There are dozens of loan companies in Britain, but there is a new one that caught our attention. Their characteristics made us write this entry. Why is it so special?

Firstly, the loans it offers have to be requested via text SMS. TxtLoan is a hi-tech version of the “payday loan” providers that offer their services on Britain’s streets.

Secondly, TxtLoan promises it can get the money into people’s bank accounts within minutes, but it charges an APR of 994% for borrowing £100 over seven days! Besides, additional costs can quickly rise if the borrower doesn’t repay within one week.

The company says it is a responsible lender and its customer selection process is stringent: only about 10%-15% of people who apply will get a loan. It has already helped supermarket shoppers who discovered they were out of cash just at the checkout point, or people with unexpected costs, such as urgent car repairs.

Even so, at We Love Mobile we think the interest rates they offer are extortionate and they take advantage of users’ urgent necessities. Consumers could demand cheaper loans or use their credit cards to get the money they need.

We think there are better mobile services to be offered, and this kind of loan is not on our future business plan! We want users to trust mobile and the possibilities it provides, not think of it as another channel for fleecing consumers.

Sony launched a video mobile campaign in India to promote its HDTVs last month. Despite achieving more than 300,000 downloads in 10 days and getting a 43 percent conversion rate, we cannot avoid thinking that the campaign strategy could have been more adapted to the Indian mobile landscape.

The campaign results are not bad, but in a country with a population of approximately 1.17 billion people, targeting just 5 million people seems not enough. While most of the mobile users in India have standard devices, the campaign featured a mobile website where the audience could download free videos about fashion and Bollywood content.

The WAP site was promoted through WAP banners and links on various mobile Internet pages, followed by an SMS campaign. Perhaps this strategy would have been more efficient in a different country, but India doesn’t have a wide 3G mobile market.

In order to ensure that everybody got the best video quality, 3^rd Space used its platform automatically optimized and a total of 558 different mobiles were targeted.

Our say:

The technology used for this campaign supported every handset, no software downloads were required and the content chosen fitted the audience like a glove. However, we believe that Sony could have got better results by launching a mobile campaign that would reach a wider part of the Indian society.

According to Warwick Hill, CEO of 3rd Space London, “Sony BRAVIA’s strategy is to reinforce brand, increase sales and achieve a better ROI than traditional print, media, Internet and banner ads used by many advertising agencies”

Perhaps the ROI achieved with this video mobile campaign has been better than having used ATL ads, but probably it could have been even better if Sony BRAVIA had looked to provide elegantly degraded branded content for those who do not have 3G mobiles. Doing so, Sony would get valuable campaign experience and would provide a richer feedback to the users.

There was quite a buzz today when the Google Admob takeover was announced. Perhaps nobody in the mobile ad industry was that surprised; there has been an acknowledgement that Admob were building up to be taken over, but the news made the wider advertising and marketing community sit up and listen.  By close of play today I had been pinged by a number of people working in digital, so the ripples of Google’s purchase were definitely being felt beyond the mobile inner circle.

This was a significant purchase, not just because of the $750m Google paid, but because of what it signalled.

Firstly, it was a clear sign that Google thinks mobile advertising is going to be seriously important. No surprises there for anybody in the inner circle. For us, mobile advertising seems obvious and inevitable. But Google’s faith in the industry gives this instant credibility. When Google speaks, people listen, so the act itself was a significant boost to mobile advertising’s profile and stature.

Are some going to dismiss this as a reckless gamble? No, I don’t think anybody is going to seriously suggest that Google is taking a three-quarter-billion-dollar risk as we creep out of a global recession. Compared to Youtube, Google’s last significant purchase, this is a fully functioning commercially focussed network, not a bunch of teenagers posting hooky videos.

Secondly, it also demonstrates that mobile specialists have a value. Google has been dabbling in mobile advertising for a few years; they have their own mobile search, banner and in-app ad networks and their own mobile analytics. None of these, however, can be described as ‘best of breed’. They are all let down by a lack of mobile magic dust.  Admob, however, are innovators in the space. Their platform is supremely easy to use, and their products have been slowly but surely evolving from text links to interactive banners to in app adverts.

Thirdly, and perhaps counter-intuitively, it may point to increased competition and innovation in the industry in the short term. The purchase signals Google’s intention to land-grab from Apple - not only in the mobile OS market, but also in the commercialisation of mobile content and activity. It is no coincidence that Admob’s biggest area of growth over the last year or so has been in iPhone targetted advertising and many free Apple applications have integrated Admob.  Apple is unlikely to be able to shut out Google from its apps, nor cast a shadow over Android for much longer, so it will have to seriously innovate and/or allow others into the space to fend off the pretender to the smart-phone throne.

Longer term? Well, banner advertising in mobile is arguably not the be all and end all. Advertising on this most intimate of devices is surely going to become more aligned to personal and social behaviour. Googlemob’s brand of low CTR display ads and its relatively un-targeted long-tail network, while large and omnipresent, is just the beginning.

Admob have just announced they are to be bought by google, this e-mail came to Admob account users today from Omar, Admob CEO.

Google to Acquire AdMob

November 2009

Today we announced that AdMob has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $750 million. We are extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our advertisers.

