Campaigns

MTV Networks will launch mobile video ads on carrier-operated premium VOD services for the first time. The first advertiser will be the U.S. Air Force, which will have pre-roll ads running across MTV’s mobile video-on-demand programming, as well as campaigns on the MTV.com mobile Web site.

Reading the tea leaves of advertising’s future gets more difficult each day. As technological advances enable new options, we experiment enthusiastically. Yet in critical ways, our innovations look strangely familiar. Both the Internet and our portable media devices increasingly resemble interactive variations of television.

Youths are signing up to have pitches, photos and links to websites sent to their multifunction mobile devices.

2007 may not have been "the year of mobile marketing," but with the iPhone launch and other under-the-hood improvements, mobile marketers moved past the experimental stage. Still, compared to other interactive platforms, in 2008, mobile will remain small in overall spending.

Your classic old-school impulse buy: you see a Kit Kat at the checkout line and you help the retailer make a few easy pennies. The impulse buy of the future? You hear a song on the radio and whip out your cell phone to buy it with a text message. Amazon's TextBuyIt platform enables just that. You can now send a text to "AMAZON," and input the name of a product. Amazon returns options with a purchase code for each. Text back with the code, confirm your Amazon account, and voila!, your package is soon on its way. I'm envisioning major co-op opportunities here. Incorporate a "buy code" with a video ad, and phone users could complete a purchase in less than a minute. Ka-ching!

According to a new report from The Nielsen Company, twenty-three percent (58 million) of all U.S. mobile subscribers say they've been exposed to advertising on their phones in the past 30 days. Half (51% or 28 million) of all data users who recall seeing mobile advertising in the previous 30 days say they responded to a mobile ad.

According to mobile entertainment company Limbo, telephone advertising is long on brand recall. Mobile-driven recall jumped 20 percent in the first quarter, with 41 percent of mobile phone users now remembering a brand that appeared on their phones. Unfortunately, Limbo also found that consumers with the most disposable income were least likely to remember the ads.

Nickelodeon has just released three new casual games for cell phones. Online, it continues to roll out easy branded games. Nickelodeon claims an industry leading 25 million unique visitors each month to its gaming sites, and it's planning to roll out as many as 600 new games. And why not? With the government keeping an eagle eye on all TV advertising targeted toward kids, games (for now) allow a little more freedom. And fun.

Advertisers and wireless carriers are eager to start serving up mobile advertising. But how are they going to get wireless subscribers to play along? Bribes. But they have to be better bribes. The Silicon Alley Insider says that one free minute for every 30-second ad isn't close to enough.

As we all know, mobile marketing is finding it hard to gain traction. So you have to admire the strategy of Akoo, which in one campaign model, it's hitching its start to the digital signage express. Akoo is setting up a digital screen network that consumers can manipulate with the cell phones. Phone users can send text commands to screens in airports and bars, and effect what content will play. In return the screens send the phones ad messages - sometimes in the form of coupons for the very establishment you're in.