Medialets Bucks Trend With Embrace of Mobile Sites

Medialets has extended its mobile rich-media ad platform to include mobile websites. Advertisers will be able to run the same creative across smart phones and tablets, operating systems, apps and mobile sites, with access to consistent reporting across all those platforms.

The company says the enhancement will help publishers achieve the scale that advertisers demand. While mobile usage is growing so fast that it’s difficult to track, Medialets founder and CEO Eric Litman says Medialets has an inventory base of approximately 20 billion impression avails a month. He anticipates that the introduction of mobile websites into that inventory will increase it 50 percent over the course of the next 12 months.

Medialets has powered lush in-app campaigns including Ralph Lauren’s exclusive September sponsorship of the New York Times iPad app and all interactive ads for the launch edition of The Daily.

“We focused on where brands wanted to be the most. Now that browsers are becoming more capable, consumers are making choices every day about whether to experience media in an app or on the mobile web,” Litman says.

The move comes at a time when the industry seems to be all about the app and moving away from mobile websites. A June report from IDC forecast that app downloads will soar from 10.7 billion in 2010 to 182.7 billion in 2015. Earlier this month, Google said its AdMob network would no longer serve ads to WAP sites, focusing instead on smart phones and tablets. Google will continue to rep browser-based mobile inventory through the AdSense network.

WAP may be cwap, but HTML5 is the shizzle. Next-gen mobile sites are the next new thing with advertisers, according to Litman.

“The notion of very slimmed-down, text-link focused pages are going away in favor of rich HTML5 experiences on capable mobile browsers,” says Litman. “Apple and Google have made meaningful strides to allow for much richer capabilities.”

Media-rich mobile sites have proliferated thanks to the availability of HTML5 creative tools from companies including Velti, Apple, Crisp Media and Sprout, acquired by inMobi in August.

In May, Medialets rolled out mobile campaign management platforms that include the ability for agencies, publishers and advertisers to build large portions of their own creative using simple interfaces and pre-produced ad templates.