The mobile adver­tis­ing indus­try is bare­ly off of its train­ing wheels, but mar­ket infor­ma­tion is clear­ly pre­sent­ing how much poten­tial there is to make prof­its. While true, if one mar­ket has had unpre­dictable growth it has been mobile adver­tis­ing, and this is in part due to the sheer diver­si­ty and com­plex­i­ty of mobile tech­nol­o­gy and mobile adver­tis­ing tech­nol­o­gy, and the com­pe­ti­tion from oth­er media mar­kets. This hasn’t stopped many com­pa­nies from mak­ing the most of the gen­er­al upward trend — let’s take a look at 3 mobile adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies that are mak­ing the most of this grow­ing market.

But Aren’t These Com­pa­nies Los­ing Money?

The fact is that both Augme and Amobee have yet to reach prof­itabil­i­ty, and while at first glance this would appear a cause for con­cern, it real­ly isn’t. The mar­ket is young and many adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies are still find­ing their feet, and despite oper­at­ing loss­es, the atten­tion these com­pa­nies are get­ting (such as the recent acqui­si­tion of Amobee) show that the future is bright. Loss­es in these com­pa­nies are also main­ly due to the costs of rapid expan­sion, which will be good in the long term, and good for the tech job mar­ket in the short term.

Am.o.bee

Found­ed in 2005, the mobile adver­tis­ing tech firm Amobee is a mar­ket leader, with pro­pri­etary tech­nol­o­gy sup­port­ing advert con­tent deliv­ery across all mobile plat­forms. As if to rein­force their mar­ket-lead­ing sta­tus, Amobee recent­ly won an award for the best “mobile mar­ket­ing & adver­tis­ing agency of the year”. The Sin­ga­pore telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions giant SingTel acquired Amobee in March of this year, pur­chas­ing the com­pa­ny at over 10 times oper­at­ing rev­enue. They have also recent­ly part­nered with AccuWeath­er, the lead­ing glob­al weath­er infor­ma­tion ser­vice, so we can def­i­nite­ly expect more good things to come.

Augme

Augme Tech­nolo­gies have recent­ly announced their first quar­ter rev­enue report, and the signs are look­ing very good. A 2012 Q1 total rev­enue of $51.8 mil­lion presents a 75% growth in com­par­i­son to 2011 Q1 results, with growth (albeit less) report­ed for mobile adver­tis­ing and mobile mar­ket­ing. Mobile Mar­keter award­ed them with “Mobile Ser­vice Provider of the Year” and their sub­sidiary Hipcrick­et was named “Mobile Mar­ket­ing & Adver­tis­ing Agency of the Year” along with 2 oth­er com­pa­nies, a con­sid­er­able feat giv­en that there were 600 entrants in total.

Air­push

Air­push is an Android based adver­tis­ing ser­vice which comes bun­dled with a vari­ety of free Android apps. It is respon­si­ble for ‘push­ing’ adver­tise­ments into the noti­fi­ca­tion space at the top of the screen, and you know it is Air­push when you see a red star icon with the advert.

The bare bones of the company’s oper­a­tion is noth­ing new, but what makes this com­pa­ny one to watch is the stag­ger­ing increase in per­for­mance they have gained despite the com­pa­ny only being 15 months old. In a recent adver­tise­ment net­work study by App­Brain, Air­push were placed at num­ber 2 for adver­tis­ing per­for­mance. The reasons?Airpush state that it is first­ly the cor­rect tim­ing of adverts to make the most of times when users are most open to dis­cov­er new things. Sec­ond­ly is pre­cise con­sumer tar­get­ing by use of loca­tions, inter­ests and demo­graph­ics. Third­ly is trans­paren­cy and user-friend­li­ness, with fea­tures such as an opt-out scheme. You might not like spam adver­tise­ment ser­vices, but they are cer­tain­ly lucra­tive, and cer­tain­ly here to stay.