Staying a Step Ahead as Mobile Ads Gain

By: Jennifer Saba While it still represents a small slice of the advertising pie, mobile advertising may be one of the few revenue lines heading north this year. Consulting firm Deloitte predicts that in 2009 mobile advertising may prove to be one of the few growth areas, doubling its market share with several large advertising campaigns projected to cost more than $2 billion.

The Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif., is thinking first of mobile advertising's potential on the local level with two very challenged categories: automotive and real estate. In June, the Register rolled out a program to entice local auto dealers to run advertising on its mobile-friendly site, http://m.ocregister.com, which simply lists stories by section. The site, powered by Verve Wireless, gets more than a million page views a month. Also featured is a banner across the top of the page.

But it's one thing to create a simple banner; it's quite another for that banner to click through to a Web site optimized for mobile devices. This is especially true for local advertisers, as the client's Web site isn't likely to be formatted to display correctly on a smartphone.

So the Register decided to help with that too, acting as an ad agency of sorts. "We created actual mobile Web sites for our clients," says Daniel Hellbusch, the newspaper's manager of real estate advertising. The sites feature information including the dealer's location, phone numbers, and inventory.

The Register has built roughly 40 Web sites for auto clients since the June launch, says Hellbusch. The mobile ads are sold a la carte or as part of a larger package that include advertising in the print and online editions. While it's still early, Hellbusch adds, "it's definitely a new revenue stream for us."

Because of this success, the Register is rolling out the program to real estate advertisers, where mobile has a lot of potential, since people tend to look at houses when they're out and about.

Hellbusch says there are some challenges to its mobile strategy ? the last thing the paper wants is to increase costs related to an ad buy. "We're not a Web development company," he notes. "While we do offer that service, it's via third parties that automate the process so as not to add tons of overhead."