I was talking to Lehmbeck about mobile search trends and what kinds of consumer response he was seeing to various campaigns. Lehmbeck gave me some unpublished, internal data that I’m now sharing in this post. He said that mobile paid search “looks like much like search advertising did in 2001.”

15 to 25 Percent Mobile Paid Search Traffic

Between 15 percent and 25 percent of paid search traffic is now coming from mobile devices according to Lehmbeck. He adds however, “In local-heavy categories, such as dining, auto services and entertainment this number jumps to 50 percent or more.” He says that with the rise of smartphones “consumer engagement [with mobile search] has gone through the roof.”

Lehmbeck points out that online-only retailers are also starting to use mobile to nab in-store shoppers. “As mobile queries grow and these brands start to create highly optimized mobile experiences, this trend will only continue.” Lehmbeck told me that traffic to e-commerce sites via mobile is somewhat lower than the average (5 percent to 15 percent) but that some e-commerce sellers are seeing a “great ROAS” (return on ad spent).

Much “More Attuned to Location” in Ad Copy

Mobile consumers are “much more attuned to location in ad copy” than online search users according to Lehmbeck. “When a user searches with implied local intent, ads that leverage geographic indication tend to perform better.” Searches like “garden supplies” or “furniture store” are in this category.

Explained Lehmbeck, “We have seen some very strong results for ads that reference location or local offers, especially those that do it in an intelligent way (e.g. “Your Garden Superstore – Take 20% Off in Our Los Angeles Locations This Weekend” or “Locate Your New Sofa – Over 15 Furniture Galleries in Los Angeles to Serve You”).” These ads see 50 percent greater engagement than ads do not indicate where to buy or what specific offers are available in their area.”

Offline Conversions Boost Sales 5 to 10X

I’ve written in the past about the offline impact of paid search. It’s rarely tracked and so the true ROI of many campaigns is probably quite a bit higher than what is being calculated. Lehmbeck told me, “In some rare but very interesting cases [paid search marketers] are tracking it down to the offer level in conjunction with our platform and they have seen 5 – 10X sales when accounting for in-store conversions.”

Lembeck counsels marketers to “build out better mobile experiences and get a deeper sense of what the right metrics are for understanding the true ROI of mobile ad spend.” Indeed, recent data from Marin Software showed higher CTRs for smartphones but much lower conversions than for PC search campaigns. However that’s likely because mobile search conversions weren’t being tracked offline.

DataPop CEO Jason Lehmbeck will be presenting on the iConvert panel at SMX Advanced in Seattle next month.

Between iOS and Android there are more than 900,000 apps. App discovery is now a major problem for both consumers and developers — hence the new advertising option on Appolicious. Chomp was planning to introduce a similar capability and then was bought by Apple. Appolicious is currently the only app engine or marketplace where developers can bid for placement in search results.

Developers can bid for placement by keyword and by broad match or exact match. It works like a simplified version of AdWords. There’s no guidance currently about bid amounts, but it’s a relative bargain at this early stage.

A considerable amount of mobile display advertising these days is devoted to promoting app downloads. Appolicious CEO Karl Stillner contends the difference between those broadly distributed mobile display ads and paid-search ads on Appolicious is that users on his site are much more targeted prospects.

Appolicious also has an expanding network of partners that include Best Buy and Samsung. Eventually the paid-search app ads will make their way to the company’s partner network.

Mobile marketing must seem that way to a lot of companies, and as a result, far too many of them are sitting on the sidelines. Fortunately, there are a few vendors out there offering a shortcut to the mobile Web:  a turnkey publishing platform that allows a marketer to quickly deploy mobile landing pages.

The question is: how effective are these pages in the context of mobile search?

The Case For Mobile Landing Pages

Turnkey landing pages are usually considered because of special circumstance:

• Budget. When most dollars get spent to support desktop sites, the remainder may not actually be enough to support a full-blown mobile effort.
• Direct response campaigns. Sometimes a media campaign concept drives the need for mobile landing pages to catch the resulting traffic. QR codes at trade show booths, mobile offers sent via text, and even plain-old PPC ads can drive the need for a quickly-built mobile site.

The systems available to deploy mobile landing pages change every month. So rather than single-out a single platform and dissect its features, let’s look at the factors you’ll want to keep in mind when evaluating and using these services.

