Marketers and advertisers agree, 2010 will be the year of the mobile web. In a few short months mobile will have more audience reach than television, radio, or the internet. Two thirds of the world’s population, roughly 4 billion people currently have a mobile device of which 20% are currently web enabled smart phones. In 2010, mobile advertising is forecast to grow 45 percent to $3.8 billion, which will be spent on SMS, mobile display, and mobile search.

Carriers opening up data plans to flat rates rather than per kb consumption (between December 2008 and December 2009, the percentage of US mobile phone subscribers with unlimited data plans increased from 16% to 21%), new more powerful devices, and a publisher surge in generating mobile wap and app content have created the perfect storm for marketers and consumers to meet on the mobile web. Consumer media consumption patterns are changing. There is a significant rise in both production and consumption of “snackable content” which is consumed during the commute, at a stoplight, or in the waiting room. This opens up the new mobile venue over which advertisers can broadcast and target. Facebook and Twitter for example saw a 112% and 347% uptick in users consuming and creating content via the mobile web from January 2009 to January 2010. Not only are there more users on the mobile web, they are more engaged. According to facebook, mobile users currently average two times the pageviews, production, interaction, and consumption events that they do on the traditional display web.

Mobile advertising added to your marketing mix will connect you to consumers who are closer to the point of purchase. Think targeting a consumer who is in the mall parking lot walking in to buy a pair of jeans rather than one on the traditional web browsing jeans styles on their couch. Mobile ad placements offer a commanding presence of the consumer experience, think one banner per page rather than the traditional 4 plus average that we are seeing today in traditional display. As an advertiser is makes sense to employ the tactics below to target your consumers via mobile:

• SMS / MMS – Communications protocol that allow exchange of short text messages between mobile devices. Reach over 2.4 billion active users, 74% of all global mobile phone subscribers.
• Mobile Display – Banner inventory within smartphone application and mobile Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) versions of html publisher pages. Reach over 405 million global users according to emarketer .
• Mobile Applications – Banner inventory on applications for specific mobile devices like iphone, blackberry, and android. According to GetJar mobile application inventory will jump from 7 billion apps downloaded in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012.
• Mobile Search – Search traffic through mobile search engines, directories, navigation, or discovery services., about 15% of the total mobile advertising market.

Mobile is a force multiplier to any of your current campaigns. Get on the small screen, take advantage of the big opportunity in 2010. Want to learn more? Contact Nalu Media to learn more about how to harness the power of the mobile web.

The Super Bowl is a yearly reminder of why it is good to be in the advertising industry. Pigskin brings together a massive union of audience and advertisers on television screens across the globe. Audience at scale engaged in the same content, at the same time makes for a prime target for Americas largest brands. This year television attendance was up with 106.5 million total viewers tuning in to the game. This is a 7.9 percent increase from last year which dethroned M*A*S*H’s final episode for the total viewers record set in 1983.

Eyeballs brought the ad dollars out in force for 2010. The going rate for a 30 second television spot was up to $3.01 million. This bodes well for network television revenue as this years Super Bowl boasted the most ad time in history at 47 minutes and 50 seconds meaning just short of $290 million in ad revenue.

Advertisers spend money for reach, conversions, and ROI. ROI is measured by purchases and brand awareness generated from their ad spend. As the line continues to blur between traditional and new media it is interesting to look at the ROI generated from web activity following the SuperBowl and additional value generated. Television advertisers spent $.03 for each unique viewer exposed to their advertising spot. A sampling of the Youtube Ad Blitz, a channel dedicated to hosting ads aired at the SuperBowl shows Godaddy, Denny’s, Doritos, and Alice in Wonderland garnered an additional 2.9 million unique views of their TV spot in the two weeks following the SuperBowl. That is a 3% value add, $8 million in total advertising spend from a medium which has only been in existence since 2005. Another success story is HomeAway.com whose reach according to Alexa jumped from .02 to .08 immediately following the SuperBowl. If the US internet population is indeed 227 million people, a .06% increase in reach means an additional 13.62 million uniques visited their site immediately following their Superbowl TV spot. Both perfect examples of how Television plus online was the play of the game in 2010.

Only 352 days for brands to refine their playbooks for BrandBowl 2011. My money is on the Chargers to win on the grid iron, and brands who continue to take advantage of the television plus web one two punch to go all the way.

