In recent weeks, we’ve been hearing rumors that companies are canceling their mobile display advertising budgets. But when we looked into it, we found that overall demand for mobile display advertising is actually increasing.

What we’ve started seeing over the last few months is that advertisers increasingly buy ads based on experience they gained testing the medium in recent months. The main driver appears to be successes brand companies have had particularly with iPhone users. This upwards trend has a good shot to continue next year, even though the full effects of the downturn have clearly yet to play out.

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Annual Halloween attraction Scream Country Haunted Forest used mobile to create awareness and generate hype around the event this year. Scream Country ran 30-second television spots on the Cox Media network asking viewers to text the keyword SCREAM to short code 269411. The TV spots ran in the Oklahoma City and Tulsa markets.

Viewers who texted in got a message back that said, “Congratulations! U R entered 2 Win 4 Frightening tickets 2 Scream Country Haunted Forest. Visit www.ScreamCountry.com for more haunting details.”

Then texters got a follow-up message that said, “Reply YES 2 Win more chilling prizes 4 Halloween from ScreamCountryHauntedForest & get Xclusives from Cox+ptnrs. max 4msgs/mo. Std txt rts aply. Reply YES now!”

This campaign saw a 56.82 percent double opt-in rate and a 25 percent increase in attendance at Scream Country Haunted Forest this Halloween.

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Rock the Vote ran a mobile campaign that drove 80,000 unique visitors to the organization's WAP site, tapping 4Info to power the campaign. 4Info helped Rock the Vote reach teens with messages about the importance of making their voices heard.

4Info offered to run the campaign as a pro-bono effort because the company is passionate about encouraging young voters to participate in the voting process regardless of party affiliation, and [they] know that mobile is one of the best ways to reach that audience.

Finally, we find an SMS search service that speaks our language!

ASK is a new SMS-based directory search service by Yellotext Sdn Bhd. It enables users to find whereabouts of desired items and also contact details of their favorite shops from its ASK Listing directory, anywhere, anytime.

To use the search service, just type “ASK” followed by a search query e.g. “ASK hair salon curve” or “ASK hair salon” and then send to 36869. The search engine can also ‘understand’ queries in natural language e.g. “ASK looking for a hair salon at gardens.” Response time is typically under a minute (depending on network conditions).

This just in from Razorfish:

Sprint is setting the pace for U.S. wireless carriers by supporting 2D barcode scanning in ‘08. The company is pushing out the service under two different monikers: “Phone IQ” and “2-D Intelligence”. 2D barcode scanning, or QR codes, is already wildly popular in Asia and starting to takeoff in Europe. Sprint deserves a round of applause for this effort and we, for one, can’t wait to see how the U.S. market reacts.

eBay UK has launched an SMS alert service to tell users when they've been outbid on an item.

eBay users are given the option online to receive text message updates on their item bid when they initially put in an offer for purchasing the product.They can also subscribe to receive texts in their account preferences in My eBay and can choose whether they want to receive alerts for each item they watch or bid on.

Wonder when this will launch in the US? Read more info here.

Yet another promising mobile study:

Mobile is measurable and drives return on investment even more than the Internet, according Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising network.

Quattro partnered with comScore Inc. for a digital marketing intelligence survey about today’s mobile consumer trends. The survey tracked contextual, demographic, behavioral and location information from the Quattro network of premier publisher mobile Web sites such as NFL.com, CollegeHumor.com, CBS News, Playboy and Univision.

Click here for detailed results.

Unilever, a large holding company of various brands, has announced they will be increasing its ad-spend on mobile campaigns following the unprecedented success of a particular campaign centered around its youth brand Peperami.

The core of this success? A mobile-based site that allows its users to send prank calls to their friends, among other things. 

The site has only been live since September 16th, and in its short life has seen over 24,000 unique visitors.  In the eyes of Unilever this represented a huge success, with it being a relatively new idea for the company.

Read on for more details on this success story.

In the wake of the October 9th disclosure that Verizon Wireless plans to levy a 3-cent transaction fee on text messages to opted-in consumers on its subscriber database, the news left SMS businesses scrambling for answers. On October 10th, the carrier released a clarification that - for the time being - has calmed the storm.

