Having served its 25th billion ad impression this week, within its rapidly growing network of mobile publishers, Jason Spero, VP Marketing for AdMob, spoke to AdMarkTech. With over 4,500 mobile sites within the network, AdMob is truly an ad market place for mobile. The in-house technology has been developed exclusively for mobile. Serving ads for a broad range of sites including brand names such as ESPN and CBS, AdMob also serves ads for mobile specific content and it is here that a lot of the innovation has been made and in turn, has seen a huge increase in the traffic driven to mobile devices.

Founded a little over two years, they primarily focused on performance advertising and over the course of the last year have added a layer of brand advertising to their versatile offering. At a time when monetizing mobile traffic was not easy and the future of mobile content was uncertain, AdMob’s founder Omar Hamoui, decided to use these factors as a starting point to offer mobile sites the ability to monetize their traffic. As more mobile sites became part of the network, coupled with growth in the need for mobile content, AdMob began to see a large increase in mobile traffic across their network.

Serving two types of display ads on the mobile web, AdMob offers a cost-per-click text ad and a CPM banner ad. Commenting on the mobile ads offered by AdMob, Jason stated, “We have automated all of the targeting, relevance and context. There’s a whole bunch of technology that is built for the mobile environment that enables us to do this.” he added “Our text link ad, which is basically a non-graphical ad that appears on a mobile web page and looks like a link, clicks between one and one and a quarter percent which is approximately 10 to 15 times what you see online. Our banner ads Mean is around 2%, dramatically higher than the Internet”.

Serving the needs of both publishers and advertisers, AdMob allows publishers a way to monetize their mobile content and advertisers a highly ROI positive experience for mobile user acquisition and penetration into the mobile market place.

Being solely focused on mobile advertising has given AdMob the opportunity to expand their offering. In addition to performance advertising, AdMob incorporated a full serve sales team approximately 15 months ago and added a layer of brand advertising. Brand advertising has employed innovation and new ideas for marketing products on the mobile web. Among the innovators have been Porsche, Land Rover and Nike, to name but a few. “What we’re starting to see is people get one evolution turn past just taking their brand and logo and product image and put it on a site. We’re starting to see really engaging, mobile specific, creative work.”

But how has the creation of the iPhone, a mobile unit designed for browsing full web sites, changed the landscape of mobile advertising? The speed of WiFi, the use of sidebar scrolling and the overall user experience has prompted mobile site publishers to create what AdMob refers to as ‘The Middle Web’. Large sites such as Digg and Travelocity have found that by dedicating pages specifically for iPhone usage, the whole user experience is greatly enhanced. Therefore, iPhone mobile advertising has its own place within the grand mobile scheme of things and allows site to be more creative within the mobile boundaries of the iPhone. As such, AdMob have used this wisely to their advantage.

Based on user demand and the need to know more about the performance of mobile web sites, AdMob launched AdMob Mobile Analytics three weeks ago. This is a free suite of tools that defines a whole array of information ranging from devices, referrer information, screen sizes and user activity. “We are banking on mobile being fragmented. The company has been specifically built for mobile. We understand the device, the operator and throw that against an algorithm that goes out and looks within thousands of ads for the one that fits.”

Currently expanding into Japan and looking to launch French and Spanish language soon, AdMob is increasing it reach. With around 65 employees and a rapid technical growth that can handle well beyond serving 100 million impressions per day, the AdMob name will feature more predominantly as the mobile web increases in popularity.