Our CEO, Peter Glaeser, has been selected to participate in a panel discussion at the Mobile Retail Summit, taking place in London on January 26, 2012. Mobile Retail Summit is part of a series of events sponsored by Mobile Marketing Magazine, bringing together professionals in mobile advertising as well as the retail industry, to create what should be one of the biggest mobile shopping events of the year. Retailers can attend the event for free to meet and learn from experts in the field of  mCommerce.

Peter will be discussing mobile search and mobile app discoverability with other leaders in mobile marketing, including representatives from Admob, Adsmobi, Efficient Frontier, and JD Williams. Other topics highlighted throughout the one-day event are rules for building mobile apps, mobile commerce, mobile couponing and payments, and more. In addition to the speaking sessions, there will also be an exhibition stands, lunch, and networking drinks at the end of the day.

To learn more about the event, visit the Mobile Retail Summit website.

Sponsormob has now made Click-to-Call advertising available to its clients in Germany. Partnering with Freespee, the leading company in call monetization, any company with a call-center can now advertise on mobile with Sponsormob.

Mobile is an ideal environment for call advertising, as clients simply have to click on a button on a landing page and can be directly connected to the advertiser’s call center. The benefits of Click-to-Call are high sales conversion rates and the opportunity to up-sell customers during phone calls. Based on statistics from partners in Europe and the US, a call is valued ten to twenty times more than a click.

Certain verticals are more promising for call advertising than others. Click-to-Call works best in service verticals such as banking, insurance, education, finance, health and beauty. Travel, telecommunications, and other utilities also do well, but online stores with call centers can also benefit from call advertising.

Of course, Click-to-Call advertising with Sponsormob is done on a performance basis, making advertising low-risk to companies wishing to expand their customer base via mobile. Additionally, Sponsormob’s unique technology makes it possible not only to attribute sales to specific publishers, but to the actual device, ad, and click.

With the expansive growth of mobile usage and traditional advertisers expanding to mobile platforms, CPA networks are an important link in the advertising chain. Freespee has extensive experience in call monetization, and is happy to expand their work with Sponsormob, its first pure mobile ad network partner.

About its new partnership, Carl Holmquist, Founder and CEO of Freespee, says “We are excited to be working closely with Sponsormob in our global expansion. Mobile has proven its strength in performance advertising, and now we are bringing along phone calls as the new digital advertising currency. Advertisers who have already added calls in their media planning have seen great results: People who call are ready to buy, and thus the sales conversion rates are very often 20-50%. At the same time, the average order value has increased due to upsell opportunity. We’ve only seen the beginning of a new era in performance mobile advertising.”

As 2011 is coming to a close, we are looking forward to the holidays but also have an eye on the future. The upcoming year will bring some big changes from us, as we are adding features to our network to make mobile advertising simpler and more effective. Although we can’t share all the details now, we can say that Sponsormob will be making advertising on the mobile web more accessible for companies wanting to reach a broader audience (more info on this to come in January 2012 …).

In addition to making plans for 2012, we have also been expanding our company. We are actually still hiring, looking for candidates to join our Berlin office. We even made a short video about it. Details on our open positions can be found on our jobs pages (English and German). If you are looking for a job in mobile advertising, please check us out. And don’t forget to keep an eye on this space for more from us in January!

Last week the Sponsormob team exhibited at Apps World Europe in London. Apps World is a conference and exhibition for app developers, marketers, and others in the online and mobile advertising industry. The event was larger than last year’s and a very good one for us, as we were able to connect with developers and other networks and exchanges. The Apps World team this year was three girls, which means that a lot of fun was had.

At the same time last week, Heiko Kasper was at the Mobile Business Conference here in Germany, and Joe Niederberger participated in AppNation in San Francisco. That was our last big event push for 2011, so we are looking forward to a break during Christmas and then getting out there again in 2012.

To see pictures from Apps World, visit our Flickr page. We also now have a YouTube channel with a few videos posted (with more to come … ).

Affiliate Summit is one of the best events out there for affiliate marketing professionals, and we are looking forward to taking part in it again next year. Affiliate Summit West 2012 will be held in Las Vegas at Caesar’s Palace. The event has grown each year, and next year is sure to be another great year, with thousands of visitors and numerous companies exhibiting.

Although we will not be exhibiting at this year’s event as we have in the past, both of our directors (Peter Glaeser and Jet Patel) will be on hand to meet with anyone interested in working with Sponsormob. There is still time to set up a meeting with Jet and/or Peter, so please send me an email if you would like to meet them at Affiliate Summit.

After being busy this year exhibiting at events in the US and the UK (such as ad:tech and Apps World), the beginning of 2012 will see us active here in Germany. We will be exhibiting and speaking at M-Days, a massive event for mobile communications and advertising event taking place in Frankfurt, Germany. This year over 120 exhibitors will be at the event, and over 3,000 visitors are expected to be attending.

The dates of the conference and exhibition are February 1-2, 2012, and it will be held at Messe Frankfurt. We will be in the Innovation section of the exhibition and would love to meet with you, so please contact us if you plan to be at M-Days and would like to connect.