Google Mobile Ads goes advanced

[Tina]

Google location search for mobile consumers.

[remaly]

Mobile ads are a curious phenomenon, they're surprisingly ubiquitous on the so-called Mobile Web, with the market leader AdMob measuring ads served in terms of billions, yet most smartphone owners will rarely see them. More and more, with the iPhone's Safari, S60 Web and of course Opera Mini, the web served up onto smart mobile devices is the full web and not a mobile version, which means that the ads served are the original full bandwidth banners. Which a smartphone owner is extremely unlikely to click on, with time and bandwidth so precious.
The concept of getting online with a mobile phone is catching on though, with most 'dumb' phone users now aware that they can get access to at least part of the Internet, albeit usually through their operator's default portal page - but it's a start. Once past the portal's doors, users are experimenting and exploring, which is good for mobile ad suppliers, but often unwittingly using transcoders such as Skweezer, which is bad for an ad company, especially if the portal or transcoder supplier decides to put its own ads in place of the original ones.
The mobile industry can't actually avoid advertising - it's a cornerstone of modern life across all media, but at least there's one way in which adverts can potentially be interesting and relevant. With more and more handsets coming with GPS and with mobile apps such as Google Maps for Mobile pioneering pseudo-GPS functionality based on cell tower locations, it's almost a given these days that your mobile has the potential to know its own location on the Earth. What I'd like to see in phones and smartphones is more pervasive location awareness, so that every application from Web browser to Map client to Music player can tie in to relevant local advertisers (e.g. the somewhat cliched "It's lunchtime, why not stop by Dominos, 2 streets away, where there's a 2-for-1 offer on" or "You like The Damned - your local HMV has their greatest hits for only £4.99").
There's still a huge grey area in the overlap between 'mobile web' and 'full web' though, not helped by the convergence of handset hardware and software functionality. It's a brave company that commits large investments to mobile advertising in such a confusing climate, but it's a wise one that invests some time, effort and (yes) money and which keeps its eyes well and truly on the mobile world.