Mobile marketing fire heats up

The Hyperfactory is expanding its mobile advertising offerings with an ad-buying network designed to generate marketing messages across wireless applications.
The New Zealand-based outfit hopes to offer a one-stop shop for companies looking to tout their brands on the wireless Web, as well as in mobile video and in-game advertising. Gil Martinez, a former ESPN Mobile Publishing executive, will helm the new business.
“We have the world’s largest mobile media footprint, attracting the most innovative brands and agencies generating mobile campaigns,” said Hyperfactory CEO Derek Handley. “We’re moving beyond WAP banner ad campaigns and offering value from generating ideas, campaign execution across any consumer touch point, detailed analytics and reporting and access to a host of media across multiple platforms.”
A rare veteran of the mobile marketing space-the company was founded in 2000-Hyperfactory is set to lock horns with Millennial Media, a newcomer also looking to deliver advertising messages across mobile applications and services. Millennial Media is led by Paul Palmieri, a former Verizon Wireless executive.
Meanwhile, San Mateo, Calif.-based startup AdMob continued to add fuel to the white-hot mobile marketing fire, announcing that it has served one billion mobile Web ads in the past six months. While the United States placed first in terms of AdMob traffic with 90 million page views per month, or 20 percent of overall traffic, much of AdMob’s business occurred in less advanced markets including South Africa (15 percent of AdMob’s page views), India (13 percent) and Romania (5 percent). Nokia Corp. phone users represented an astounding 41 percent of AdMob traffic; Motorola Inc. was second among manufacturers with 14 percent.
“The encouraging data point for the mobile Web is not just the number of ads being served, but the pace at which things are growing,” said AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui. “In our first six months, we only served about 30 million ads, and over the next six months we served 1 billion more.”