BALTIMORE – Millennial Media, the leading independent mobile advertising platform, announced that it is releasing an SDK and the PadMedia Creative Suite™, with new creative ad formats, built specifically for the iPad™. The PadMedia creatives will be formatted and available on other tablet devices later in 2010.
Millennial Media’s iPad SDK is code complete, and will be deployed after testing with beta publishers on-device is finalized this week. Developers will be able to download the SDK through the developer portal, mmDev™; in the interim, the iPad SDK is available for private beta through the portal as well. For advertisers, Millennial Media is releasing its PadMedia Creative Suite, which includes standard mobile ad units and new unique ad formats for the iPad, including, but not limited to:
Floating Canvas: Advertiser chooses where a rich media ad will expand upon click, leveraging the great canvas of the iPad.
RTP (Return-to-Play): Specifically geared towards entertainment developers, these ad units allow consumers to respond to an ad, pausing their application experience and resuming when they are ready.
Motion Creative: Utilizing the iPad’s accelerometer capability, all ad units, including the Floating Canvas unit, can become interactive when the user turns or rotates the iPad in different ways (e.g., these ad units will allow the consumer to pour a beverage into a glass, when the device is physically rotated from portrait to landscape).
Full-page Interstitials: These full-page ads appear upon application launch or during transition in game play. Advertisers can use the creatives to brand or promote in-ad interaction and post-click actions.
The PadMedia Creative Suite will be included in the iPad SDK when it is released on Friday.
“This new set of creative units has been created specifically to help everyone in the new iPad ecosystem of application developers, publishers and particularly, advertisers, maximize the media capabilities of this new device,” said Erin (Mack) McKelvey, SVP of Marketing, Millennial Media. “Our iPad SDK and creative ad units are more validation that the iPad is a new class of mobile device that delivers an experience as good in the home as it is on the road.”
In 2010, eMarketer reported that consumers will spend a projected $6.2 billion in mobile application stores, and ad revenues derived from those apps is expected to generate $600 million worldwide, according to Gartner. In addition, Gartner estimated that mobile application stores will see more than 4.5 billion downloads in 2010. Apple alone reported 3 billion downloads from the App Store as of January 5, 2010, and 26% of US Internet Users said they were likely to download apps from the iTunes App Store on the iPad (comScore, March 2010).
In January, Paul Palmieri, Millennial Media’s president and CEO, published his initial thoughts about the iPad on the company’s blog. Here is an excerpt:
The iPad is a big mobile device, not a stripped down PC. Tablet devices would ultimately be based on mobile platforms:
The mobile experience is inherently different from the desktop experience. Trying to cram the wired web into smaller, mobile devices just doesn’t work for mobile consumers.
Mobile users are more willing to pay for content and are much more responsive to advertising (if done correctly) than web surfers on the wired web.
The price is right. Apple sees the iPad as a mainstream, mass-market device. The unlocked, non-contract, 3G support is healthy for the industry and good for consumers.
The palate for mobile advertisers has just been expanded. With the iPad and numerous other tablet devices poised to reach the market early in 2010, we are excited to work with advertisers to help them get the most out of this new class of mobile device.
The monetization roadmap for developers increasingly needs to be a coordinated business strategy. New screens, new platforms and new opportunities mean complexity for developers. Developers should partner with providers who give them broad device and opportunity coverage in a coordinated fashion, and that have direct relationships with the advertisers who seek these new and powerful audiences.
In February 2010, Millennial Media announced that it acquired TapMetrics, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm, focused on application usage and behavior. TapMetrics’ software suite provides detailed analytics to enable developers to better manage their application sales and revenue. Since adding $16M to its already strong cash position in November, Millennial Media has expanded its offerings to key customer segments, to include OEM and platform partnerships that seek to access its strong base of developers and publishers.
Reporters/Analysts: View Millennial Media Press Resources: www.millennialmedia.com/press, or read more about our initial thoughts on the iPad at www.millennialmedia.com/blog. Millennial Media’s developer portal with full information on our developer capabilities and community is available through the company’s website, at http://developer.millennialmedia.com/.
About Millennial Media, Inc.
Millennial Media is the proven leader in mobile advertising. With the largest mobile media audience in the U.S., Millennial Media uniquely offers brand advertisers the only set of specific, scalable audiences. Our ability to reach, target and engage consumers is unparalleled. As an innovative technology leader, our mobile decisioning, serving, and mediation platforms are powering some of the largest companies in the media business today. The company is committed to growing the mobile advertising marketplace by becoming the preferred partner to all advertisers seeking to reach mobile consumers, all publishers seeking to maximize ad revenue, and all mobile operators seeking to further monetize their networks. For more information, please visit http://www.millennialmedia.com or follow us on Twitter @millennialmedia.
