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Looking at the data of Black Friday purchases over mobile phones, one would wonder if we’re recovering from a deep recession. On Black Friday 2009, mobile online payments through PayPal were up nearly 650 percent year-over-year, according to the eBay-owned payment company, in data reviewed by Dow Jones . The data was compiled from eBay’s PayPal and TheFind.com, a product search engine. Searches from mobile devices increased from about 5,000 on Black Friday 2008 to about 200,000 this year according to product search engine TheFind.com.

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Black Friday Sees Mobile Shopping Explosion

The musical Avenue Q might want to update it’s lyrics to “The Mobile Phone is for Porn.” While Apple has avoided allowing a porn store on its iPhone, Google’s Android device won’t judge. Called MiKandi , the world’s first adult-only app store was recently launched for Android devices. In the porn-only store, users can search a range of free and paid applications. Users can post reviews and join discussions. What does adult videos have to do with mobile marketing

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Should Porn Be Apple’s Biggest Fear?

This does not have to be a long post, I just wanted to set the record straight once and for all. There is a difference between “Mobile Marketing” and “Mobile Advertising”. A lot of times you will read an article about a successful mobile marketing campaign and it has to do with mobile advertising, I suggest you try and set the author straight. Its important we are all talking the same language.

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What’s the difference between mobile marketing and mobile advertising?

Email marketing has been a useful tool for a long time, and even though mobile is a new-age channel for marketing, the same strategies and optimization used for email campaigns can – and should – be implemented in mobile campaigns as well. There was an interesting article on Marketing Vox recently that talked about SMB’s increased interest in email marketing, citing several surveys showing that nearly three-fourths of all SMBs plan to implement email marketing due to its high ROI.  A recent report from the DMA states the average ROI for email campaigns is $43.62 for every dollar spent, and that it remains a top marketing medium for it’s low cost and high ROI. The article also listed several tips for email marketers, including priorities such as targeting and relevance, which seem to mirror the tips and strategies necessary for successful mobile marketing as well.  Advertising to email and mobile devices is very similar in nature, especially if you’re comparing email and SMS marketing

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Applying Email Strategies To Mobile Marketing

There’s been a lot of speculation as to what plans Google has for AdMob, and why it spent such a large chunk of change to acquire it .  While it’s obviously interested in it’s broad mobile reach in terms of advertising, Google likely had its eye on something else only AdMob has- all that iPhone user-data. With the onslaught of smartphones in recent years, the complexity has increased dramatically and so has the advertising targeted to them.  AdMob spearheaded the movement to focus on creating unique ways to market to smartphone users, and particularly iPhone users – one of the most advanced and widely-used smartphones around.

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Google Wanted AdMob’s iPhone User-Data

Over at VentureBeat, Mobclix writer Megan Berry poses the question “does your business have a plan for mobile?” She provides some solid advice for any marketer or company looking to test out the mobile waters. Berry writes that you don’t need to go “charging in” to develop your own iPhone app to get the benefits of mobile marketing. Her recommendations for getting into the mobile boom are as follows: 1. Mobile Advertising and Marketing With mobile advertising networks and exchanges offering highly accurate targeting for mobile campaigns, this provides an unprecedented opportunity for you to reach your customers with as little as one ad buy.

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How to Take Advantage of Mobile Marketing

Google is on a mobile-ad buying frenzy. Earlier this week, the search giant announced that it acquired Teracent , a display ad company focused on creating customized display ads in real-time. The move comes just two weeks after Google announced its $750M acquisition of mobile marketing company AdMob and Teracent’s San Mateo, CA neighbor. Teracent’s technology uses machine learning algorithms to customize the ads with the option of thousands of creative elements.

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Google Acquires Teracent for Real-Time Mobile Ad Customization

I’ll admit it, I’m late to the game when it comes to understanding the potential of Amazon’s Kindle, or any so-called “e-reader” for that matter, but as the tech progresses, I’m beginning to understand the immense marketing potential associated with the concept. Google has created an infinite goldmine by way of collecting the worlds information, organizing it and serving up highly targeted advertising alongside it.  That method has proved very beneficial for digital content, but printed material is a different story altogether.  Google has begun to digitize books and other printed material in hopes of extending its advertising reach away from Web content, but it’s a slippery slope to climb. That’s where the Kindle and the concept of e-readers come into play.

