Two unlikely global titans have partnered on a “mobile only” media deal whose footprint covers 16 countries, from developed markets in North America and Europe to emerging markets in Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.

Mondelez International, the CPG giant behind billion-dollar brands like Oreo and Cadbury, announced today that it has inked a landmark deal with Google: a one-year partnership that will include mobile search, display and websites. While financial terms were not released, the deal will include branded mobile websites, training and mobile capability building, analytics and opportunity to opt in to Google's mobile beta programs.Continue reading...

Microsoft's Windows Phone may lag behind Samsung and Apple in the battle for America’s mobile-phone patronage, but the company seems to think that being in the lower spot isn’t always a bad thing.

Its most recent commercial, which debuted on NBC's “Today” show on Monday, features fans of the top two mobile phones attacking one another at a wedding while two folks working at the nuptials enjoy the pleasures of their Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phones. That sure beats going negative, like it did with its Scroogled ads. 

“We have our own fans, of course,” Microsoft writer and editor Michael Stroh said in a blog post, AllThingsD.com reports. “And while they may be outnumbered (for now), they’re no less proud and routinely urge us to do more to get the word out about Windows Phone … There are choices. iPhone and Android Smartphones aren’t the only—or even best—options out there for all Smartphone buyers.”Continue reading...

Mondelez International's first-of-its-kind Mobile Futures Network is teaming brands with top entrepreneurial minds to bring pilots to market in as little as 90 days. 

"The Mobile Futures program has been an extraordinary experience for all of us at Mondelez International,” said Bonin Bough, vice president of global media and consumer engagement. “It has given us the opportunity to work with and learn from leading mobile innovators to enhance how we engage with our consumers.” 

The pilots, focused on mobile-at-retail, social TV and SoLoMo (social/ location/ mobile) technology to enhance consumer experiences and drive impulse purchases have launched across multiple brands under the Mondelez umbrella. The global company hopes that the service-y and social tie-ins will help build brand relevance beyond obvious user engagements for brands like Chips Ahoy! and Stride Gum.Continue reading...

HTC One, a.k.a. the Facebook Home phone that's coming to AT&T and other carriers, is just one focus of the company’s impending brand refresh and aggressive marketing campaign to get better market placement against competitors like Samsung. 

HTC has been known for good hardware and not-so-good promotion, but squaring off against marketing-savvy Samsung requires the former to up its game. "It's one thing to make a great device—HTC has done that before," Mike Woodward, president of HTC America told the LA Times. "What is a little different this time is the way that we're going to market. We want to really get that down to the streets and get that down to consumers." 

HTC had been using “quietly brilliant” as its slogan, but the brand is looking to step out of its shell with a new marketing message that has “bold,” “authentic” and “playful” themes. The new tagline, "Everything Your Phone Isn't," is courting "Generation Feed" (what HTC calls tech-savvy, early-adopters). "Tech millennials are hard to connect with," Erin McGee, HTC North America VP Marketing told Ad Age. "We wanted to create a closer connection by targeting passion points."Continue reading...

The just released MediaBrix Social and Mobile Gaming report is bullish on the performance of social gaming ad campaigns as mobile gaming video ads deliver an average CTR of 3 percent, 30 times higher than the CTR of standard banner advertising campaigns. 

“The key finding on ad engagement rates is that the average social and mobile gaming engagement rates are around 20 percent, the highest of the reported ad formats,” states the report. “By way of comparison, Facebook brand pages have an average engagement rate of .50 percent and pre-roll ads have engagement rates ranging from .7 percent to 3.64 percent, according to data supplied by eMarketer.” 

“It comes as no surprise that social and mobile gaming advertising sees results 30-100 times better than standard online advertising campaigns,” commented Ari Brandt, CEO and Co-founder of MediaBrix, which is behind Honda's new mobile social campaign for the 2013 Honda Civic. “This is largely due to the fact that people are driven by a deep well of positive emotions—such as joy, excitement and brand affinity—when playing social and mobile games.”Continue reading...

Joining other major companies and brands such as Unilever, Nike, PepsiCo, Lexus, BMW and AT&T in spurring mobile innovation around its brands, Mondelez International is investing in mobile startups in the hopes that they'll bring the kind of game-changing innovations to the company that often are hard to come by at corporate stalwarts such as the global-snacks operation that used to be part of Kraft Foods.

That said, it was Kraft that spearheaded the mobile incubator program that Mondelez is now running with. Mondelez just announced nine startups to participate in an ambitious new mobile-technology initiative aimed at drivng more impulse purchases and better in-store marketing. Called Mobile Futures, the program kicked off in October with a call for new ideas that drew 126 applications. Twenty-two startups survived the first cut, then were narrowed to nine after a two-day pitch event last month.

Mondelez hopes to launch one or two mobile-focused tech companies out of the process as well as garner new applications specifically for its business. It's one important way in which the spinoff — which owns megabrands such as Oreo, Trident, Stride and Cadbury — is attempting to do business differently, more dynamically, than in its old incarnation paired with what has now become Kraft's North American grocery business.Continue reading...

When Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops video game went on sale back in November 2010, more than 5.6 million units had been sold. The United States was responsible for 4.2 million of those sales, which passed $1 billion after only six weeks.

And now, hold onto your joysticks and step to the side, here comes Black Ops II. Set to be released on Nov. 13, the next installment is on track to be another blockbuster. The trailer above has received more than three million views since it was released on Oct. 16.

To mark the occasion and generate even more interest in the gamer world (as if it needed any), Activision and JJ Abrams' BadRobot Interactive collaborated to develop a new update to the Action Movie FX app, which allows gamers to get some of their weapons for the game earlier than its release.Continue reading...

Collaborating with startups is becoming popular these days. GE funds a startup incubator program; PepsiCo is expanding its PepsiCo10 initiative, which pairs startups with brands such as Quaker; BMW's iVentures arm is a $100 million venture capital fund that's investing in mobile innovation; and Lexus is getting into the startup funding business.  Now you can add Mondelēz International to that list.

With a tagline of "The Future in 90 Days," the two-day old company's new Mobile Futures program was announced at the Mobile Marketing Association's Advertising Week conference in New York. The program is structured in two phases: scaling startup innovation, and creating entirely new mobile ventures by partnering entrepreneurs in the mobile space with "up to 10" Mondelez brands, as Mondelēz VP of Global Media and Consumer Engagement Bonin Bough told Ad Age.

Bough is bringing a solid track record to the task. He oversaw digital and consumer engagement at PepsiCo, including the now wrapped Pepsi Refresh Project crowdsourced community project-funding platform, before joining Kraft Foods in February. He's tapping that experience to spur mobile innovation at Mondelēz, the just-launched global corporate identity for Kraft Foods following Monday's spin-off of Kraft's North American consumer packaged brands.Continue reading...