Medialets

Medialets New York City Capital One Locations ad on MenuPages appGreat article today by Dan Butcher at MobileMarketer.com highlighting Capital One’s rich media ad campaign running on the MenuPages.com iPhone app which we are serving and measuring!

http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/advertising/5470.html

And here’s a video of the MenuPages app with the Capital One ads in action….

More evidence out today that Medialets is the solution publishers are looking for to monetize their mobile content.  The Associated Press, CNN, NPR, Variety, MenuPages.com, CNNMoney and The Washington Post have integrated Medialets into their mobile apps.

These publishers are now giving brands access to advertising that taps into the full creative capabilities of smartphones while delivering the highest returns for their media spend.  Below is a press release with more info.

LEADING PUBLISHERS LOOK TO MEDIALETS FOR MOBILE RICH MEDIA ADVERTISING SOLUTION

The Associated Press, NPR, CNN, Variety and others integrate Medialets into their mobile apps

New York, NY: February 18, 2010 — Medialets, the most widely deployed rich media ad and analytics platform for mobile, today announced that The Associated Press, NPR, The Washington Post, MenuPages.com, CNN, CNN Money and Variety have integrated Medialets’ into their mobile applications. These publishers can now reliably deliver engaging rich media ads into their mobile apps while measuring usage and driving real mobile ad revenue.

“Publishers are turning to Medialets for our ability to provide them with the most engaging rich media ad units in mobile,” said Eric Litman, Medialets CEO. “Through their relationship with Medialets, these publishers can now give brands access to advertising that taps into the full creative capabilities of smartphones and delivers the highest return for their media spend.”

Medialets’ ad technology enables publishers to serve rich media ads into mobile applications, whether those ads are sold in-house or come from an integrated advertising sales partner. The unique ad formats offered by Medialets let brands and agencies create engaging ads that utilize the power of a mobile app with the intimacy and exceptional measurability smartphones provide. The advertisements can include video, animation, sound and other advanced functionality.

Examples of the rich media ads created, served and tracked by Medialets for these publishers can be found at the Medialets blog.

About Medialets:

Medialets is the most widely deployed rich media ad platform for mobile. Our clients include The Washington Post, NPR, Variety, MenuPages.com and more than 17,000 others who use Medialets to measure their audience and serve award-winning, high impact ads that outperform online rich media by an average of 2.5 times. Medialytics, our mobile app analytics platform supporting the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices, delivers in-depth views into both application and ad performance while providing the industry’s only solution for guaranteed post-click ad reporting. We are a privately held, New York-based company with marquee investors and a world-class team. Visit us on the Web at www.medialets.com, email us at connect@medialets.com, or follow us on Twitter @medialets.

Good news… real time data processing within our Medialytics platform is back. Kudos to our dev team for getting this functionality up and running, enabling Medialets to provide the industry’s only real-time analytics platform for rich media ads within iPhone, Blackberry and Android apps.

We’ve crunched the adoption numbers for last week’s release of iPhone OS v3.1.3 and found that among the developers’ apps we track 14% of their users installed v3.1.3 between 2/1 and 2/6, with adoption growing steadily each day.

We also saw a drop of 13% in installs v3.1.2, meaning 87% of the upgrades to v3.1.3 came from users that already had v3.1.2.

The other interesting data point is that roughly 13% of these users are slow to upgrade their iPhone OS and are using a version prior to 3.1.2.

More exciting news today…. Wizzard Media, the world’s largest podcasting network, has integrated our  advertising and medialytics platform into their iPhone App framework through which they will be posting  podcast related apps.

As Wizzard CEO Chris Spencer talks about in the release, Medialets is helping Wizzard overcome the biggest obstacle for podcast advertising which is “the lack of interactivity (the ability to click on an ad and be taken to an advertiser’s web site) and the accurate measurement of the delivered advertisement…”

More big news from Medialets in the coming days….stay tuned.

We are pleased to announce that the current Medialets 2.1.x SDKs are fully compatible with Apple’s new iPhone/iPad SDK 3.2 Beta released today. With Apple’s announcement  today a world of new possibilities has been opened and now comes all the amazing functionality and features of the Medialets Analytics and Advertising SDKs you’ve come to rely on. Stay tuned for updates as we release new SDKs to take advantage of the new iPhone 3.2 SDK functionality and Medialets first iPad SDK.

Medialets is proud to announce our latest rich media, interactive video ad promoting CONTRA, the new album by indie rock band Vampire Weekend (Beggars Group/XL Recordings).

The ad is currently running within the NPR News iPhone app and raising awareness of the album while also driving direct downloads via the iTunes Music Store.

Check out the video of the ad in action and let us know what you think in the comments!

Let’s walk through the ad…

When a viewer opens the NPR News iPhone app, a 320×50 banner is presented that, when clicked, expands to reveal the band’s CONTRA album cover. The track “Cousins” begins to play over the iPhone’s speakers. (We also recommend headphones!)

The viewer is immediately  prompted via an animated icon to tilt their phone to the right. When they do, the album cover image slides off the screen revealing a fullscreen video of Vampire Weekend performing their song “Cousins.”

A message appears instructing the viewer to shake their phone to edit the video. Each time the viewer shakes their phone, the video clip instantly switches out as the band’s song continuously plays in the background. The user can tap anywhere on the ad to “View Album Info.” When tapped, the entire video slides to the left, once again revealing the CONTRA album cover. The viewer is prompted to tap the album cover to launch the iTunes store.

We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of several enhancements to our Medialytics Ad reporting website for advertising customers.  We’ve taken your feedback, added new charts, and enhanced access to rich media engagement data.