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Harnessing The Kindle’s Mobile Marketing Potential

We all rely on GPS to get us from home to the mall on Black Friday, but when we get inside how do we know where to go? There’s always the map displayed somewhere near the entrance, but what if you’re wandering around lost looking for the perfect Black Friday deal at a store that’s somewhere in the mall? There’s an app for that. MEDL Mobile’s Mall Maps iphone app has skyrocketed to the top of the must-have iPhone apps for the holiday season. It features more than 1,000 shopping centers across the US and GPS Location-based search to help you find all the malls around you, in case you want to do a multi-mall Black Friday hunt

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Mall Maps iPhone App Avoid Lost-in-Mall Black Friday Syndrome

Google is feeling extra generous this year when it comes to appreciating the small businesses looking to do big business this holiday season. As a result, Google has announced that they are enabling small businesses and other local retailers to display coupons for in-store use on mobile devices of Google-searching users. Although Google has not previously given the small business community exceptional exposure to its mobile coupon platform and prowess, Google seems poised to make up for lost time with this latest endeavor. Essentially, small business owners utilizing Google Local Business Center can quickly create and upload their mobile coupon offers.

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Google Helping SMB Owners with Mobile Coupons

AdMob’s latest Mobile Metrics Report focused on taking a look inside each operating system to analyze the distribution of requests coming from different handsets, instead of comparing smartphones platforms against each other as in previous reports. The report focused primarily on devices from RIM and devices running Android to determine the most popular handsets running each OS, in terms of mobile ad-requests.  Since we all know the iPhone dominates AdMob’s mobile ad-network, it’s interesting to see how Blackberry and Android-based phones stack up in the realm of mobile marketing. In terms of the distribution of traffic from RIM devices, the 8300 Curve series and 8100 Pearl series still make up the majority of traffic.  However newer devices such as the Tour and updated versions of the Curve (8900 and 8520) are generating an increasing percentage of RIM requests.  The Flip (8220 and 8230), launched over a year ago, has not gained much traction and generated less than 2% of RIM traffic in October 2009.  The first generation Storm generated 12% of requests and has seen its percentage share stay the same over the last year. What’s more interesting is data derived from Android-based ad-requests.

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AdMob Mobile Metrics Report: Android & RIM

Tomi Ahonen wrote an excellent piece called What happens to mobile advertising when economy comes back? that combined with a MediaPost article by Sarah Mahoney about retailers’ Black Friday plans has got me thinking about the future of mobile marketing. Ahonen’s point is that once the economy comes back to full swing advertisers will look to add new engagement marketing techniques to their plans instead of just beefing back up their budgets on the old technology. Mahoney’s article got me thinking about how retailers could use mobile campaigns during Black Friday

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Mobile Marketing after the Recession

A new survey published by Xiam Technologies indicates that users are still having difficulty accessing certain types of mobile content, and as such, it’s remaining a barrier to the mobile Web for most consumers. According to the survey, some 80 percent of users in the US and UK report some difficulty or problem when trying to access mobile content.  Time spent searching/downloading was the primary reason cited, followed by device/interface issues.  Judging by user’s responses, the means to access mobile content seems to remain the number one barrier

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Survey Finds Users Still Struggle To Access Certain Mobile Content

The Mobile Marketing Association has officially released a new definition of the term “mobile marketing.” According to the MMA, mobile marketing is described as: “A set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network.” While easy to spot on the surface, there’s more to mobile marketing than digital coupons and the incessant ad campaigns that target our handsets. During the Mobile Marketing Forum in Los Angeles, the MMA delved deeper into the existence, function, and, yes, the definition of mobile marketing – although the organization’s language has proven confusing to some, particularly when it came to discussing the “two parts of its taxonomy.” The “set of practices” includes “activities, institutions, processes, industry players, standards, advertising and media, direct response, promotions, relationship management, CRM, customer services, loyalty, social marketing, and all the many faces and facets of marketing.” To “engage” means to “start relationships, acquire, generate activity, stimulate social interaction with organization and community members, (and) be present at time of consumers expressed need.” Furthermore, engagement can be initiated by the consumer (”Pull” in form of a click or response) or by the marketer (”Push”).

