In previous years I was most excited about the companies in the Search & Discovery category because I have purposely focused my career and this site on analyzing tools and technologies that assist us in seeking information/content relevant to our queries and in tune with our personal context. However, this time it was the progressive approaches to mobile advertising that grabbed my attention and won my respect.

(By way of background, last year the Meffys  for the Search category recognized Gracenote, specifically Gracenote’s Mobile Music Platform, as a path-breaking way to enjoy and discover music on our mobile phones. During the last Mobile World Congress, I connected with Jim Hollingsworth, Gracenote Senior VP, Sales & Marketing, on behalf of MSG and bnetTV for a demo of this super-cool service. The video interview pops up at random in the bnetTV jukebox in the sidebar, so I encourage you to tune in when it comes around. This sector profile from Mobile Entertainment is also a help if you need a primer on the Music ID market, where Gracenote and Shazam are top contenders.)

I cannot divulge the mobile advertising campaign shortlist, nor can I deep dive into individual brands/campaigns/agencies. (The short list is slated for release next week.) But I can highlight the larger mobile advertising trends and models that merit a closer look.

What is different this year? Brands and agencies are much higher on the learning curve because they have got past the hype to ask the key question:  What is the place of mobile in mobile advertising?

Is it ‘just another screen’? Or is it THE screen to rule them all? (More specifically, is it the 7^th Mass Media, as author and consultant Tomi Ahonen observes? Or is it the remote control to our lives as Alan Moore, likewise a renowned author and consultant, reminds us in his comprehensive white paper, The glittering allure of the mobile society? Or is it something else?

The jury is out on this one. (In fact, it remains a central question I ask brands, agencies, operators and enablers daily as part of the Mobile Advertising Research U.K. project). There are no easy answers, but I was truly encouraged by the number and variety of mobile advertising campaigns that successfully harnessed the unique characteristics of mobile to deliver a message that resonated with the target audience.

By way of background, mobile offers 7 unique benefits:

1)    Mobile phones are the first personal mass media channel

2)    Mobile phones are permanently carried.

3)    Mobile phone are always on

4)    Only mobile phones provide a built-in payment channel.

5)    Mobile phones are available at the point of creative impulse, enabling user-generated content.

6)    Mobile phones are the first media with near perfect audience data.

7)    Only mobile phones capture social context of media consumption.

Courtesy of  Tomi and Alan

Notice anything missing? No mention of technology and whiz-bang features. Indeed, as I have observed on MSG and in my series of mobile advertising white papers, the innovation is not in the advertising formats, but in how we use them.

Against this backdrop, the campaigns that impressed harnessed relatively simple technologies such as IVR, video calling, Bluetooth and 2D barcodes to deliver engaging campaigns to a mass-market of people (trying to get away from calling us consumers). All the better if the campaigns orchestrated these capabilities to deliver a 360-degree, cross-media campaign.

My take: Brands and agencies, through their submissions to the judging panel, proved that we have a lot of mileage left in technologies on the table. Looking at mobile in the broadest sense delivers brands (and us) the broadest benefits. A word at this juncture about the iPhone: Granted iPhone apps are cool, and have earned a top-notch spot in the marketing mix, but (siding again with this insightful observation by Crisp Wireless) we shouldn’t lose sight of other exciting opportunities and invest so much effort (and resources) on approaches that effectively focus on a niche demographic.

Another observation following today’s judging: Mobile operators also have the opportunity to (w)ring much more value out of mobile advertising. Ringback tones, in particular, may be poised for a comeback as an ingenious way to turn dead-time into real benefits for people (they get rewards) and brands (they boost awareness). This is advertising that says ‘I’m so enamored of the brand that I choose to pass it on as part of my own digital persona.‘ Talk about advertising with a personal touch (!) Other opportunities that deserve a closer look: Schemes that introduce advertising (with our permission, of course!) into our SMS exchanges (in-text), into content buying and sharing (in-app), or enable a two-way conversation (via IVR) with the brand when the moment is right.

If you are anxious (as I am!) to speak with the companies behind these great ideas, I encourage you to attend the Meffys. This year, the awards are returning to London on 23 June, and will be held at the stylish Floridita in the heart of Soho before an audience of 300+ senior-level mobile execs. The Meffys also mark the start of the Mobile Entertainment Market (MeM), the annual international conference for mobile content organized by the MEF.

With speakers from all the top mobile content, service providers, network operators and mobile media companies and attended by execs from key mobile companies around the globe, MeM is a conference/networking opportunity you won’t want to miss!

