Ghirardelli Chocolate since 1852

Today we received a great Chocolate Gift Basket (Ghirardelli Chocolate Company) from our business partner AdMob. A fantastic surprise for our team with a nice AdMob branded cup and miscellaneous chocolate stuff; Intense Dark Chocolates like Evening Dream with 60% Cacao, Twilight Delight with 72% cacao, Midnight Reverie with 86% cacao and filled chocolate bars like Milk chocolate with caramel and dark chocolate with mint. Thanks a bunch!

Update 2010.07.23: Today we got a seven pages long statement from UPS. Beside this administrative effort for a gift, we now have to pay 20,75 Euro for overdraft fee and import turnover tax :o(

Many Aspects to consider by Optimizing Inventory

Some days ago I wrote about Whom should Mobile Social Networks partner with in Mobile Advertising and today I would like to share some experience from the perspective of a publisher with three mobile advertisement optimizer; smaato.com, admarvel.com and nexage.com. Beside smooth technical integration the evaluation of relevant operating figures like e.g. revenue, eCPM or fill rate is for me important. For my daily work I wish – in the best case – to get the figures real time. Maybe I am spoiled by the extensive admob back office and I understand that the optimizer need to collect and reprocess the figures from all their partners, but it still see some improvement of their back offices, so I can better get through with my personal every-day tasks. For example I am missing a more detailed effective cost per mille (eCPM) analysis. In one back office I get the eCPM for the top 10 countries, in the second one I find the eCPM for each advertisement network and the third one doesn’t provide any eCPM calculation. And sometimes there is also some fine tuning to be done, like putting all the figures for the same country together and not to separate them into e.g. Congo, The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zaire :o)
 
Not every optimizer has a daily (one has a weekly) and a country specific (one has only the top10 countries) breakdown of the figures, so a detailed analysis e.g. of the daily click through rate (CTR) in a certain country is not possible. And I must say that there are also big differences in the speed when jumping from one statistic to another between the three different back offices. Sometimes I am also not sure if the figures are completed, because some data are included bit by bit after some days and the optimizers don’t get all information from all their networks. This doesn’t come as a big surprise, because in the best case they have connected you as publisher to 20+ different advertisement sources. But this all makes it more difficult for a publisher to compare the three services in terms of economic performance, but also to compare them to other alternatives, like a direct integration of an advertisement network.

Another good thing for a publisher using an optimizer is the allocations of ad sources to increase the overall fill rate. The experience shows that there are big differences in the three testes systems; for one particular country we had a range from 33,6% over 89,1% to 99,0% fill rate. I know that it’s only one of several performance indicators, but still the test shows, that you should consider various aspects in your decision making. For my personal conclusion I must say, that the cooperation with all of those advertisement optimizers is a valuable experience for me and for a better understanding of our business, but there is still much home work to be done for those new players in the mobile industry. In the last months I heard many different thoughts about the future of the mobile advertisement optimizers and I am really curious about future development.

The Mobile Advertising Ecosystem

There are several business models for Mobile Social Networks (MSN). Asking users to pay for either community membership or for premium content like virtual goods are two examples. Lately, a few players have been experimenting with different premium models. Nevertheless, it seems to me that our market segment still favours the advertising-based business model.

When thinking about whom to choose as a partner I drew the diagram you see above to visualise which partners and options MSN currently have. In my view mobile social networks now have four different groups of potential advertising partners. In more detail, if you consider the various possible combinations for cooperations between partners, the money we look at can go through 7 different ways through the value chain) as the diagram illustrates. These four groups of partners are:

• Mobile Content / Service Provider
  A direct cooperation with mobile content and service provider can bring higher rates of the effective cost per mille (eCPM) for the social network’s inventory. On the other hand the cooperation requires a a higher sales effort from the MSN. To reach a 100% fill rate (defined here as ads shown by content partner/inventory offered by MSN) your inventory a MSN needs many business partners to gain enough advertising deals. It also takes a high technical integration effort and a lot time to manage the relationships with these partners. One well-known mobile content provider is e.g. Fox Mobile Group (Jamba/Jamster).
   
• Mobile Advertising Agency
  Mobile advertising agencies often work for several big brands and manage cross media advertising campaigns for them. Typically agencies wish to target a very specific audience for a very large MSN inventory volume within a certain period of time. For a MSN these specific types of demands are often difficult to serve properly. Two of such mobile advertising agencies are pi2006.es and glispa.de.
   
• Mobile Advertising Networks
  Mobile advertising networks pool different kinds of mobile players. They have elaborated ways how they can fulfill the specific needs of advertisers and help publishers to convert their inventory into revenues. From the point of view of a MSN their specific disadvantage is that MSN can not directly choose who advertises on on their site. Indirectly they can choose to put to put specific advertisers on “blacklists”. Examples of two such marketplaces are admob.com and adinfuse.com.
   