Rich media ads tend to drive higher and more intricate user engagement.  We’ve enhanced our “Engagement” reporting where you now can see engagement rate alongside impressions.  An engagement is defined as the user taking the call to action — loosely, “the user did something in the ad” — such as expand a banner to full screen, play the game in the ad, shake, etc.  Having a user take the call to action within the ad unit (as opposed to just a click through) demonstrates greater interaction with your creative and, ultimately, your brand.

The “Engagement” page also show a breakdown of total and average screen time for each creative across your selected campaigns and apps.  This allows for some side-by-side comparison to see how creatives are performing.  The data can also be downloaded in CSV format for your own analysis.

A new tab entitled “Engagement Detail” shows more fine grained impressions, clicks, and CTR by hour of day and day of week.  Now you can see how a given ad or campaign performs through the course of a day or week.  Do users tend to interact more during typical commute times?  Can you better grab their attention on lazy Friday afternoons?

An enhancement to “Impressions & Clicks” now has impressions vs. CTR and clicks vs. CTR separated into individual charts so you can see greater granularity on ad performance.  They’re side by side on the same user-defined scale for trend analysis.

Similar to the engagement data, creatives can be compared and data downloaded for each campaign.

Reporting is always an evolving product and we hope to continue to enhance based on your feedback.  Contact your Medialets representative or send comments to support@medialets.com.

Headed to iPhoneDevCamp 3 on July 31st? Then we have a special treat for you!

Medialets is proud to bring you BT as the special guest performer for the opening night events. This outdoor performance will be held at Yahoo! and is only available to registered attendees of the conference.

BT has a long standing history with Apple, from using their equipment to performing at WWDC 2006, and now releasing his first iPhone app called Sonifi . If you haven’t had a chance to hear BT before, you can check him out here.

There’s still time to register for iPhoneDevCamp 3 where VP of Marketing Rana Sobhany will be discussing iPhone Marketing 101, a session you don’t want to miss. Click here to register.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Apple has made claims that the iPhone OS 3.0 yields significant performance gains on the 3G model, and that the new 3GS can accomplish the same tasks up to twice as fast as its predecessors. Anecdotally, the new 3GS definitely “feels” faster under certain conditions. But how do Apple’s devices and OS versions really compare to one another? And perhaps of even greater interest, how does the latest hardware from Cupertino compare to smart phones recently released from other vendors?

“Objavectaweb-C” OS?

One of the key challenges in conducting an objective evaluation of software performance across devices that utilize different operating systems lies in accounting for the fundamental differences in the various OSs. While the iPhone 3G and 3GS could potentially run the same app on the same Objective-C-based operating system (making direct comparisons relatively straightforward), Android apps are Java-based, and the Palm Pre runs the entirely new Web OS. Given these divergent OS implementations, is there anything that come close to a standard unit of measure for judging performance of this growing breed of “superphones?”

Finding Common Ground

The common thread between these three OS’s is JavaScript execution in WebKit—the open source project that, in varying degrees, powers web browsing technology for these three disparate operating systems. With the exception of certain browser plugins (e.g., Flash), web rendering technology installed on today’s premiere mobile devices makes almost all—and in some cases even more—features of their ubiquitous desktop web browser counterparts available. Therefore, given the global commonality of JavaScript and WebKit-based web browsers, it becomes possible to compare the performance of these “pocket computers that make phone calls” to the performance of desktop machines.

The Yardstick

The WebKit Open Source Project provides a JavaScript test Suite dubbed SunSpider. According to the description on the SunSpider home page, “this benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other.” We at Medialets have found it to be one of the best attempts to measure real world JavaScript performance in a balanced and statistically sound way.

Medialets ran the SunSpider test suite in the following environments:

1. Safari 4.0.1 on a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo White MacBook.
   The MacBook results were used as a baseline for relative comparisons.
2. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS v2.2.1
3. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS v3.0
4. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3GS with iPhone OS v3.0
5. The “Browser” app on the T-Mobile G1 with Android OS v1.5 (Cupcake)
6. The “Web” app on the Palm Pre with Web OS v1.0.2

Each device was fully restored and rebooted immediately before running the test suite. Every attempt was made to assure that no atypical background tasks were executing while the tests were running. The SunSpider tests automatically run five times sequentially and the mean average from all five tests are reported. Network speed and latency have no effect on the results of the test.

Results

The results of the iPhone-based tests alone are rather astonishing and seem to indicate that many of Apple’s claims about the performance gains of their 3.0 OS and the iPhone 3GS may hold some water. Using OS 3.0 on the same iPhone 3G yields nearly 3X the JavaScript performance in Mobile Safari vs. using iPhone OS 2.2.1. The iPhone 3GS ups the ante by another factor of 3, bringing JavaScript performance on the iPhone 3GS to just 12X that of a full-powered desktop machine that has well over four times the raw processing muscle alone. The T-Mobile G1 running the “Cupcake” version of the Android OS completed the test suite in about 91 seconds. This makes it about a third faster than the iPhone 3G running Apple’s previous OS (2.2.1). The Palm Pre came storming out of the gate with speeds that closely rival the iPhone 3G running Apple’s latest iPhone OS.

Do any of these numbers really indicate which phone might be the best choice for a given individual? Absolutely not. At Medialets we use all of these devices, and love each one for many reasons. The fact that these tests can even be performed across this many device/OS combinations is a testament to how far mobile technology has come in such a relatively short time. We are looking forward to seeing an even greater variety of advanced mobile devices and OS revisions enter the market and we’ll keep you posted as we test more devices in our lab. Subscribe to our feed, leave a comment below, or reach out to us directly if you have any questions.