“Imagine if you will sitting down for your morning coffee and turning on your computer to read the local paper, well it is not as far fetched as it seems.” are the words from a report by Steve Newman in 1981 that marked the beginning of the end for the traditional newspaper industry. Audience moving online has been chewing away revenue from major newspapers around the country at an increasing rate. According to a New York Times article published in October 2008 weekday circulation for the largest metropolitan dailies like the Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution fell up to 15% over the previous six months. As traditional revenue dries up newspapers are forced to deal with finding new ways to monetize their content. Those slow to adapt to this shift have been forced to close their doors like the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Online audience forces newspapers to look at a different revenue strategy. Traditional subscription and ad sales models need to adapt and find new ways to drive profits. Classified ad sales which was once a large portion of revenue needs to compete with free sites like craigslist, which are seeing 47 million monthly uniques, one fifth of the US adult population. Established news sites like the Los Angeles Times (alexa rank 16) need to be nimble enough to compete with sites with a little over 4 years online who outrank them like the Huffintgton Post (alexa rank 13).

There are new strategies emerging daily. One of these, paid content, supported by king pins like Rupert Murdoch who feel “Quality journalish is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannabalizing its ability to produce good reporting“, pushes to charge users for the content they read online. Google has joined this fight with its submission of a proposal to the Newspaper Association of America detailing a micropayment system that would work more like itunes allowing papers to charge readers consuming their content online.

Another strategy is to bring more value to the massive amount of impressions the newspaper sites see everyday. With direct ad sales monetizing only a fraction of total impressions, newspapers sites are forced to look for ways to monetize their “unsold” or “secondary premium” impressions. Companies like the Rubicon Project are working to make this market more efficient, and layer data on those impressions making them more valuable. Yahoo’s newspaper consortium and APT platform allow a paper to sell the same users visiting high yield pages like the travel section to lower yielding sections of their sites driving more revenue.

Each day brings about more broadband conections, more iphones, more cancelled subscriptions, and less traditional revenue for our nations largest newspapers. In 1981 KRON reporters felt that ” the online edition wasn’t a threat to the $.20 street edition”. It is hard to deny that today the online edition, if not monetized properly, will be the death of the tradtitional newspaper. Good thing new media is here to save it.

Elfyourself.com from OfficeMax is a simple concept and an amazing example of something going viral. A user uploads their picture, uses their phone to record a greeting, and is transformed instantly into a dancing elf. I know a good viral concept when my own mother forwards it to me. Elfyourself has spent two years in a row at the top of Holiday Greeting sites. They have logged over 120 Million visitors who have created and forwarded over 75 million elves around the globe. Word of Elfyourself started as a small leak in the blogosphere and on social networks and made it all the way up to prime time coverage from USA Today, ABC World News, CNN, and the Today Show. Elfyourself is a genius concept which has fueled a combined time of more than 15,000 years of people creating elves and laughing at their friends, all framed by a holiday border and the OfficeMax Brand.

When it comes to balls the golf industry is dominated by one powerhouse. When your ball has been used to win 85% of tournaments and you outweigh your closest competitor by a factor of eight there is not much to worry about in the way of competition.

Sometimes great things come from those who look like they are out of the race. In this case it is Nike Golf’s Juice Marketing Campaign. Nike put together a series of videos featuring two researchers, a high speed camera, and the juice ball being fired through random objects in slow motion. Besides being fun to watch there are a few lessons that we can learn from the juice. Nike has done a great job of converting video views to email addresses. How do they do it?

1. Want to see more?
Juice offers a free preview of things to come. Just before impact the video stops and users are notified that the video will available soon. Enter your email and your birthday and you will sent a link when you can come back and watch the full version.
2. Want to be the first to know when the green beer gets blown up? Sign up to be the first to know when your favorite object will be blown up. First to know means first to forward. First to forward means social currency.
3. Want to make your golf buddies laugh? Juice makes it very easy to forward. Enter your email, their email, a message, and you will have your friends rolling courtesy of the juice

Nike has done a great job of collecting information by rewarding their users with access to content, and the social currency of being the first to forward. Does a good golfball have to blow through lava lamps, Valentines Day Gifts, gingerbread houses, mayonnaise jars, and gumball machines to win tournaments? No. Do today’s marketers need to understand how to get their branding message out virally in order to succeed in todays competitive business environment? 100%.