Mobile advertising is taking off, but brands aren't gravitating only to operator portals. They're also keen to explore the growing number of off-portal sites that are flourishing just under the radar. These boast sharp focus, attractive demographics and loyal audiences.

Operator portals offer among the highest WAP page impressions - some 1.4bn in April 2006, according to the Mobile Data Association. Yet they're far from being the only game in town. A thriving subculture of off-portal sites, from niche media brands to mobile communities, is taking its place among mainstream destinations.

To date, much of the excitement has been about operator portals because most mobile advertisers have only just worked out how to fit such schemes into their overall marketing strategies. However, this is about to change as more companies explore a 'dual strategy' that encompasses a new breed of offportal destinations.

"Much of current mobile advertising takes the form of placing an ad banner on an operator portal. It's the most obvious focus and offers the biggest reach right now," says Jana Eisenstein, UK MD of ScreenTonic, a mobile advertising company that offers a complete solution spanning media sales, ad management and ad serving. But she also notes an increase in the number of advertisers looking elsewhe re. "Off-portal sites are starting to pop up that generate a lot of page impressions and that's appealing to an advertiser. For them, it's not a question of on-portal or off-portal, it's about how many users they can reach and who those users are."

The end-game is about matching the right marketing message to the right audience. Against this backdrop, many independent sites have the focus and reach to blow some of the more mainstream sites out of the water.

"It's the long tail of independent sites that do millions of page impressions a day, despite the fact that most mainstream marketing people have never heard of them," says Russell Buckley, director of European operations at Admob, a pay-per-click mobile advertising marketplace that brings advertisers together with independent mobile content publishers.

The long tail means popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability. It's the off-the-wall off-portal sites that bring together enthusiasts and eccentrics which may end up with the most eyeballs and most attractive inventory, not the major media brands and mobile content providers.

A prime example is Peperoni, Germany's mobile answer to MySpace. The site, which also borrows from the Ebay business model, brings together content and commerce, allowing users to share ideas and sell the items that matter most.

According to Marcus Ladwig, Peperoni's chief operating officer, the tight-knit mobile community counts over 9m page impressions a day, a number growing at a whopping 25% a month. But it's not just the numbers that are attracting the likes of Adidas worldwide and Disney in the Netherlands. "Our target group is mobile-savvy people between the ages of 19 and 29, and that's a demographic brands find very exciting," says Ladwig. "Mobile advertisers want to know who their audiences are, and we can tell them."

Peperoni is an Admob client, so it also benefits from technology that can target ads by region, manufacturer and platform. "A French user will see the ad in French. That functionality ensures the brands connect with the users on their terms," says Ladwig.

For Buckley, advertisers are attracted to two things: huge volumes of traffic and the chance to target focused and loyal audiences of hyperactive users. In the case of popular off-portal WAP sites, the advertiser can often have both. "There's a whole parallel universe of WAP sites that you won't have heard of unless you're a heavy WAP user," he says. It's precisely this group of hardcore users th at advertisers are eager to reach.

Against this backdrop, Admob counts 10m page impressions a day, a number that has doubled in the last month, according to Buckley. He also reports click-through rates of "as much as 7%" and an average click-through rate of 3-4%. "We double each month and advertising is obviously following that.

Text is unobtrusive enough to be accepted by users and there are clearly a lot more people clicking the se ads to find out more."

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. Cr ickee 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".

Knowing your customers

Last year, off-portal was a bit of strange backwater for brands, but now there's a torrent of interest, according to Anil Malhotra, senior VP of marketing and alliances at Bango, a company that has developed and deployed an open, global infrastructure platform allowing content providers to market, sell and deliver their products and services directly to the consumer.
Having introduced standardised forms of content access and payment, Bango is gearing up to introduce services that will help content companies monetise their traffic better. These include a "treasure trove" of data on where traffic is coming from, where the optimum conversion rates are and how much money is spent.

