New mobile entertainment proposition

The Israeli provider of ad-funded entertainment, innerActive Smart Media, has teamed up with Italian mobile entertainment firm Buongiorno to offer its customers free ad-supported games, IM and Video content, opening up interesting mobile marketing possibilities.

A spokesman for the venture said that innerActive’s innovative and effective way of reaching target mobile users with ads and incentives will appeal to both major mobile advertisers and ad agencies.

HotSMS.com, part of Buongiorno Marketing Services, will offer the joint service directly to its members in return for viewing non-intrusive, contextual advertisements and product placements that are dynamically embedded in-content. The advertising sales will be handled by HotSMS.

Results from earlier trials of innerActive’s platform have produced impressive click-through results for brand owners of around 40 percent, as well as downloads ten times higher than for paid games. These results are at least partly due to the platform’s ‘self-learning’ capability, which learns what offers and incentives users respond to and modifies future promotions accordingly.

The ad-funded model also gives content owners, brand owners and portals access to valuable new mobile user segments: in trials, 78 percent of game players were new users who had never downloaded a game before. Users can also share ad-funded content for free with others, thereby creating a strong viral market that can be profiled and targeted.

Ziv Elul, co-founder and co-CEO of innerActive claims that offering free games to users in return for viewing advertisements and promotional offers, opens up a valuable new untapped market for advertisers, content owners and portals and also provides users that are unwilling to pay for premium content with a high quality, yet free, alternative.

“The agreement with Buongiorno to use our technology represents a major step forward in this nascent sector,” he says.

Commenting on the ad sales potential, Ruben Troostwijk, the md at HotSMS, says: “Our ad sales experience combined with innerActive’s ad-funded entertainment channel is sure to be a winning combination.”

The agreement marks the second commercial launch of innerActive’s ad-funded entertainment channel; the company, which was founded in 2005, has been working with mobile operator Cellcom in Israel since March 2007.