Mobile ad plays keep popping up: Bango, CBS, others look to mobile ad horizon

Bango is moving beyond wireless transactions and into the world of mobile marketing.
The U.K.-based firm, which specializes in off-deck activity, launched an offering designed to allow mobile advertisers to track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. Bango Analytics counts the number of unique visitors to sites and determines the type of phone being used, the user’s language and the country of the user.
The hosted service also delivers information such as peak traffic times, most popular content and search terms used.
The offering is similar to a handful of other products and services from mobile advertising firms such as Millennial Media, Third Screen Media and others. But each company’s analytics give only a fractional view of the market, compiling data only from the traffic on their customers’ sites.
Bango hopes to leverage its existing network of mobile site operators — as well as its position outside the traditional mobile advertising space — to create a standardized system for tracking activity on the wireless Internet.
“Millennial has a very good product; they can give you terrific analytics about how their marketing channel works. So can Google, so can AdMob. But what they can’t do is compare that to each other,” said Anil Malhotra, Bango’s VP of marketing and alliances. “One of the challenges of the mobile marketplaces is that it is fragmented. We actually think that because of the big footprint we’ve got, we’re in a position to become the standard.”
In other mobile advertising news:
–CBS is teaming with location-based services startup Loopt to deliver location-aware ads on the mobile Internet. The banner ads will be available later this year on sites for CBS Sports Mobile and CBS Mobile News as well as partners of Loopt.
Brick-and-mortar retailers have long salivated over the idea of delivering mobile ads to customers within a few blocks, but technological roadblocks and privacy concerns have held back the market. Advertisers insist, though, that consumers will welcome such ads if they’re unobtrusive and highly targeted.
“If you’re hungry and we take into account your location and time of day to display an ad for a restaurant offering free appetizers during happy hour,” said Loopt CEO Sam Altman, “we’ve really blurred the line between advertising and content.”
–San Francisco-based startup Ad Infuse unveiled a new mobile advertising unit designed specifically for Apple Inc.’s iPhone. The offering allows the company’s platform to automatically recognize the iPhone and deliver video clips and other messages optimized for the popular device.