Google
Product marketing manager Alexandra Kenin explained in a blog post: "Now, advertisers will be able to display ads exclusively on these mobile devices, create campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. If you prefer not to show your desktop ads on these phones, you can opt out and show ads only on desktop and laptop computers."
And vice versa. Ads once intended for the desktop can now follow you everywhere. If that sounds eerily like a Philip K. Dick novel, as if your digital life is about to be consumed by one pitch after another, it isn't.
Not yet, anyway.
Neither Apple
But if we're seeing more mobile ads, it's because, factoring in location data, they can be made more relevant. That's the pitch for Loopt, a Baby Breaker that maps your network of friends in real time and ultimately aims to subsist on advertising.
Mobile-ad distributor AdMob -- think Google, but for mobile phones -- offers hope. Executives there recently told VentureBeat writer Matthaus Krzykowski that they had, for the first time, secured "upfronts in the million-dollar range" for 2009. Upfronts are commitments made for planned ad placements.
Both the iPhone 3G and T-Mobile's G1 have built-in GPS systems, as do Nokia's
For now, mobile ads remain on the minority report. But that won't last. Nokia, RIM, Samsung ... they're all way too smart to let their smartphone-cum-pitch platforms miss this opportunity.
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- Amazon, too, wants you to buy on the go.
- The world might not be ready for a Zune phone.
- Yet Mr. Softy was talking tough about mobile ads in January.