To purchase tickets for the Meffys Awards, go to: ITMevents@informa.com

To purchase a corporate branded table of 10 at the Meffys, please contact: renee.harris@informa.com

For innovative sponsorship opportunities to suit any budget, please contact: maureen@m-e-f.org

To register for MeM (a ticket to the Meffys is included in the price), go to: www.mem09.com/register

I encourage you to add the site to your list of must-read destinations. Why? Many of the business models and businesses driving revenues in the Internet are coming soon to mobile. (Search engines and collaborative software companies lead the pack of companies moving out of stealth mode to make some serious waves.) Amidst this change I know of no better source than EContent to stay that extra-important step ahead of the game.

(I will therefore give EContent a top-notch spot in the new-look Knowledge Sharing Zone I wrote about in this earlier post. The goal is to create a comprehensive list of valuable resources and destinations. If you would like your site or blog to be considered, please email it to me (peggy@msearchgroove.com).

As part of the recent Buying and Selling eContent conference, Michelle invited experts and contributors who judged the EContent 100, to give their views on the companies and trends that matter. Michelle reports that the series of video interviews  got good reviews, and the content in them was “extremely well received.”

In Search of Excellence in Content Commerce, Creation, Delivery and CMS

with Tony Byrne, Ron Miller, and Martin White

Cutting Edge Success Stories in Collaboration, Social Media, and Mobile Content

featuring David Meerman Scott, Steve Smith, and Peggy Anne Salz

The Best In Content Collections, DRM, and Search

with Theresa Regli, Steve Sieck, and Paula Hane

Tune in and enjoy!

By way of background, I was chosen to judge the categories Mobile Content, Search Engine & Technologies, Collaboration and Social Media.

My participation in the judging team (of 14 judges) allowed me to introduce my peers to mobile industry innovators high on my radar and emphasize the role of mobile-only search and personalization companies in the scheme of things. As a result, this year saw four new (mobile) additions to the EContent100: ChangingWorlds, CrispWireless JumpTap, MCN and SurfKitchen. They join other movers and shakers that made the list including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Twitter.

If you want to be considered for inclusion in the next EContent 100, contact me directly. I’m always open to new companies and great ideas!

In the meantime, I’ll be back on Thursday with a wrap-up of mobile content issues, challenges and trends from the European Mobile Media Conference.

This could be the week that Apple chalks up its one-billionth iPhone application download, according to this post at MoCoNews. Principal Correspondent Tricia Duryee does the math and figures “about 100 apps are being downloaded every second-that’s 6,000 every minute, 360,000 every hour and 8.6 million a day.”

It’s a flood of apps that pegs the needle, and no doubt plays in favor of companies that recognized the potential of the Apple App Store early on. I’m thinking here of mobile ad marketplace AdMob, which just launched Download Tracking for iPhone applications, allowing advertisers to accurately monitor App Store conversion rates, (detailed in a separate post based on an exclusive briefing with Russell Buckley, AdMob VP Global Alliances); and Taptu, a mobile search company gearing up to solve the search/discovery problem in the “Touch Web” and become a leading App Store mobile ad network in the process (an ambitious plan I discuss tomorrow’s exclusive Q&A with Andreas Bernstrom, Taptu COO).

The iPhone has helped to unleash a new interest among consumers in the mobile Web, but it nonetheless represents a tiny subset of the total mobile market. To date Apple has sold 17 million iPhones worldwide (a total Nokia generally tops in a fortnight). Garter puts it in perspective: It concludes that smartphones account for a small percentage of handsets (11-12 percent of all handsets sold globally), and iPhones account for an even smaller percentage of total smartphones (8.2 percent of handsets sold globally).

Another keys data point comes from comScore. It reports that more than half (54 percent) of app users are in households making at least $75,000 per year. If your end-goal is about reaching a mass-market audience with apps, ads or marketing campaigns, you’re well-advised to think beyond the iPhone.

Before jumping on the iPhone bandwagon, we should also take a closer look at new stats from AdMob and Bango, numbers that both confirm and deny iPhone’s leading position.

First, the monthly AdMob Mobile Metrics Report.

It lists the top smartphones in its network (market share AdMob calculates “based on the percentage of requests received by a particular handset” for the ads its serves), and found that smartphones generated a whopping 33 percent of worldwide traffic in February 2009, up 26 percent from six months ago. The real surprise: iPhone generated 33 percent of all smartphone traffic worldwide and half (!) of all traffic in the U.S.

Wow (!), iPhone is where the action is – or so it seems…

New data from Bango, a provider of mobile analytics solutions, tells a different story. The Bango Top 20 handset list (likewise based on February stats) puts the Nokia 3110c in the number one spot; iPhone comes in at number 24 (!). By way of background,Bango data looks at the activities of major brands and businesses as their consumers browse to mobile websites (measured by Bango Analytics) and buy mobile content and services (as measured by Bango Payment).

