Much of current mobile advertising takes the form of placing an ad banner on an operator portal.

According to ScreenTonic's Eisenstein, the next six months will be the mobile industry's most exciting, as companies juggle for prime placement on off-portal sites. "Advertisers have recognised the energy and opportunity and now they want to tap into it," she says.

But the real surprise is the breadth of sites competing quite successfully for ad budgets. A newcomer gaining traction is Crickee Technologies, a French start-up and ScreenTonic customer. It provides a free piece of messaging software that allows users to send and receive text messages via a data connection in much the same way that Skype allows users to make free calls via the fixed Internet. Crickee also expects to chalk up similar growth and anticipates 1m users by the end of this year.

More importantly, it offers advertisers the opportunity to bring their brand to a captive audience of 15-30-year-olds via a splash screen that appears every time users open the application. Coca-Cola, which came onboard in June, uses the splash screen to show users an animated image related to its World Cup campaign.

"It takes three seconds to launch the application and we see users opening the application several times a day," says Laurent Vermot-Gauchy, president and CEO of Crickee Technologies. "It's an opportunity for brands to communicate with users." Moving forward, Crickee will harness ScreenTonic's technology to provide brands with the tools to define "what ad is shown to whom and when".

Fortsetzung