile.

Update:

Thank you to prdo for pointing out (indirectly) that the title of this post is slightly misleading. We’ve modified it to clarify that the PPC ads are not available on MSN Mobile, though display advertising is.

The results of the “Wave 8″ market survey by Advertiser Perceptions bring a mixture of good and bad news for the mobile advertising industry. About 55 percent of marketers plan to increase their budgets on mobile spending in the next 6 months, indicating that there is a healthy level of enthusiasm in the market.

However, less than half the participants in the survey, consider ‘interactivity’, which is a strength of mobile advertising, to be an important criterion when deciding their budgets for advertising. On the other hand, these advertisers consider ‘reach’, which is a weak point of mobile advertising, to be the number one criteria.

Mobile Internet usage needs to increase and attain levels comparable to other forms of media before platforms and publishers can expect advertisers to invest substantial sums in this medium. Among other things, mobile companies will have to facilitate cross-operator inventory, and a consistent audience measurement system to lure advertisers.

Growth Predictions

Analysts and industry leaders seem unabashed about their enthusiasm for the future of mobile advertising. Sterling Market Intelligence forecast mobile advertising revenues will reach $5.08 billion in North America and Western Europe by 2012. Thomson Financial predict Google’s 2009 mobile ad revenue alone will reach $21.31 billion. Gartner predict that the worldwide mobile advertising market will grow from $895 million in 2007 to $14.6 billion in 2011, while the Kelsey Group forecast that the US mobile ad market will grow from $33.2 million to $1.4 billion in 2012. Forrester are the most conservative, predicting less than $1 billion in mobile ad revenue by 2012.

In brief the results of the Wave 8 report show

• 70% of mobile advertisers use text messaging
• 31% of advertisers use video ads
• 36% of mobile marketers use mobile search
• 45% say they intend to start mobile search in the next 6 months

Google’s Optimism

According to eMarketer there are 405 million mobile internet users and the figure is likely to double in just about 4 years. This huge potential market and its steady growth is what fuels Google’s continuing desire to rule the mobile ad space. They are obviously relying heavily on mobile to drive a chunk of their future growth. This would explain why Google CEO Eric Schmidt dismissed Forrester‘s conservative predictions for the mobile ad market and said “(The mobile Web) is the recreation of the Internet, it’s the recreation of the PC story and it is before us — and it is very likely it will happen in the next year.”

The new service is called Snap.Send.Get. As the name suggests, consumers can use their mobile handset to capture a photograph of a brand that interests them and send the picture to SnapTell via MMS. SnapTell use an image matching algorithm to compare the received picture with a set of brand images already stored in their database. On recognition of the image, SnapTell sends across image related content to the consumer. This information may be in the form of related WAP links, videos, games or ring tones.

Turning Every Mobile Camera into a Marketing Tool

Any mobile phone with a camera can be used with SnapTell, irrespective of the optical resolution. The subject of the photograph can range from logos, posters, billboards, magazine print ads, product packaging and even bottles and branded cans. Users don’t even need to install additional software. The Snap.Send.Get algorithm employs sophisticated text extraction technology to recognise text in the image and uses the extracted text to search for relevant information.

Gautam Bhargava, Co-founder and CEO of SnapTell believes that Snap.Send.Get will enable brands to reach out to consumers who are on the go. According to Gautam, “The Snap.Send.Get solution simply uses existing packaging or collateral materials to create a personalized marketing experience that is fun and easy-to-use for the consumer.”

SnapTell have also announced a partnership with mobile’s content distribution services/technology provider iLoop. iLoop will offer SnapTell’s mobile marketing service to clients using their mFinity platform.

Will It Really Work?

While the premise of the service sounds good, it faces two major obstacles:

1. It relies on consumers sending MMS messages, which is more expensive than SMS. The returned information would therefore need to be really special in order to justify the cost of sending an MMS message.
2. It is untested in the real world – if consumers actually start sending random product logos or poor quality photographs with multiple subjects and hope to get back information, there is a good chance that the service will not work quite as well, leading to consumers getting frustrated with the brand.

If, on the other hand, the product does improve on the drawbacks of its predecessor, Qode, Snap.Send.Get could create an effective new means for brands to interact with consumers at various stages of the buying cycle.

Alternatively, users can text the airline name, and Google will send a text message with the main numbers one can call for information.

In their ongoing endeavour to organise the world’s information, this is yet another handy service being offered by Google. They already offer parcel tracking, vehicle identification number search and many other similar services. The question, though, remains – how many people will actually use these services? When an individual is in a rush, Google might not be the first thing that pops up in their mind when they want information about their flight.

Over time, though, this trend could change. Their continuous innovation is making Google the main online destination for more and more people. As these users discover additional services Google offers, they are more and more likely to keep returning to Google every time they need to find an answer to something. Visitors will also start experimenting over time, trying to search for information that Google doesn’t already provide – which will, of course, be a great way for Google to gauge what else to develop!