IAB Launches Mobile Center of Excellence

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has continued its recent activity in the mobile arena with the launch of a Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence.

A month ago the association issued joint guidelines with the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) on standardizing key metrics for mobile audience measurement.

The new Center will be an industry-funded and staffed unit within the IAB. It will be led by Anna Bager, former Head of Business Intelligence for the multimedia division of Ericsson, and based in the IAB's New York headquarters with some further support staff.

The initiative has already received funding commitments from 18 member companies. Those which will be serving on its board include AT&T BabyCenter, Converged Services, Cars.com, Google, Jumptap, Microsoft, The New York Times, Univision Interactive Media, Weather Channel and Yahoo. Meanwhile 24/7 Real Media, CNN, Disney Interactive Media Group, Federated Media, The Huffington Post, IDG Communications, NBC Universal and Tremor Media will serve as R&D sponsors. Up to three more board sponsorship slots are still open according to the IAB, which declined to comment on the cost of sponsorship or how much in funding commitments the venture had collected so far.

Says Bager, 'The spread of smartphones and tablets and broad adoption of mobile across user and age groups has made the time right for mobile advertising and it seems companies are picking up on this and mobile budgets are increasing.'

Research firm eMarketer has projected that US mobile ad spending this year will increase nearly 80% to $743 million in 2010. A separate study issued by Macquarie Equities Research recently predicted that global mobile ad spending would go from $2 billion in 2009 to $14 billion in 2015.

The center's remit is to providing market and consumer research, mobile ad case studies, executive training and education, and develop best practices for mobile media and marketing. These are areas currently covered by the MMA, but Bager insisted that the two organizations' efforts were complementary, saying: 'We come from the ad industry side and the [MMA] comes more from the mobile side and so we can work together, and the more, the better.'

Web sites: www.iab.net and www.mma.com .