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MMA Revises Mobile Marketing Definition

With the rise of mobile marketing, you may be wondering — where do I go to get expert training and certification in the field? Here’s an answer for you — the Mobile Marketing Association, earlier this week, launched its first mobile marketer certification program for professional marketers and mobile marketing noobs alike. The training and certification will cost $349 for MMA members and $399 for non members. The MMA Track is a program which consists of three certification tiers, intensive training and assessement to progress levels of knowledge and experience.

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Mobile Marketing Association Launches First Certification Program

With the amount of potentially dangerous spam and other bogus mobile content threatening our digital way of life, it sure helps to have an extra pair to eyes to watch out for the dangers that lurk around the corner. Fortunately, Cisco has acted on this need and introduced a new (and free) iPhone app chronicling the latest security threats to computers and mobile devices by offering alerts from Cisco’s enormous internet traffic and security experts (better than 500 in all) monitoring the cyber dangers that loom large, occasionally unbeknown to us.

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Cisco Unveils New iPhone Security App

Yahoo is planning to bid farewell to its Yahoo Go mobile application in early 2010. For three years, Yahoo Go has served as Yahoo’s all-in-one native app for our favorite Yahoo services on Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian phones. Famous for its simple and efficient access to the broad range of mobile offerings like search, messaging, news, etc., it seems Yahoo is letting go of Go in order to direct more energy and resources to the development of its mobile web efforts. “In the past 18 months, browser quality has been increasing at an accelerated rate,” Yahoo’s global head of mobile product marketing Adam Taggart says. “We’ve doubled down on our mobile web strategy.” This week, Yahoo Go users will be notified by email of the company’s decision

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No Go for Yahoo Go in 2010

With the likes of Apple and Google making huge headway in the areas of mobile marketing and app distribution via app stores, wireless carriers have been forced to play catch up.  New research suggests carriers are planning to invest heavily in “service delivery platform software and services,” or in other words internal means for self-serve mobile marketing and app distribution. Market research firm Infonetics released its latest “2009 Service Delivery Platform Software and Services” report that indicates mobile marketing and app store development are the two leading drivers behind carrier’s renewed interest in internal “Service Delivery Platforms,” due in large part to the revenue potential both concepts provide

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Carriers Rushing To Invest In Internal Mobile Marketing Platforms & App Stores

The Mobile Marketing Association redefined “mobile marketing” this week at the Mobile Marketing Forum in Los Angeles. Here’s the new official definition: “Mobile marketing is a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network.” I love the MMA’s new definition because it encompasses all the different tools of mobile marketing that are available today and those that will become available. Also, it brings up two very important concepts: communication and engagement. After all, if a mobile phone isn’t about communication we’ve really missed the boat.

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What is Mobile Marketing Anyway?

The Mobile Marketing Association announced the winners of the 2009 MMA Global Mobile Marketing Awards at their Fifth Annual Global Mobile Marketing Awards during a dinner yesterday evening. Each year, the MMA’s awards receive hundreds of submissions in 12 categories from companies across the globe. Winners are selected by the MMA Awards Selection Committee comprised of global industry leaders from wireless carriers, technology and content providers, agencies and industry publications. TIM Father’s Day: Gift Express by TIM, McCann Erickson & Mobext, UPS jobs – Problem Solved Mobile Media Campaign Delivers Hires, UPS & TMP Worldwide Advertising, and Who Killed Summer 09 (Vodafone Group), OMD Mobile won in a three-way tie for Best Mobile Campaign Overall. North American Winner Highlights: *Mobile Display Campaign: Pizza Hut iPhone App, Pizza Hut, Inc

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2009 MMA Global Mobile Marketing Award Winners

Millennial Media, the leading mobile ad-network who just scored a $16M round of funding , has released its October “SMART” report, or “Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting.” This month’s report includes a special section dedicated to analyzing the reach, platforms and CTR data associated with mobile apps.  Though you can probably guess who dominates the mobile app landscape, the data still includes some interesting tidbits. According to the report, Apple dominated the number of total apps year-to-date with 115,00, as well as total app downloads with 100M.  In addition, Apple users downloaded roughly 11 apps per month- three times more than Android users and six times more than Blackberry users. More interesting though, was that while Apple led with the most entertainment and book apps year-to-date, Android dominated the games category with 32 percent of apps.  In terms of total app downloads, the Android platform accounted for some 20M, while Blackberry users only downloaded 300K.  While Apple’s downloads are still five times that of Androids, it still shows how quickly Android is catching on

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Millennial Releases October “SMART” Report