San Francisco — Google Inc. said on Wednesday it is shaping out its portion of the mobile advertising market, has unveiled brand-image ads for mobile phones, in a bid to extend beyond the computer-based Web market, joining Yahoo, AOL, MSN and a host of niche players scrambling toward the next frontier in interactive advertising on phones.
While mobile advertising is nothing new, Google’s main center of attention on this latest platform for display ads is building up excitement in some circles. A complement to Google’s existing mobile text ads that it sells through its cost-per-click AdSense program, which it is now growing enormously to offer contextually targeted graphical banners, formatted to fit within the constraints of the mobile browser.
“Image ads are in reality attractive to brand advertisers,” Sanjay Agarwal, a mobile ad engineer with Google, said in a video describing the product. “We want to give them the flexibility of either choosing a text format or an image format.”
The service, “Mobile Ads,” can also be coupled with AdSense and similar to other Google products will use keyword targeting to display relevant advertising for users. The requirement is that advertising should be linked to a mobile Web page, according to a blog post by Alexandra Kenin, the product marketing manager for Mobile Ads.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin even said at Google’s recent quarterly results conference call that “The mobile ads work very well … there is nothing to dissuade me it would be any worse than traditional desktop search.” If that holds true — and we all know how desktop search has panned out — mobile search may be a huge blockbuster.
With many new carriers now offering flat-rate faster data plans with new smartphones shipments are increasing, and attention to the mobile web has gained a huge amount of steam due to the iPhone and its full web browsing capabilities to perform more functions of the traditional computer, Google has lately been evangelizing the prospects for the mobile Web.
“Though, only one image ad is displayed on each mobile page, a move that appears to restrict clutter on small screens.”
By collectively connecting Mobile Ads and AdSense, publishers can automate the advertising delivery services to serve the advertisements that have generated the highest click-through rates.
“For publishers, mobile image ads provide added flexibility,” Kenin wrote. “They can now choose to show text ads, image ads, or a mix of both and Google will dynamically return the ad that we expect will perform best at the time the ad is shown.”
Google’s penetration into the mobile display advertising business comes as the development of mobile advertising continues skyrocketing. Today’s market is still in the emerging phase, but recent research has suggested that mobile browser deployment will grow dramatically over the next five years, even if consumer usage of the new capabilities remains uncertain.
Spending on mobile advertising is expected to reach US$1.3 billion this year, according to JuniperResearch. Although SMS messaging carries on to dominate most campaigns, video-related services and multi-media displays are expected to be the primary driving force in the near future.
For advertisers, the procedure of Google’s display ads for mobile work in a similar fashion as banner ads on the Web, with a few twitches for the mobile medium. Advertisers put forward their image ads to Google, which will then place them on publishers who take part in Google’s mobile content ad network and have optimized their sites for the mobile browser.
Google will offer advertisers four ad sizes from which to choose, none with a file size larger than 3 kilobytes. The company is attempting to keep file sizes small, so that the ads do not unduly slow the load times of mobile Web pages, Agarwal said. Slow speeds have been a common complaint about the experience of browsing the Web on a mobile device.
Once Google’s Android operating system starts shipping and the mobile web is a single button press away, Google’s next frontier to attack will be the mobile search market. And, of course, selling display ads along with all those searches.
“Google now joins other industry heavyweights — such as AOL and Yahoo — chasing the mobile display advertising dollars.”
Mobile image ads are available in 13 national markets: Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the United States, Google said.