Google Adwords supports iPhone and Android

Today Google's mobile team announced the ability for all of our Adwords advertisers to target their desktop ads to high-end (Android and iPhone) devices.

There is a lot of speculation about how many advertisers Adwords has. The point, however, is that what is arguably the front end for the broadest online advertising platform now enables all of its advertisers to deliver appropriate ads (and deliver associated ROI).

I believe that one of the primary issues with mobile advertising has been the challenge of educating broad-based advertisers about how to discover the medium, create appropriate ads for the medium and track said ads' performance. That all goes away... Think about the implication of 10+ million iphones with Google ads and 30x the search usage of a typical device across many, many advertisers...

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Mobile advertising piece in Venturebeat

Venturebeat put together an interesting post on mobile advertising and the effects of the downturn.
Their point is that the iPhone is driving growth (as Admob, Google and other have touted publicly), and that advertisers are transitioning from "testing" the medium to actually planning spend against it.

Having interacted with dozens of agencies and advertisers over the past year, I continue to feel that mobile is seen as "experimental" for now, but with everyone eyeing iPhone, Android and other "true-web" phones to see how quickly they get a significant install base.

If you can have 100 million devices that leverage the technology (banner ads, tracking, analytics, targetting) of the web AND provide location based targetting and a deep personal attachment for users, then we have a compelling medium.

As always, I am very bullish on mobile and I am glad to see others begin to agree.

Mobile panel at Monaco Media Forum

Last weekend at the Monaco Media Forum Rich Wong from Accel hosted a panel on mobile. Very interesting discussion on whether 2009 is the year of mobile (again). Same themes come out - iPhone, flat rate data plan.

Panelists: Alvin Wang Graylin, CEO, minfo;Omar Hamoui, CEO, AdMob; Alexandre Mars, CEO, Phonevalley and Head of Mobile, Publicis Groupe; Federico Pisani Massamormile,CEO, Hanzo; and Jon Medved, CEO, Vringo; Moderator: Rich Wong, Accel Partners.




Nikesh Arora also spoke at the event and served as co-chair.

Admob raises $15.7M from Sequoia and Accel

Talk about a strong statement... A few weeks after Sequoia told its CEOs to buckle up for a tough ride, it turns around and invests $15.7M along with Accel in Admob. This raises Admob's total funding to $34.3 million...

And in all the excitement, they let it be known that they have turned cash-positive and are serving over 5B ads... How is that for a nice middle finger to the doom sayers!

I must admit I love what Admob is doing and how they are doing it. Their mobile metrics provides great insight into the growing trends in mobile advertising (even if it is very skewed towards the US and some emerging markets) and Omar Hamoui (CEO), Russell Buckley (MD Europe) and the team are ever-present in the mobile ecosystem (disclosure: I serve with Russell on the Board of the Mobile Marketing Association).

In any case, a great piece of news in this otherwise dire market...

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