Laying A Foundation

The first thing you’ll want to investigate is whether or not these landing pages can be read by a search engine. Here are a few features to look at closely:

• Dynamic Pages. Some turnkey systems use dynamic pages to quickly create pages that can respond to campaigns or even individual ads. Dynamic pages include lots of parameters in their URLs, and can cause problems for mobile search, just as they do in the desktop world.
• On-Page Coding. Mobile landing pages sometimes use special coding to create a seamless app-like experience. I’ve talked about JQuery Mobile in the past, and there are other frameworks such as XUI, JQTouch, not to mention plain-vanilla JavaScript. These schemes don’t get a 100% thumbs-up or thumbs-down – it depends on how they are used. The key is to ensure that your landing pages are actually composed of distinct pages, instead of a single downloadable page with a chameleon-like ability to alter its content.
• Navigation. If your turnkey site is built to catch campaign traffic, it may just be a collection of free-standing landing pages, with links to connect them to each other. If that’s the case, you won’t benefit from the SEO support these pages would lend to each other. Furthermore, without nav links, you may lose a connection back to the home page, which typically has the strongest SEO scoring.
• Flash. Flash is not usually employed on these sites (thank you Steve Jobs) so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Getting There From Here

Looking at all the points above, you might get the impression that optimizing your mobile landing pages will be an end in itself. And it partially is: you’ll be living with them for a while, so it’s worthwhile to see what sort of SEO performance can be extracted from it.

But you can also take a broader view. If the turnkey site and its campaigns are successful, it’s likely that more mobile projects will follow, including the creation of a more comprehensive “official” mobile website.

With that in mind, your turnkey site can be considered a precursor, one that can be used to lay a foundation for the construction of a future brand presence.

A bit of preparation can help to make that happen:

• Domain Name.  Try to anticipate the URL that will be used for your future mobile site. If you can start using that URL today, you’ll create a footprint that will help search engines discover your next website more quickly. Conversely, you should talk to your vendor if they suggest a URL based on *their* domain name, because you may lose access to it when you transition to your next mobile website.
• Recyclable URLs. What works at the site level also works at the page level. Choosing locations for landing pages that will echo the page locations of a future website will also help smooth the transition. Granted, it’s hard to predict what your future site will look like, but for basic pages like “About Us” or pages promoting on your bread-and-butter product lines, some predictions can be made.

Your short-term mobile landing pages (left) may not have as much content as your future mobile website (right.) But the more they resemble each other in structure, the better your mobile SEO will be down the road.

Altogether, mobile landing pages are a great tactic for getting yourself into the mobile space. And with advance planning, that short-term success can be leveraged into an asset that can feed into successive projects, creating a win-win for both mobile search and your time-to-market.

Mobile by itself, excluding tablets, is about 10 percent of search impressions. Tablets account for almost 2% of all paid search impressions and roughly 14% of all mobile impressions. Thus mobile + tablets = 12 percent of overall paid search impressions.

Here are some other findings from Performics’ data dive:

• Mobile clicks represent 11.9% of all paid search clicks (June). Tablets account for  13.3% of all mobile clicks.
• CTR: Mobile and tablet devices have caught up in the past two months with the PC for CTR. (However other data show higher mobile CTRs vs. PC)
• PPC: “Mobile and tablet[s] . . . continue to track significantly below desktops”

There’s an interesting discussion of dayparting, comparing mobile, PC and tablet usage:

Initial tablet search behavior by time of day closely resembles existing mobile habits—usage peaks during off-work hours.  While PC searches peak between the hours of 9AM and 5PM, mobile and tablet usage peaks between the hours of 5PM and 10PM.  However, while mobile devices also see moderately strong search usage between the hours of 11AM and 5PM, tablet devices are almost exclusively restricted to the evening period.

Tablets and mobile device usage complement PC search according to Performics. However tablets “are almost exclusively restricted to the evening period.” There are other data that argue, not necessarily directly contradicting Performics, that tablets cannibalize PC usage.

To summarize, then, Performics says that mobile volumes and CTR are growing, while PPC prices are below desktop levels. This suggests a “buying opportunity” to me.

Mobile attribution is key to helping validate the channel and monetizing the high quality leads it delivers.

Mobile Searchers Need It Today

Consider the mobile searcher profile. Leads that come from a mobile search program are not only more likely to buy, but will often times convert to a customer within hours.

According to Google’s stats, shared at a recent Mobile Marketing Association forum and reported on SEL by Greg Sterling earlier this month:

• 58% of mobile users are on the mobile web at least once a day
• 90% of mobile users search/lookup local information
• 87% of local mobile searchers take action from their search

Mobile search is locally focused and all about instant gratification as searchers are typically looking for something that they need the same day.