How can iPhone be both a leader and a laggard?

As this well-written/researched post from mobiThinking points out: It depends on where you sit. AdMob counts the number of mobile adverts it serves to different types of handsets, not unique handsets. “So, if iPhone users surf more (aren’t the majority of iPhone users on unlimited data plans?), then iPhones go to the top. So, from AdMob’s perspective iPhone is indeed the only game in town.

Bango, because it can identify and track unique visitors to its customers’ sites, has correctly identified a diverse range of handsets browsing the mobile Web. It’s a more representative sample of the devices surfing the mobile Web, with smartphones accounting for 30 percent of handsets in the top 20.

My take: The existence of two conflicting views of the handsets that matter most (to advertisers/publishers) underlines the importance of employing analytics tools that provide a more holistic view of what customers do and the devices they use. Focusing only on the iPhone or only mass-market handsets is a sure-fire way to short change yourself and your customers. It takes two, baby!

But it’s not just about big-picture anayltics; it’s about how brands and publishers approach the mobile Web.

As Boris Fridman, Crisp Wireless CEO, points out (via the company newsletter): ” For everyone thinking about investing in an iPhone app, I say, kudos – but don’t do it at the expense of a mobile website.  Our recent Crisp Wireless Index shows that iPhone usage for mobile browsing across our network has grown significantly from 9.1 percent to 22.98 percent.  However, Blackberry browsing still holds a significant share at 23.98%. Furthermore, recent studies from Pinch Media show that as novelty wears off, iPhone app usage drops significantly after 90 days. Mobile has become a crucial channel that requires a multi-pronged approach.  Our own Tom Limongello recently stated it best in his blog post pointing out how maintaining a mobile or iPhone-optimized website to complement iPhone apps is key to maintaining discoverability and addressing a broader market.” (More from Crisp Wireless  in an exclusive interview next week.)

I’m reminded here of an interesting debate during a recent industry conference, a discussion I would like to open up to MSG readers. Does the popularity of the iPhone among this demographic and the continued hype around the iPhone (one that sees many companies invest in the iPhone as their only mobile play) combine at some level to create a new kind of iPhone-only affluent mobile Internet (as opposed to a mass-market mobile Internet for the rest of us)? What do YOU think? What’s more, is there a danger this will increase fragmentation and move us one giant step away from the One Web vision Steve Bratt, Chief Executive Officer, World Wide Web Consortium, outlines in this excellent presentation?

Disclaimer: AdMob has been an MSG supporter; Bango is an MSG supporter.

I am proud that EContent named me to its panel of 14 judges to evaluate the 100+ candidates across the categories: classification & taxonomy; collaboration; content commerce; content creation, production, & digital publishing; content delivery; content management; content security; fee-based info services; intranets & portals; mobile content; search engines & technologies; and social media. (We spent one month in our judging wiki, reviewing previous list members and considering a slew of worthy new contenders. In addition to casting votes, we were involved in lively discussion and debate – a process that was daunting at times, but always incredibly rewarding.)

More importantly, my participation in the judging team allowed me to introduce my peers to mobile industry innovators high on my radar and emphasize the role of mobile-only search and personalization companies in the scheme of things.

Content may not be convergent yet, but the all-pervasive nature of digital content reinforces how important it is for organizations of all kinds to maximize this essential resource and, as my dear friend and mentor Tomi Ahonen would say, Think mobile.

Congratulations are in order for the four new (mobile) additions to the EContent100: ChangingWorlds, CrispWireless JumpTap, MCN and SurfKitchen. They join other movers and shakers that made the list including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Twitter. As today’s press releases show, SurfKitchen was recognized for its innovation and influence in mobile content and service delivery; MCN was commended for its position as a leader in federated mobile search and search merchandising; and JumpTap was honored for its advances in mobile search and advertising. (Click here for the full EContent list.)

A special thanks to Julie Ginches at JumpTap for not only issuing a press release, but also recognizing my involvement in the judging team. I would also like to extend my personal thanks to the dozens of mobile content and search companies that reached out to me directly and encourage you to keep the conversation going. I will be a member of the judging team for years to come – and will work with EContent in every way I can to ensure that those companies hard at work to make digital content work are recognized for their accomplishments.

On a personal note: I invite you to peruse my EContent columns (aptly titled Agile Minds) here. EContent has also promoted me to the position of contributing editor, so please reach out to me directly with your pitches. I am always open to good ideas! As I have said many times, my mission, and the purpose of MSG, is to identify and amplify voices the industry should hear.

Disclaimer: JumpTap has sponsored an MSG podcast series; MCN is an MSG supporter