Converge Weekly

The Coca-Cola Co., Honda, Vodafone, Nokia, Samsung and Capcom are among the brands advertising on mobile messaging service eBuddy, a publisher within the InMobi mobile ad network.

InMobi and eBuddy have partnered to increase their mobile-advertising revenue in 12 countries including Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, Australia, India and Indonesia. The newly formed partnership between eBuddy and InMobi in these geographies already accounts for over 20 percent of eBuddy’s total mobile ad revenue.

“EBuddy is one of the largest and fastest growing youth Web sites in the world and attracts a young user base of progressive users,” said Rogier van den Heuvel, vice president of worldwide sales at eBuddy BV, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. “Brands like Coke value engaging with these young, progressive users through a site with a very high mobile reach.

“A recent campaign we ran for Capcom’s Monster Hunter aimed to reach the maximum number of users using multiple touch-points, so this campaign ran both on Web and mobile,” he said. “Brands like Samsung also have an added advantage of advertising on eBuddy—our mobile users form the exact target audience for handset manufacturers.

“A strategically-placed ad showing advantages of a specific handset has a very high probability of being viewed and clicked on—hence different brands look at eBuddy to achieve different goals, but the base line of the campaign is to reach eBuddy’s audience of ‘always-on’ young people.”

InMobi, formerly mKhoj, claims to be the largest mobile ad network across international markets.

Web and mobile messaging platform eBuddy processes nearly 9.5 billion messages per month and enables more than 23 million unique monthly visitors to chat free of charge in one interface across all major IM networks including AIM, Facebook, Gtalk, ICQ, MySpace, MSN Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo.

Across the four mobile IM versions—eBuddy for iPhone, eBuddy for Android, eBuddy Mobile Messenger (J2ME) and eBuddy Lite Messenger (mobile Web)—eBuddy claims to have more than 9 million unique monthly mobile users.

Monetizing mobile messaging
Various eBuddy platforms—Lite Messenger (mobile Web site), Mobile Messenger (J2ME application), Sony PSP and Nintendo DS—support both textlinks and MMA-standard display banner ads.

This month, the company will roll out expandable banner ads within the Apple iPhone application. In the near future, eBuddy will also serve expandable banners in the Google Android application.

InMobi has run several campaigns on eBuddy’s site, with banner ads from the Coca-Cola Co., Honda, Vodafone, Nokia, Samsung and Capcom.

For example, Honda ran a campaign promoting the Civic with calls-to-action such as “click to locate a dealer and “click to schedule a test drive.”

Nokia offered consumers the opportunity to download a free music track, while Vodafone was promoting its mobile Internet services.

Ad agency Mindshare bought a six-day ad campaign with eBuddy to promote awareness of Capcom’s Monster Hunter game that ran across the Web, mobile—including Mobile Messenger and Lite Messenger—and a bespoke PSP skin placement.

The campaign achieved 5,768,740 online impressions and 615,362 mobile impressions.

“As mentioned earlier, eBuddy provides messaging services to PC and mobile users,” Mr. van den Heuvel said. “This usually serves an audience of young users who like to be constantly connected with people and who use their mobile phones throughout the day.

“So now advertisers serving ads on eBuddy are able to reach a real large number of people, who are young—and are usually open to mobile ads and products it has to offer—and are regularly using their mobile devices,” he said. “They are also constantly on chat, so brands can benefit from digital word of mouth product promotion if the ad manages to capture the users’ attention.

“All these put together form a stellar combination and the results prove the same.”