• Mobile Advertising Optimisers
  Mobile advertising optimisers offer a very tempting comprehensive monetization solution for MSNs. However, they represent a new branch of business in the mobile industry. If one is to believe them MSN can easily manage all their business cooperations and maximize the monetization of their inventory. On the other hand they represent a new part of the value chain which wants a bite from the revenue pie. Nexage.com and smaato.de are among those new players.

It should be mentioned that there is a even more complexity in the value chain. For example some mobile social networks like buzzcity.com offer their own mobile advertising networks. And you also can’t preclude that the mobile advertising optimisers integrate each other. So how does one choose as a mobile social network the right part of this value chain to work with? We don’t really know yet who in the value chain will survive in the long term because the mobile advertising business is still young. We know mobile advertising networks since 2006 (admob.com started in 2006) and mobile advertising optimisers since last year (smaato.de started with SOMA in 2008). Google introduced Adsense for mobile search just the other day. I am sure that we will also see another big movement in the industry when the first mobile ads appear on Facebook Mobile and MySpace Mobile‘s efforts increase in this regard. Facebook has got no ads yet, but just imagine the additional amount of mobile advertising inventory from ‘20 Million Users Now Accessing Facebook Through Mobile Platforms‘.

To me as MSN one must broadly consider of a trade-off between money (content providers, agencies) vs security (optimizers). The best business option for a mobile social network depends much on which strategy in general they pursue. If you go for the big money, you go directly to the content / service providers or/and advertising agency and accept the high business efforts and the risk depending on few big customers. If you aim for more secureness and less work, but at the worst also less money for your inventory, than you go for the mobile advertising marketplaces and optimizers.
 
But at the end, how to chose the right business partners for the corresponding cooperation? For an informed decision you need some criteria; I can think of a set of 14 criteria to bear in mind when selecting one. Firstly we can have a look on basic facts about the potential business friends like company age, references, team and investors. Some operating figures like the market coverage, achieved average fill rate and achieved average eCPM are also of interest. Than we should consider the business aspects like revenue share, contract duration, contractual specials and payment target / reliability. And of course don’t forget the technical issues like integration efforts, performance / scalability and support quality. But at the end it’s all about individual experience with specific business partners, because mostly you have to deal with young players in our turbulent industrial sector.
 
For peperonity.com we have found our strategy and good business partners. Understandably I can’t tell you the details, but I am open for discussion about the mobile advertising ecosystem from the perspective of MSN or a publisher in general. Our mobile industry is just vibrant and full of surprises :o)

(Note: This is my contribution for the ‘FACTS OF THE WEEK NO 1′ at www.mobile-facts.com)

Social Media in real life

After the first day of the CTIA Wireless 2008 we first went to the AdMob CTIA Dinner Party in the Ozumo Restaurant. Sometimes the best networking is after the trade show. Like in the last year AdMob did a great job with their reception bringing together many folks from the mobile industry. All in all a great evening with people like Omar, Jason and Thomas (AdMob), Michael and Gustaf (Heysan), Annika (Netbiscuits), Matthäus (mobile facts) and Ilja (getjar). Afterwards I was lucky to grab an invitation from Jamie (MocoSpace) for the CTIA DefJam, MocoSpace and Quattro Wireless party, where I also met  Justin (MocoSpace).

Emerging Trends of Mobile Web

Two days before the CTIA Wireless I joined together with around 50 other folks from the mobile industry a conference called Mobile Web Megatrends. The event was hosted at the University of California, Berkeley and was organized by Ajit Jaokar (Futuretext). I mostly enjoyed the vital presentations from Matthäus Krzykowski (mobile facts) on Trends Driving the Mobile Web & Related Business Opportunities for Startups and Dan Mason (ESPN Mobile Web) on Mobile Web Discovery and Placement. But also Jason Spero (admob) had some interesting insights on Mobile Analytics and their new product AdMob Analytics.

Agenda:

Welcome and Opening Remarks From the Chair
Ajit Jaokar (Futuretext)

The Mobile Web evolution and its impact for developers

• Nokias’s Vision for the Mobile Web Opportunities for Developers
  Ganesh Sivaraman (Forum Nokia)
• Opera’s Vision for the Mobile Web
  Tatsuki Tomita (Opera Software)
• Mobile Data: Convergence or Divergence
  Michael Mace (Rubicon Consulting)
• Cloud Computing: The Software Stack for Mobile Web
  Kevin Leong (Mo’Blast)
• Emerging Market Opportunities – Digital Inclusion with an Emphasis on the Brazilian Market
  Priscila Grison (Journalist)
• Impact of Open Source on Mobile Devices
  Mike Rowehl (Mobile Monday Silicon Valley)
• The Obamamobile: Media and Mobile Convergence – Trends and Opportunities
  Michael Becker (iLoop Mobile)
• The iPhone Session – The iStore and the Future of Mobile Applications
  William Volk (PlayScreen)
• Apps for Mobile Devices – What happens next?
  Michael Mace (Rubicon Consulting)