Consider your own habits: on a weekend day trip, you might make plans on the way there, searching for a place to stop for lunch and calling about a kids menu and reservations, calling about the hours of a special exhibit for a local museum or calling a couple hotels to find out about availability when you decide to stay the night.

Calls Are Top Mobile Performance Metric

Smartphones are transforming the search landscape, and calls are the de facto performance metric as the device’s primary use is for voice service. Our internal data reveals that more than half of all calls driven by local search ads are made from mobile phones – this is nearly double the number from a year ago.

Consumers calling from their mobile phones stay on the phone with businesses longer (more than three minutes per call) and longer call durations indicate a greater propensity to buy/convert. While mobile calls may be longer because there is less robust information available on mobile websites and apps, mobile consumers are closer to the point of purchase.

Mobile Leads Command Higher Monetization Value

The recent BIA/Kelsey’s mobile outlook forecasts that mobile ad spending will grow to $2.8 billion in 2015 with locally-targeted ads comprising 70 percent of that value. As the mobile growth rate is skyrocketing, I expect the 2015 figure will explode.

Mobile leads are truly ready to buy, so mobile ad networks and other mobile ad providers can command a higher price for mobile calls in a pay for performance-based model. And, while clicks are still a standard mobile metric, measuring calls reveals greater consumer insights and is a way to truly evaluate the monetization potential of newer mobile properties—including appropriate verticals, pricing of calls, and optimization opportunities.

The lead quality from mobile callers is so strong that mobile ad providers can price calls (in a pay for performance model) at almost twice the amount of SEM-driven calls. While the price differential in most cases is warranted, mobile programs priced too high could discourage advertisers. So it is crucial to evaluate caller data and compare with other media to help appropriately price calls.

Mobile Requires Unique Approach

Like any media, mobile has its own unique profile. So best practices from online search or other channels shouldn’t be transferred without testing first.

As an example, mobile searchers are more likely to have a location qualifier so the keywords used to search should be different as well. Knowing how mobile callers arrived at an advertiser, listing or phone number and optimizing for more of those callers is key.

Without a doubt, mobile monetization depends on appropriate attribution. This includes tracking calls and providing drill down analysis of call response data – from total call volumes to caller demographics to call durations.

Whether you are an advertiser or advertising provider, if you don’t have a mobile program, you are leaving money on the table. Harness the power of instant gratification by measuring and monetizing your mobile efforts.

I spent the past couple of days at Borrell Associates Local Online Advertising Conference in New York City. This event was primarily focused on strategies and tactics that executives from traditional media companies should be looking at to survive and thrive in the increasingly competitive “local” space—but offered some interesting insights for all online marketers, old and new, small and large alike.

So, what’s happening?

First, mobile advertising has not just finally “arrived”—it is growing at comparable rates to the adoption of smart phones and pads. We’re talking at least doubling every year for the next five years, with mobile actually becoming the dominant mode of online advertising by 2015. Put another way, that means mobile ads will grow from about a 15% share today to more than 60% in 2015, according to Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates.

Hype? I don’t think so. Borrell has a consistent track record of being right on trends—and being conservative, relative to other market researchers.

Second, the concept of “local” as a meaningful way to segment audiences is gradually becoming obsolete, as mobile devices, which make location implicit in all online activities, have nudged personal computers onto the same track to oblivion as microcomputers and mainframes, back when the PC “revolution” swept the older technology away.

And finally, the catastrophic losses experienced by traditional media may have—at last!—plateaued, as the so-called “dinosaurs” (newspapers, radio and television and other offline media) have finally stopped panicking and are experimenting with innovative models that have not only stanched the revenue bleeding but are also back to doing what they always did—finding a sustainable revenue stream to support quality journalism and content creation.

The bad news: According to keynote speaker, “disruption” expert and Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen, only about 10% or so of the incumbents will actually survive to thrive in the new era. According to his research, all survivors share two traits, without exception:

First, they create a separate operating division that’s charged with creating a new business model that’s totally free of interference from the legacy business. This is true across the board—while it’s fine for the new unit to cherry-pick some of the best ideas of the legacy businesses, there must be no interference or blending of staffs (e.g. – no creating “synergies”). No influence (or even communication) from the established business over the strategy and tactics of the new business unit.

Second, and most important, the new business unit must be charged with the mission of killing the old. This is a ruthless and (from a Harvard Business School standpoint, anyway), counterintuitive strategy, but Christensen says his research over decades is unambiguous. Again, without exception, this is the only way established businesses have been able to innovate, survive and thrive.

Christensen was a truly motivational speaker. He himself is a survivor, having just returned to public speaking after battling cancer, recovering from a heart attack and re-learning to speak after suffering a stroke that savaged the language areas of his brain. He encouraged the audience to “fill in the blanks” whenever he grasped for a word his brain “knew,” but he couldn’t access to pronounce. In a sense, he was a living embodiment of how a famously successful force of nature must struggle to face new realities and new challenges when the “operating environment” suddenly, and disruptively, changes. For more on Christensen and how he’s confronting his challenges, see the current cover story of Forbes.

All of the speakers from traditional media at the conference claimed that they were endorsing and embracing the principles Christiansen was espousing. However, a number of knowledgeable attendees, including Search Engine Land’s local guru Greg Sterling expressed skepticism. Having worked for years as a management consultant, I share Greg’s skepticism. Change is difficult, and singing the praises of the “new way” is far easier than making the difficult decisions to change and innovate to take advantage of new realities.

But for the first time in my experience, I saw people from “dying” industries genuinely excited about the future, and for the roles they could play in participating in the future, rather than whining about how “amateurs” like Huffington Post and AOL’s Patch were “compromising” their ideals and dragging the notion of quality content creation into the gutter. So color me skeptical, but optimistic.

And to me, despite years of asking “are we here yet,” I believe the stats on the mobile ad marketplace. We are “here,” and we’re continuing to move forward, at a pace that’s likely to be as rapid as the adoption of the iPhone and iPad.

Bottom line: Regardless of where traditional media goes, search marketers should be looking very carefully at the mobile space and making moves to create a strong presence on mobile devices, before competition gets intense. It’s still a relatively small market, but is poised to be the next big wave in online marketing.

We believe Apple could utilize data unavailable to Google, data generated by the company’s App Store, to create a mobile centric search engine, which would be a unique offering to Google’s search engine.

An iPhone specific search engine could be a difficult undertaking, but we feel Apple could make a minor acquisition of a search company that has built a web index, like a Cuil, and utilize the index as the base for building its own engine.

We believe the odds of Apple developing a search engine in the next five years are 70%. One hurdle for Apple in developing its own search engine would be generating enough advertiser interest to form a competitive marketplace; however, we believe the rationale for an Apple search product is to protect data rather than generate profit.

The key idea here, according to Munster, is defensive: “we believe the rationale for an Apple search product is to protect data rather than generate profit.” An article in eWeek elaborates the thinking further:

Munster said protecting valuable consumer data and not profit would be the point for Apple’s mobile search engine.

“The data generated on the iPhone OS platform must become an increasing priority for Apple and we believe the company has the resources to develop its own products in both maps and search in the next five years,” Munster said.

He added that Apple could entice enough major advertisers and local resellers like ReachLocal to use the Apple search platform to make a meaningful market place and potentially operate a search product at break even.

Danny Sullivan in a recent column for AdAge argues that Apple is unlikely to develop its own search engine:

[B]uilding a search engine is hard. Damn hard. Just ask Microsoft, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build its own and millions more to market it. Even then, Bing has barely made a dent against Google. It was no iPhone-like product that revolutionized an existing market.

But couldn’t Jobs work some of his magic and transform search in a way that would cause people to flock to an Apple search engine? I doubt it. When you ask people what they most want in search, it’s relevancy and speed. A pretty user interface is far down the list. And developing a relevant search engine is incredibly hard. You need many engineers skilled in search, which Google and Microsoft are already fighting over. You need to pull back billions of pages. You need lots of data centers for blazing speed.

An easier way forward would be to buy someone else’s technology and improve it. Yahoo would have been a great fit — but Yahoo’s going to Microsoft now. There’s Ask, but it has lost talent over the years. Building from scratch isn’t impossible. But by the time you build your search engine to today’s levels, your competitors have probably moved far past you.

I agree with this logic; building a competitive search engine is very expensive and then there is the consumer-behavior mountain to climb. I suppose it’s not entirely out of the question if Apple agrees with Munster that its data need to be shielded from Google’s view. (Google will have several years worth of that data by the time Apple does anything, so it might all be moot.)

Though I believe it’s extremely unlikely that Apple will build its own search engine, few would have predicted Apple getting into the mobile advertising business with its Quttro acquisition.

Danny initiated the compressed session by asking the time-honored question about local online marketing and small business: “Why aren’t local businesses getting it?” Interestingly most of the panelists disagreed with that characterization.

John Hanke: “I feel like the stampede has started.” He added that “several million business” have used the local business center and later referenced Google’s simplified ads as directed toward small businesses.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas was more tempered: “It’s definitely accelerating but it’s still early.” He argued that there are millions and millions of local businesses in the US and this is a vast opportunity that remains largely untapped. (It’s really not that early in this discussion of small business and online marketing, but years from now 2009-2010 may be seen as the beginning of a new phase in the market.)

Yahoo’s Tom Wailes agreed with the notion that small business usage of online marketing is gaining momentum. However, he said that business owners are so busy and time starved, they need to see the ROI very directly. He argued that would be more apparent if online marketing were more directly tied in to offline sales and the POS system.

Reviews and local:

Danny then shifted to the topic of reviews, their integrity and how these sites protected against false or fraudulent reviews.

Dylan Swift discussed how Yelp protects the integrity of its reviews and described the Yelp algorithm and the site’s review filtering process. (This has been one of the things that has driven confusion and in some cases anger among some local businesses who don’t understand it. More recently Yelp has made a much bigger effort towards transparency in this process.)

John Hanke downplayed the danger of “scam reviews.” His response was that publishers should “raise the level of overall participation” rather than worry about filtering out negative reviews in particular. His view was that people can relatively easily spot fake reviews.

Tom Wailes advocated that “Reviews are good but they don’t go far enough in many cases.” He said that he sees recommendations as a complement or even successor to reviews.

John Hanke then added that he believed some of the new, simplified “dashboards” (analytics) being offered to small businesses were very beneficial and would help them see the value of online much more explicitly.

Street-level imagery:

John Hanke said he believed that Street View is “critical to local search.” Part of this is because of the images but part of it has to do with data collection. Said Hanke, Street View offers “ground truth about businesses: does it exist, where is it located?” This new method of data collection, he argued, contributes to a very precise local database.

Microsoft’s Blaise Agüera y Arcas agreed and lauded Google “for making investments before many of the use cases were obvious.” He then discussed the imagery as a “canvass” or the basis for layers and layers of data on top of that basic imagery. It also paves the way for augmented reality in maps (Bing Map Apps).

Dylan Swift said that Yelp focuses on photos inside businesses. He said that after Yelp added mobile check-ins to its new iPhone app, there was a huge increase in the number of images being uploaded by users.

Danny then raised the privacy question with street-level photography.

John Hanke argued that the genie is out of the bottle and this imagery is here to stay.

Blaise cited differing privacy laws in various countries and argued that some of them didn’t make sense. Everyone agreed with the “face blurring” that’s going on however.

On how mobile is changing local:

Tom Wailes asserted that it’s “fairly obvious how it’s changing local — convenience.” He argued that “Simpler local tasks are migrating aggressively to mobile.”

Dylan Swift discussed the immediacy of the user need in mobile — “tell me what’s good within 10 feet of where I’m standing right now” — and discussed the Yelp Monocle augmented reality tool.

Blaise: “Mobile is local; it’s really hard to draw the distinction. On the PC one could argue that maps is a vertical. On the mobile device maps isn’t a vertical. The entire context for everything that I do is about me and my location . . . often on foot.” He added that “spatial accuracy is very important.”

Hanke said he was “fascinated by mobile-local-social dynamics” and cited Foursquare as a exemplar of that development. “We’ve only begun the potential there.” Mobile and local “are wedded” at this point.

Danny then asked provocatively, “Will you be overtaken by the new check-in services?”

Dylan Swift jumped in, “Check-ins are a feature.” He said they “tie in nicely with the CRM aspects of our site.” Check-ins help local businesses see who their most loyal customers are.

Blaise: “We see ourselves as an ecosystem player; I get excited not distraught by what I’m seeing. I’m a big fan of Foursquare.”

Tom Wailes: “I’m very excited seeing these check in players. It’s very early too.” He said it’s hard to predict when and if the phenomenon will migrate to a mass audience. He said that Yahoo was a potential partner, rather than being threatened. He explained that Yahoo research has shown “Average users aren’t aware of this stuff yet,” adding that it will be “interesting to see how this evolves as it gets adopted by a mass audience.”

Hanke agreed: “We’re excited to work with these companies . . . We want to build inventory of great locally relevant ads. Previously the inventory wasn’t there.” He discusses some of the new simple ad products for local businesses from Google.

Tom Wailes: “Even users who haven’t heard of these services, they like the functionality especially coupons/discounts.”

Finally local and social:

Dylan Swift: “We’re at the early stages. This [local] is an obvious place for collaborative filtering to help get the most relevant recommendations to you.”

Blaise: “I want help to find where people like me go to eat. I wouldn’t trust any algorithm to know what I like; neither would I trust reviews in their current form.”

Tom Wailes: “Social and local . . . It’s about how to connect people to those who they can trust.”

Hanke: “Social is really important; there’s going to be more from Google on social and local.” He added that there’s a need to make features and functionality simple. “Most features are used by less than 5 percent of our users and we wind up throwing them away. We need more innovation around simple UIs coupled with great data.”

If that sounds familiar you are one of the growing number of people using/playing Foursquare, a mobile app that uses the location of your mobile device to encourage users to “check in” wherever they might be in exchange for points and recognition like becoming the Mayor of McDonald’s, or wherever else you might happen to be. Yelp recently launched a similar feature and GoWalla provides its own spin on this conceit. So more people are checking out checking in. You might wonder, what does all this have to do with local search?

There’s this thing called Second Life. It’s been around for a while and every year hundreds of thousands of people sign up to create virtual selves that interact in virtual worlds with other virtual people and use virtual money to buy virtual goods. That virtual money is of course paid for with non-virtual (aka real) money. So what if instead of experiencing Second Life on your computer, you could experience it in the real world? That’s the promise of these new location-based gaming applications—overlaying a virtual world upon the real, physical 3D world.

Besides amassing points and badges, the benefit of using these check-in services is that they can present relevant nearby offers and promotions to users. If you are at a mall and you check in to a Gap store you might get an offer for a discount on a shirt. If it’s around lunch time you might get pinged about a discount meal offer at a nearby California Pizza Kitchen along with a review of the pizza by a friend who is using the same app. The relevance of location, time, social recommendations and perhaps demographic information combine to make powerful media targeting.

We are now in what I call the 2D version of location-based gaming. There’s not a lot more to it than what’s described above. But in the not-too-distant future I believe we will see a James Cameron of local search emerge and create the 3D version that will rock the world.

Imagine a game that happens via a mobile device but incorporates real world location. Now imagine that instead of merely checking in and getting relevant coupons, you are actually playing a game that requires you to interact with the location and the people there. Maybe the game requires you to go to a McDonald’s (Burger King underbid for the QSR sponsorship) and order a specific item to unlock some secret. The guy at the counter pings your mobile device once the sale is made and then you are given a message to sit at the table near the ketchup counter to await your next instruction—and enjoy the Filet O’ Fish while you wait. Then another player sits down, gives you the secret handshake and provides you with your next mission, to find another clue to the game while trying on a new Wonderbra at Victoria’s Secret (warning: gender targeting can sometimes be off. We’re still in beta after all).

What if the world basically becomes a walking version of the Wii?

The implication for brands is pretty clear. There will be opportunities to interact with potential customers by integrating with the game. This is no different than what is going on in virtual worlds like Second Life. The difference is that the interaction will be happening both online and offline simultaneously and it will likely be accessible to a lot more people.

So what does this mean for the service providers who are not location-based (e.g. plumbers) and those who are not ideal hosts for fake shoot outs (e.g. banks, gynecologists, etc.)?

In the 24/7 always on world of reality-based virtual gaming, there will always be an excess of inventory. As these types of experiences become the new time suck, most likely for a younger demographic, creative local businesses will find a way to get their message out. At first this will be the realm of two-for-one shots at the local bar type deals. But just like ATMs found their way into casinos, clever banks, chiropractors and others will find ways to participate if the customers are there. Don’t be surprised if the next time you are named the Mayor of the local dive bar you get a friend connection request from a virtual DUI attorney.

Partners during the pilot phase included Digsby and UberTwitter, among others, while advertisers included sports networks, news organizations, and entertainment sites. Here’s an example of ads from the program being shown in OneRiot’s feed, tied to the “Conan O’Brien” trending topic:

OneRiot says the RiotWise ads have been performing at 3-4 times industry standard CTR for ads in realtime web apps. Says OneRiot GM Tobias Peggs: “Our ads make sense to buyers, make sense to users, and transparently deliver revenue to developers across the realtime web ecosystem.”

Today’s launch makes RiotWise available to all developers via the OneRiot Developer Network.