AdMob’s people, products and tools will continue to work to deliver successful campaigns for you – no interruptions. Our product and engineering teams will keep building great products for our customers. Our business development team will keep working to maximize ad revenue for the more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications that make up AdMob’s publisher network.

After our deal closes, AdMob will work with Google to accelerate the pace of innovation in mobile and do an even better job for you. We believe this deal will benefit our advertisers by:

*Increasing our investment in building innovative and engaging ad units across platforms and to further improve targeting and tracking.

*Building even more powerful relevance and optimization capabilities.

*Improving the already high level of service and support we deliver to our advertisers.

You can read more about this deal at www.admob.com/google.

Omar

I’m in Oman at the moment looking at the mobile marketing and advertising landscape. I have been meeting some really interesting people, with differing views on what will and won’t work in this country. It’s very clear to me that this market has bundles of opportunities;

Two pieces today on Applications. The first is really a pointer to a great article written by James over at M-Jelly on how to use SEO and other techniques to make your iPhone app stand out in an increasingly crowded App Store environment. Some solid advice from James for anyone looking to increase the visibilty of an application. Go check it our at:

http://blog.mjelly.com/2009/10/iphone-appstore-seo.html

Closer to home, I recently had a piece published by Point Zero magazine on whether there is a future in ad-funded applications. You can read it online here:

http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/691223a7#/691223a7/30

Or download the PDF here;

http://www.box.net/shared/4bviuj2tzj

Thought you mobile fanatics out there might be interested in a programme going out on Monday 5th September on BBC Four at 9pm as part of their ‘Electric Revolution’ series. It’s called The Life and Death of a Mobile Phone. Programme link and blurb below. I have to declare an interest, it features a cameo from We Love Mobile’s own Ben Scott-Robinson!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n58ml

Synopsis

Through the life cycle of one mobile phone, this documentary investigates the million and one ways in which the mobile has made itself indispensable to modern life.

One in every two human beings has a mobile, and this inanimate lump of plastic and minerals is made privy to people’s innermost secrets - conversations with friends, lovers and family. It holds family photos, plays favourite music and yet, as an instrument of communication, it has its paradoxes. People are dumped by text, some pretend to be deep in a telephone conversation to avoid speaking to real people and others are affronted when their bellowed conversations on public transport are overheard.

Then, at the end of a strangely intimate relationship, it becomes one of the one billion phones discarded every year - reconditioned for re-use or smelted down for the precious metals it contains.

Sorry for those outside the UK, as you are unlikely to be able to access the programme right now. For those in the UK not able to view it tonight, I imagine it will be available on i-Player.

Not a mobile thingy I suppose, but still quite interesting.

Today I got my first piece of Twitter spam. A girl whom I’d never heard of starting following me. Now I think it’s fair to say I know or know of most of the people who follow me - it’s a pretty small industry. So I clicked through to read one of her tweets, got a slightly surreal but not implausible message, and a link. Click link. Get porn.

Wow. I then looked up Twitter spam, and I can see that it is a problem. There are loads of sites out there trying to get it stopped. I just don’t use Twitter enough, I suppose. But I’ve never heard anybody else talking about it. Does this mean that people don’t even notice when malevolent strangers are asking to become their friends? Does this mean that they don’t know who is following what they do?

The trouble is, being a follower on Twitter has the potential to be such an effective tool for profiling. Yes you have to look quite hard to become followers in the first place, and then you have to do some trawling to work out what people are in to etc, but with the right datamining and searches of Twitter you could get a reasonable cross section of the public to reveal just about everything that interests them, allowing for some pretty precise demographics.

And it’s all just out there, waiting for the right devious mind to write the software to be able to read it. If they haven’t already.

If you include the image sites where people put up everything that interests them, then you could find out employment details, holiday preferences, when people go to the loo, their dog’s name, when they are out…

In fact, never mind illicit consumer data mining, what about burglars?

I don’t know, Si goes away on holiday for a week to France… and then this arrives.

You have to wonder, what has he been up to on his sojourn?

Bx

Well, clean up may be a little OTT, but the Mobile Marketing Forum last week was a good couple of days for us.

Firstly, I got a chance to see the new reality of mobile marketing and advertising. Coke, BMW and P&G rolled into town to show off the fact that mobile is not just an interesting idea, but a real-life channel, with tangible impact on the bottom line. It sent a shiver down the spine of all the agencies there to see that… well… we really have arrived.

This was backed up by Elvin from Turkcell, who did a fine job of showing up some of the big operators with their forward-thinking, innovative work.

We had our chance to talk for a bit on the realities of mobile marketing, especially the attitude and opinions of some advertising agencies to the channel.

Next there was some friendly banter with old chum Russell Buckley on the relative merits of iPhone. Then Smaato got us all trashed at a super cool Berlin venue. Things got a bit hazy at that point…

Then, on day two, Paul Berney announced the results of the text in competition for the best presentation… and we won!

What a feeling - our humble little outfit considered above the biggest names in the business, in this respect anyway.

So, if you are bored, and need to fill half an hour, contact the We Love Mobile performing monkey hotline and I’ll come round and relive that glorious glimpse of fame…

Call 07890412072, ask for Ben, bring bananas.