Today, the mobile advertising marketplace AdMob released a new, global marketplace for iPhone ads. The most interesting aspect of this is that these ads will be specifically tailored to the iPhone and will also be highly interactive. To promote this launch and the new platform, AdMob is giving away a total of $1 million to iPhone developers to promote their applications through AdMob.
To start, AdMob has lined up a number of large advertisers, including Electronic Arts, Universal Pictures, Movietickets.com, AccuWeather, and Ford, including its Land Rover and Jaguar brands. Other companies using AdMob include Stitcher, Loopt, Shozu, Mippin, and vsnax. Advertisers can target users browsing the web, as well as users of specific applications.
Just in June alone, AdMob already served over 50 million ads to iPhones worldwide, without offering any of this interactivity, so there is clearly a huge market for these mobile ads and this interactivity takes them to a whole new level.
Both Medialets and AppLoop already offer a marketplace for advertisers and application developers to connect. Chances are that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will release similar programs in the future, but for now, none of them have announced anything in this direction.
As we reported earlier, AdMob (and the mobile advertising market) has been growing at a steady clip. Most of the mobile ads, however, never made much use of the 'mobile' aspects of the devices they ran on. Admob is trying to change this with the iPhone marketplace, which will feature ads that make use of the iPhone's capabilities.
AdMob is giving its advertisers the ability to access eight actions on the iPhone: open iTunes to buy music or video, open the App Store, listen to audio, view video, initiate a call, launch maps, and to visit a web site with Safari. AdMob is not, as far as we can see, making any use of the iPhones location awareness so far. Overall, though, some of the ads AdMob has showcased to far are more interactive than some of the web based iPhone apps we have seen lately.
Ads can, for example, bring up Safari to display show times for a movie from an ad, take you to iTunes to buy music, or let you initiate a call right from an ad. While these ideas aren't revolutionary, AdMob has executed them very well, with easy to understand icons which are, as far as we can see, standardized among all ads.
To showcase the interactivity of the ads, AdMob has put together this video: