Adidas tapped mobile ad network AdMob and ad agency Isobar for a mobile advertising campaign to promote its Originals collection of vintage clothing, retro shoes and urban wear that blend '70s and '80s designs with sports styles.

AdMob ran graphical banner ads and text link ads targeted toward college students and consumers in its Downloads and Communities Channels across select sites in its network, including MovieTickets.com and CBS Sports Mobile. AdMob's graphical banner ads and text link ads drove traffic to the Adidas Originals mobile Web site.

"Adidas' overall goal for the campaign was to build brand awareness and develop the brand associations of originality and self expression with the Adidas Superstar brand,"said Nicole Leverich, director of corporate communications for AdMob, San Mateo, CA.

"In addition, they wanted to drive traffic to their mobile site and had specific goals for activity on the site: to drive video views and ringtone and wallpaper downloads,"she said.

The target audience for the campaign was young urban influencers.

The Adidas mobile Web site lets consumers select their favorite type of music and listen to sample tracks from up-and-coming artists in each genre.

Consumers could then download ringtones from the musicians they liked best, view videos of their performances, opt-in to receive more ringtones in the future, send their friends ringtones and enter their ZIP code to find the nearest location where they could buy Adidas Superstars.

The campaign drove more than 290,000 visitors to the Adidas Originals mobile site, with each visitor consuming an average of 2.9 page views.

Consumers downloaded more than 100,000 ringtones and sent more than 10,000 ringtones to friends.

Additionally, AdMob worked with Insight Express to conduct a brand study for Adidas in order to measure the impact of this highly engaging campaign's key brand metrics.

The Insight Express brand study showed a significant increase in recommendation intent of more than 19 percent over the control group and an increase in message association of more than 34 percent over the control group.

Adidas Ltd. AG is a German sports apparel manufacturer and part of the Adidas Group, which consists of Reebok sportswear company, the TaylorMade-adidas golf company and Rockport.

Besides sports footwear, the company also produces other products such as bags, shirts and other sports and clothing related goods.

The company is the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe and the second largest sportswear manufacturer in the world.

"AdMob enables our advertisers to reach a targeted audience of engaged consumers on their most personal device, their mobile phone,"Ms. Leverich said. "We enable publishers to generate revenue from their mobile traffic.

Growing strong
Mobile advertising marketplace AdMob has experienced strong growth over the past year and added a number of new publisher partners and advertisers to its network.

In January 2009, worldwide requests in AdMob's network increased 8 percent to 6.8 billion, led by double digit growth in Western Europe and Asia.

Over the past year, traffic from Western Europe more than doubled to total 550 million requests in January 2009, with strong growth in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

The combination of explosive growth in consumer usage of mobile Web sites and applications and AdMob's recent product advancements -- from new French, Spanish and German language interfaces to iPhone download tracking and ad units for Android applications -- has played a significant role in the growth of its network worldwide, according to AdMob.

AdMob has extended its relationships with a number of mobile publishers and added new publisher partners to its network, including Flirtomatic, Mads (see story), peperonity.com, Taptu and WYAN.

AdMob's network includes 6,000-plus mobile Web sites and 700 iPhone and Android applications.

AdMob claims that the number of brand and performance advertisers running campaigns on its network also continues to grow worldwide.

In December 2008, more than 60 brand advertisers ran campaigns on AdMob's global network, including Adidas, Kodak, MTV, Nokia, O2 and Paramount, more than doubling the number that ran in the same period one year prior.

As revealed in AdMob's January 2009 Mobile Metrics Report released last week, the iPhone is now the number-one device by usage in Western Europe, with 21 percent share of total requests.

This strong share reflects dramatically higher mobile Web and application usage by consumers and AdMob's presence on this device.

Nokia and Sony Ericsson are the number-two and three manufacturers in Western Europe, with 22 percent and 17 percent share, respectively.

Nokia continues to dominate the smartphone category with 11 of the top 15 devices.

AdMob is a mobile advertising marketplace serving more than 4.5 billion mobile banner and text ads per month.

Incorporated in April 2006, AdMob allows advertisers to target and reach their customers on the mobile Web and enables publishers to increase the value of their mobile sites in more than 160 countries.

"Mobile advertising has grown by leaps and bounds over the past year and is gaining an increasing share of budget from both brand and performance advertisers,"Ms. Leverich said.

"Usage of the Internet on mobile phones is projected to overtake Internet usage on PCs in the next few years, which demonstrates the size of the audience and opportunity for growth,"she said.

Netbiscuits partners with AdMob
Netbiscuits Inc., a provider of a Web software platform for development, publishing and advertising on the mobile Internet, is working with AdMob to provide advertisement and placement tools to a wide mobile audience.

This will let publishers and developers integrate rich mobile ads using video, intelligent linking and device-specific schemes provided by Netbiscuits' online platform to manage and create mobile content from one portal.

By integrating AdMob on Netbiscuits' development platform, publishers and developers can reach a mobile audience.

The Netbiscuits platform recognizes more than 5,000 different mobile devices across all carriers globally.

AdMob advertisements and all other mobile content are adjusted on the fly to fit each screen size and form function, resulting in targeted ads for any mobile Web site developed with Netbiscuits.

The integration with Netbiscuits has allowed AdMob to use their platform to create and publish mobile sites and landing pages for its advertisers.

AdMob ads can now be delivered into mobile Web sites created with Netbiscuits.

In addition, AdMob's free mobile analytics service can be integrated and accessed directly from the Netbiscuits dashboard.

Netbiscuits operates a B2B Web software platform for development, publishing and advertising in the mobile Internet.

Founded in 2000, the company, with more than 80 employees in the U.S., Germany and Singapore, serves the global mobile Internet programs of premium brands such as Yahoo, AOL, BILD, Spiegel, RTL, Konami, Sixt and eBay.

Globally, Netbiscuits delivers more than 1 billion mobile page impressions each month.

The Netbiscuits platform is available as a Web-based software service.

The platform provides all tools, interfaces and mobile enabling technologies online that are needed to create, publish and monetize professional mobile Web applications.

Netbiscuits allows content and media publishers, marketing and advertising agencies, application developers and service providers to achieve a faster path to profit from their mobile Internet programs.

"The monetization of mobile Web sites has never been easier,"said Ran Farmer, managing director of Netbiscuits, Reston, VA, in a written statement. "The seamless integration of AdMob ads and mobile analytics into Netbiscuits opens a direct revenue stream for our customers.

"At the same time, AdMob customers can take advantage of the superior mobile Internet experience that Netbiscuits' mobile Web site creation and publication platform easily enables on any mobile phone in more than 40 countries worldwide,"he said.