Mobile must be woven into multiple media touchpoints in order to succeed as an ad platform. AdMob weighs in.

It's entirely possible that AdMob and Isobar delivered one of the most honest and realistic sessions on mobile marketing in anyone's recent memory at iMedia's Breakthrough Summit in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

In stark contrast to vendor presentations that overstated mobile's case, AdMob's Tony Nethercutt opened his session not just with background slides showing the category's growth, but also with specifics on tactical approaches that can be used today. 

According to AdMob, there are plenty of classic banner advertising and text links that can be delivered via their mobile ad network. And those ad units can be delivered at a low blended CPM, using familiar tracking technologies such as Atlas Solutions or DoubleClick DART click tags.

Also familiar are some of the models, most of which are performance-based. There are standard cost-per-click campaigns, but also click-to-call, click-to-download, click-to-video, click-to-capture and a few others. 

Targeting criteria also mirror the familiar landscape of online display media. AdMob advertisers can use the service to target ads by age, gender, ethnicity, household income, education and content, just to name a few. But then there are additional data points unique to mobile that might come in handy, like phone attributes. For instance, one might target a video ad campaign only to handsets that are capable of receiving video.  Much of the demographic data points are mapped to a study AdMob did with mobile research firm m:metrics.

For many attending this session, campaign concepts really began to gel with the presentation of case studies from Land Rover and Adidas. Land Rover specifically targeted the iPhone with a video ad, which might sound like a risky proposition. But when one considers the target profile of the average iPhone user in terms of adoption, disposable income and willingness to pay a premium price for a solid product, the two customer profiles matched up nicely.

The Adidas case study, presented by Gene Keenan from Isobar, showed how several mobile tactics can be implemented to cover multiple touchpoints. The campaign, titled "Basketball is a Brotherhood," was executed across many of the usual traditional media outlets. Via short-code tagging, Adidas drove interested mobile users to opt in for the Brotherhood via their mobile devices.  Those who opted in and provided a mobile number got a phone message from the NBA's Kevin Garnett -- the first in a string of several such messages.

Several campaign participants -- more than 25,000 -- called Garnett back, leaving messages with Adidas. Ringtones, wallpapers and a mobile site that let prospects look at shoes on the mobile web were all features of this campaign. While television was the backbone of the campaign, mobile drove over 20 percent of the total opt-ins for "Basketball is a Brotherhood."

Overall, many took away from this session that mobile is not a tactical afterthought. But in order to succeed, it must be woven in at the strategic level over multiple touchpoints to take advantage of the on-the-go audience.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.