Read more here

Oberon Media, the NYC-based mobile and online casual gaming firm which recently did a restructuring and management changes, has received another $20 million in funding, from the Infinity I-China Fund. This funding will help Oberon expand its publishing and distribution business and establishing new partnerships in China. Infinity IChina is Israeli-Chinese equity fund...it plans to do some more investments in the gaming sector in the region. Some more details in the release.

Founded in 2003, Oberon Media is backed by some big money from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers.

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As unbelievable as that sounds, a survey by Omniture shows that nearly 71% of companies do not track mobile-based traffic to their websites- with half admitting to not even knowing how many unique users visit their sites from a mobile device.

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Close to half of all social networking users have now visited destinations like MySpace and Facebook via mobile device, according to an online user survey conducted by market analysis firm ABI Research. Forty-six percent of social networking members have visited their favorite sites on their phones, with more than half of them checking for comments and messages from their friends--about 45 percent have also posted status updates.... Read more >>

Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the International Telecom Union (ITU), said he expects the number of mobile phone users to exceed 4bn, or 61pc of the world's 6.7bn inhabitants, in December.

Soaring demand in developing countries has seen year-on-year growth average 24pc between 2000 and 2008. At the turn of the century just 12pc of the world's population had a mobile phone, by early this year the figure exceeded 50pc.

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Timberland has agreed to reimburse people who received unauthorized text messages advertising its products in one of the first nationwide settlements of its kind, according to a law firm involved in the case.

Timberland, the boots and clothing company, and another company, e-commerce provider GSI, were the subject of a class-action lawsuit that charged them with sending text messages to customers in violation of the U.S. Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

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American mobile subscribers between the ages of 13 and 29 send an average of 20 text messages each day, compared to just two texts daily for consumers aged 30 to 43 and only one for users aged 44 to...

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This weekend I was at the second annual Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas. Naturally, there was a heavy emphasis on blogging and talk of podcasting and video was not far behind. Mobile, the newest new media, only got mentioned a couple of times in the sessions I attended. (There were tons of sessions; and it is entirely possible I missed the ones that did.)

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There will be no shortage of excitement on Tuesday when T-Mobile unveils the first phone powered by Google’s Android operating system. But “the event” is likely only the start of a long effort to “rewrite the rules of the mobile communications industry.”

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MACTAN,  CEBU — As  more people  use third-generation (3G)       phones and as soon  as mobile phone operators  can provide rich media,       advertising via mobile phones is expected to kick in and provide a new       revenue stream for telecommunication companies.     

Mobile advertising has been touted as the next killer application in      the mobile  industry.  In  the  Philippines,  this  is  still  in  the       "elementary stage"  because  advertisements  are  currently  sent only       through the short  messaging and  multimedia messaging  services, said       Danilo J.  Mojica  II,  head of  Smart  Communications,  Inc. wireless       consumer division.

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Sep 10, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- CTIA -- Ad Infuse, a leader in delivering highly personalized mobile ad experiences, today announced that GoTV Networks(TM), the first and largest multi-platform new media network, selected Ad Infuse as its mobile advertising network. Through this partnership, GoTV(TM)'s multi-platform mobile network will be ad-enabled and will offer cross-carrier, cross-platform mobile video advertising options, giving advertisers unique access to GoTV's extensive viewing audience. Ad Infuse's ad network will serve optimized multimedia advertisements that seamlessly integrate with GoTV's premium mobile video content, including its cutting-edge music offerings, to create an engaging, high-quality user experience.

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MTV Networks announced the launch of its first-ever mobile video advertising effort, introducing pre-roll ads to content available via carrier-operated premium video-on-demand services. MTV will insert U.S. Air Force ads in front of episodes of its made-for-mobile series The How To Show--the USAF will also co-brand the program, which documents musicians, athletes and other celebs as they teach audiences the ins and outs of their respective trades. The mobile campaign, orchestrated by advertising agency GSD&M Idea City, will also span across MTV's mobile website.

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