Plans are to provide these insights to Bango customers as part of the company's self-service online management system. "When we start adding these tools, customers [content providers] will be able to decide how they want to reinvest the money they're making and choose the off- portal destinations where it makes most sense for them to advertise," explains Malhotra. "Advertisers and content provide rs are asking what the best way they can spend their money is, and we can show them this based on our very detailed analytical data."

Such information would also raise the profile of independent WAP sites anxious to show they can offer good returns. "It's all about reach right now. If you can combine that with insights into consumer habits to deliver targeted advertising, that's fantastic," says Mark Slade, MD of 4th Screen Advertising, a mobile agency that brokers advertising and sponsorship contracts between brands, media buy ers and mobile operators.

In fact, Slade says, it's a lack of data that could be preventing many off-portal sites from achieving their full potential. Advertisers are keen to go after off-portal destinations, but on-portal sites often provide better profiling, and that's attractive to advertisers used to metrics from the likes of Nielsen. "There's a huge demand for off-portal inventory, but there's also a growing need to know who's getting the [marketing] message," he says.

4th Screen, perhaps best known for its work brokering a World Cup deal between Canon and mobile operator 3, is seeing a "new wave of off-portal advertising". As Slade sees it, the action is around mobile content companies pushing traffic to their own WAP sites by advertising on other non-competitive WAP sites.

These companies could engage in TV and press campaigns, or simply buy up expensive SMS lists, to get the message out. But WAP banners offer more for their money. "The ROI is higher if they [mobile content brands] can run banner campaigns in the off-portal landscape," says Slade. In view of this trend, 4th Screen is signing up WAP publishers to represent its mobile banner inventory and then sell and deliver banner ads to their sites using mobile ad serving technology.

The company is set to launch a product that can also target campaigns by handset type and functionality. "This is of interest to the mobile content players, such as Monster Mob, which want to know if the phone they're sending a banner to is compatible with the technology their content needs, such as Java or video," says Slade.

Sensing a business opportunity, MobVision, a UK-based company that produces, licenses and delivers mobile content to over 100 countries, is preparing to launch a WAP advertising solution.

"We've focused our pre-launch activities on getting publishers on board, and we now have publishers signed who can deliver well over 10m ad impressions a day," says Terry Jackson, MobVision CEO.

Notably, these page impressions come from a handful of WAP sites ranging from search engines to adult content.

Advertisers are also attracted to these independent WAP sites because they're often themselves channels to a variety of content and specific user segments. "Lots of these sites are part of a network and the entry-point to an even larger audience," says Jackson.

"These are small brands but they have a big impact, as they've built up their offers and their audiences over time," he adds. "Their traffic is dwarfing the major media brands."

Operators venture beyond the walled garden

It's the mass of off-portal users that mobile operators like Orange hope to reach by leaving large chinks in their walled-garden portals. Now Orange in the UK is following in the footsteps of Orange in France and working with ScreenTonic to monetise its on-portal traffic.

Advertisers can now post banners on the OrangeWorld portal. However, this is just one of several initiatives Orange has on its roadmap for the next 18 months. "We're also going to work to make sure our customers can benefit from seeing what's off-portal, look at those ads, and also give those advertisers an opportunity to reach our customers in a more targeted, more immediate and more interactive way," says third-party services manager Steve Ricketts.

In addition, Orange has purposely improved its own functionality on the portal to deliver better search results. "We've seen an 80% increase in the number of searches by users because the results coming back are much better," says Ricketts. Brands also benefit from this because Orange search encourages subscribers to explore content across both the operator portal and the wider mobile Internet.

Next on Orange's agenda is sponsored search, to allow companies to bid for keywords and secure a place for their destination among search results. "It's all about encouraging users to get out there [on the mobile Internet] and find the sites that match their needs," says Ricketts.

By taking the position of a broker in this ecosystem, Orange hopes to give advertisers an indication of demographics and greater insight into what users look for on the mobile Internet.