Google and Apple are both racing to own the mobile advertising platform by adding the new “holy grail” of mobile advertising – geolocation.  The Wall Street Journal reports that both Google and Apple have bought mobile advertising companies and are attempting to leverage their mobile phones to let your local pizza parlor put an ad on your mobile when you start feeling hungry in the late afternoon.  They are reaching out to you and to your local business just like FourSquare to reach you where you are right at this moment.

Have you ever seen an ad on paper that you just go yuck, that ruins the page. How about a front page ad? I ran into one of those this week on the front of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette owned weekly entertainment tab called Sync.

Yuck!

I completely understand and support the need for front page ads, but front page ads on tabs take up significantly more room than a strip ad on the bottom of a broadsheet. Since the ad is ran as a vertical strip it completely dominates the page. On top of that the Democrat-Gazette recently shaved the width of their press down (like every other newspaper) leaving a tab to be rather square than rectangle making the ad more dominant.

I would think that even the advertiser, Landers, would prefer an ad the works with the content and design of the front page rather than against it.

Here’s Ashton’s online advertising model/brand promotion model from the December 2009 Fast Company:

Make entertaining stuff, give it to people where they already are, let them have fun with it, and mix in brand messaging. And because of the viral nature of the Web, each new consumer is cheaper to win than the last one.

Yes, Ashton really does get it. He continues:

Katalyst (his company) is a merger of three industries. A piece of us is connected to ad agencies. Because we get the complex overlay of the social Web, we know how to engage an audience and how to make entertainment for the social Web. And we know how to gain and activate and retain an audience. So we create social networks for brands.

For several years I’ve been on a kick that traditional advertising metrics are bogus and it’s impossible to compare traditional advertising numbers with online advertising numbers.  On top of that I think traditional advertising is way, way overpriced when you consider their real numbers. In this month’s Fast Company Ashton Kutcher agrees:

“For years the ad business has been happy to have a completely ambiguous accounting system they’ve been monetizing off of. Now that the web offers a slightly more granular dollars-and-cents audience-acquisition metric – now they’re going to get completely granular about how they’re getting money?”

I shouldn’t be surprised that Ashton can intelligently discuss this, but I have to say that he apparently really does get it.

The end of the year brings on many predictions for next year. Placecast looks at digital advertising trends for 2009. Again my favorites of their predictions with some comments.

• View-through metrics gain traction –For at least five years I’ve said theres got to be more than just clickthrough to sale an advertiser as their primary metric and here it comes.
• Web will be connected to the physical world –geocode, geolocation.
• Online video consumption will continue to grow –preroll, postroll, overlays will become part of every media buyer’s vocabulary.