Chris Parandian, a fellow blogger and mobile enthusiast over at Mobile Diner, recently asked me to write a post about mobile marketing for his blog.  Even with the wave of good news from marketers like Porsche, who are having great success with their mobile marketing campaigns, there are still many companies struggling with whether or not to jump in, and how to get it right.  So while I don't profess to have all the answers, if you are debating the merits of mobile marketing, check out the first course over at the Diner.  If you are ready to jump in and want some tips, serve up the second course on getting your mobile marketing campaign right. I welcome your comments or ideas here on Crisp Voices or over at Mobile Diner.  As always, follow me on Twitter for more ideas.

On the way back from CTIA this year, I read a great blog post on MobileStance called Mobile Publishers Dance with the Ad Networks, which inherently summed up the complexities in the mobile advertising space. The beginning of any new market is exciting and even as fans of mobile advertising we can all agree there is some confusion and much waiting.

Crisp has always served the premium brand publisher to create an attractive and robust mobile presence that scales and easily integrates into an ad network of the publisher’s choice to help monetize. Pretty simple business proposition, right? If only. The industry as a whole lacks standards and I’m not just talking about banner sizes. For example, it would be great if everyone could synchronize the bot filter lists on a monthly basis so that we’re all working off the same page. But, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Market Complexities

I recently counted and found sixteen established, as well as newly funded ad networks, and I hear the song “Lost in the SuperMarket” by The Clash play in my head every time when I think about the abundance of choices. If I were a publisher, I assume I would like to sell some of my own inventory if I could, in which case I need only a basic ad server solution and then give the rest to an ad network to sell on my behalf. To a certain degree my choices are limited if I want to ad serve on-deck. Verizon and Sprint (and I’m sure AT&T will follow suit) require enablements with their selected partners. So, my choices then become about whether or not I want an ad network which will focus on premium placement or will serve the remnant market. In either case, no one company can do a great job of selling the inventory and who can blame them? Just like the MobileStance article suggests, it is truly almost impossible to get an easy and comprehensive view to enable a media buyer to buy effectively.

Technical and Other Complexities

Crisp has long been involved in ad network integrations and has integrated with most major ad serving players in this mobile space. People can dumb down the integration to dropping in a snippet of code or urls into our pages and while we had hoped integration could be that easy that isn’t always the case. [Caveat: we have great ad network partnerships but I would like to point out general problems that we see for the better of the whole market.] What are some of the potential snags?