Operators, New Media and Convergence

• Mobile Web Discovery and Placement – Issues, Insights and Best Practices
  Dan Mason (ESPN Mobile Web)
• Content Adaptation: going Beyond Transcoding
  Eyal Rosen (InfoGin)
• Operator Trends – Identity and Security
  Tim Haysom (OMTP)
• How Multimedia SIM can bring Operators Applications to Mass-Market Devices
  Frederic Martinent (Gemalto)
• Trends driving the Mobile Web & Related Business Opportunities for Startups
  Matthäus Krzykowski (mobile facts)

Technology Trends – under the Radar

• Mobile Analytics
  Jason Spero (admob)
• Mobile Web Trends
  Raj Singh (Skyfire)
• Get Smart: Coupons and the Mobile Web
  Brent Dusing (cellfire)
• Oracle Atom DB
  Nikunj Mehta (Oracle)
• New Mobile Ecosystem
  Barbara Ballard (Little Springs Design)

Barcelona in 2 hours

Starting from our apartment in the middle of La Barceloneta I went for a walk through the city on our last day in Barcelona during the Mobile World Congress; Platja Barceloneta, Platja Sant Sebastià, Marina Port Vell, Moll de Bosch i Alsina, Rambla de Mar, Maremàgnum, Christopher Columbus monument, La Rambla, Mercat de la Boqueria, Plaça de Catalunya, Plaça Urquinaona, Arc de Triomf, Passeig de Sant Joan, Plaça de Tetuan, Sagrada Família, Passeig de Lluís Companys, Park of the Ciutadella and Estació de França.

I thought our business trips was over, but then I met Tony Nethercutt and Jason Spero from admob.com relaxing in the sun on the Platja Barceloneta :o)

Source: PR-inside.com, 12.12.2007, 11:44:32 

[...] 

Russell Buckley, der gerade zum stellvertretenden Vorsitzenden der Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) gewählt wurde, ruft 2008 als das Jahr des mobilen Internet aus, moniert jedoch, dass diese Vorhersage nicht für Deutschland gelten kann: ‘Einerseits ist Deutschland weltweit führend im Bereich von Mobile Social Software, wie man recht gut am Erfolg des Hagener Unternehmens und Kooperationspartners von AdMob, Peperoni, sehen kann. Die mobile Community und das Netzwerk an mobilen Sites von Peperoni sind die weltweit führende Plattform für endverbraucherorientierte mobile Websites und soziale Netzwerke und werden von annähernd 10 Millionen Besuchern monatlich genutzt.

[...]

More sources – Thanks to Ulrike :o)

• LivePR
• FirmenPresse
• PresseEcho
• WirtschaftsInfo
• OpenPR
• PR-Inside
• BusinessPortal24
• Portel
• Digital world
• E-Commerce Magazin
• BareboneCenter

Today we visit the admob.com headquarters in San Mateo and we landed amidst impressive halloween preparation. After some talks with Omar Hamoui and Russell Buckley, we had time to meet some other admob.com members and I had the honor to ring the famous gong! I must admit that Omar really made a great job with building up this company behind “The World’s Largest Mobile Advertising Marketplace” :o)

The first day at the CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment 2007 was very good for us, because it was full with talks and impressions about the mobile market in USA. And we also met for the first time ever the guys behind our combatant mocospace.com; Justin Siegel (CEO) and Jamie Hall (CTO). This day was really great, because later on we met even more of our combatants; Malcolm Wong (Business Development at buzzcity.com), Armando Pena (CEO at fotochatter.com), Sabine Irrgang (COO at gofresh.de) and Mikko Saarelainen (Director Content & Communities at gofresh.de). Even if we are amidst the battlefield, it was great the have a chat with all of them about our industry and next developments :o)

In the evenings we went to the admob.com Cocktail Reception in the Ozumo Restaurant. I was very amazed how fast the admob.com family grow in the last months and I was glad to meet some of the family members, like Omar, Niren, Zubair, Andy, Cheryl, Wendy, Jennifer, Tony, Kevin, Thomas, Jackson and many others…

We got an invitation to join admob.com on the Oktoberfest in the festival hall Pschorr Bräurosl, so I went for the first time in my life for this bavarian tradition. The festival hall was quite crowded, like the Thersienwiese. And we didn’t only meet Ivanka Hahnenberger, Andy Smith and Russell Buckley of admob.com, but also some of our combatants like some folks from pitch.tv and Mikko Saarelainen (Gofresh). It was also a pleasure to see Ulrike Meinhardt (onPR) and Daniel Melter (M-Squad) again.