I wrote an article recently for MediaPost’s Online Media Daily called Field of Dreams II: The Mobile Advertising Story that was seen by some as slamming mobile ad networks.  On the contrary, mobile ad networks play an important role in the mobile advertising ecosystem for remnant inventory.

The underlying point of this article was to call out premium publishers who are relegating their mobile sales strategy to ad networks instead of selling premium inventory to their own advertisers.  In our discussions with premium publishers, many have expressed their dissatisfaction with the way some ad networks transparently represent their inventory and they are expressing a desire to sell this inventory direct through their existing digital sales team.

So if you are a publisher with scale (>1 million page views per month), think twice before you hand over your inventory to mobile ad networks.  Don’t be satisfied with $1.00 CPMs.  Empower your ad sales team to sell mobile, in particular rich, beyond-the-banner ads.  These ad units generate excellent CTR and user engagement and sell for much higher CPMs.  

Still need a push? Crisp provides end-to-end services to make selling, buying, and tracking mobile advertising simple and easy.  We are industry leaders when it comes to mobile ad serving, rich media ad forms, reporting, robust advertiser sites and collaborative (not competitive) sales support.

What are your thoughts? Leave your comments here or on my article, looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

Do mobile ad networks deliver for premium publishers? I do not believe so. Remember not that long ago the talk of $40 CPMs from mobile advertising? Forget about it.  Today, it is more like $1 to $5 CPMs for premium inventory. Mobile ad networks have failed to deliver value for premium publishers.

• They have driven CPMs down and devalued publishers' inventory.
• They have broken their covenant with publishers by allowing advertisers to pick where they run at below market rates.
• They have turned premium inventory into remnant.

On the Web, many premium publishers have been making a clear distinction between premium inventory they sell and remnant inventory they might give ad networks sell. In mobile, practically speaking, all inventory is treated as lowly remnant. On the Web, many premium publishers have stopped using ad networks altogether because of damaging channel conflict, invariably bad ads, and unwanted second rate advertisers.

The law of supply and demand is immutable. The scarcity of inventory drives the prices higher and the abundance does the opposite. Except for publisher’s inertia, I cannot fathom why publishers with sales staff already trained in selling online still give their inventory to ad networks to sell as part of a huge pool of generally lower quality inventory. The results are predictable. I am hopeful that for premium publishers using ad networks is a short term solution. They are waiting for traffic to grow, the economy to improve, and mobile to become even more pervasive. It is a mistake to wait. Advertisers get conditioned to the trend that your mobile inventory is cheap.

Premium publishers need to stop relying on mobile ad networks to monetize their mobile inventory.  Instead of relegating ad sales to non-performing ad networks or using mobile as a value-add, premium publishers need to take control of their inventory and start selling. The fact is that publishers can achieve high sell-through in mobile; since traffic levels are still below desktop, so it only takes a handful of advertisers to fill the inventory.  The key is delivering an engaging, beyond-the-banner experience and making it painless for the buyer.

I really enjoyed participating on a panel about mobile advertising at DMA Mobile Marketing Day last week.  Congratulations to Mickey Alam Khan from Mobile Marketerfor organizing a terrific event for the Direct Marketing Association. Having recently attended a few digital and mobile media events with a visibly thinning audience-- due economy not diet-- I was pleased to see a large conference room full of participants from Fortune 500 and midsize companies.  I was glad to find many familiar faces of mobile execs from Jumptap, Quattro, Millennial, ChaCha, Bango, Nielsen, iLoop, and other players of the mobile advertising value chain. While some in the audience were new to mobile, most were direct response marketers who have already implemented successful mobile campaigns and came to network with their colleagues and learn some new tricks of trade. My panel was about driving consumer engagement through mobile advertising. For me, it was interesting to see how the questions betrayed the direct response nature of the audience: How does one measure engagement in mobile? How do you get a mobile user to buy things? How do I track users across online and mobile?  How does one integrate Click-to-Call into a mobile Web campaign? The panelists agreed that relevance and creative were the key to driving consumer engagement. In this, mobile offers some unique benefits that allow ads to be more compelling than traditional advertising:  location awareness (maybe not now but eventually), built-in payment mechanism, high level of measurability, and “always-with-you” characteristics.  Let’s not forget it’s also a phone. You can make phone calls. Clicking on a banner to call a car dealer to schedule an appointment, isn’t it the ultimate goal of engagement marketing?  Users calling ChaCha to ask tax questions receive highly relevant H&R Block ads. As for creative implementation, taking advantage of opportunities to fill “dead time” allows marketers to engage consumers into interacting with a brand more often and in more compelling ways than in traditional media: interactive quizzes,  timely polls, and multi-player advergames. AdMob and Crisp Wireless take advantage the iPhone ‘s dazzling screen and touch capabilities to deliver rich media ad units that integrate video into advertising banner and allow consumers to truly interact with the brand. 2009 may or may not be the "year of mobile advertising," but if this audience was any measure, it will surely be the year when mobile becomes an integral and necessary part of nearly every advertising spend. See more buzz from DMA Mobile Marketing Day on Twitter.