Mobile advertising is more than just display: Hipcricket puts it all in the cloud

Hipcricket is a mobile marketer that has been around since 2004. In the last year, we’ve seen it building its platform out to cover more of the available mobile marketing channels. And today it has announced the launch HIP 6.0 – an entirely cloud-hosted service that combines all of its mobile advertising disciplines.

What’s HIP 6.0?

It’s a Software-as-a-Service (Saas) mobile advertising platform. Last year we saw Hipcricket attempting to patent a mobily loyalty programme that ran through coupons (I’m not sure how that went for them). Earlier this year they built in display advertising for both applications and mobile browsers, and an SMS offering.

What Hipcricket is really pushing for HIP 6.0 though, is analytics, management and targeting. It claims the new platform enables better resource and customer management, provides better reports than previously, and now allows location-based targeting that will serve ads to someone based on where they are.

Eric Harber, president and COO at Hipcricket says “the HIP 6.0 platform represents an important release for Hipcricket; one that mirrors our customers’ desire to integrate mobile into their overall marketing mix, rather than have it operate as a silo. We listened to our customers, and built an easy-to-use mobile marketing and advertising platform that tightly integrates with their existing marketing to deliver results quickly, while empowering them to reach new mobile subscribers and to better engage with their current ones.”

What we think?

The HIP 6.0 platform looks fine and dandy. It represents what I believe is becoming the standard in mobile advertising networks. It allows advertisers to manage their own inventory remotely. It allows them to target consumers, and get reports on how it worked. Importantly it goes beyond just display advertising, and uses channels that are unique to mobile like SMS and mobile coupons – it’s even trying a little Interactive Voice Response.

I’m not saying that this a completely comprehensive system. It doesn’t dabble in idle-screen advertising, video or audio interstitials, for example. But the important thing is that it realises display advertising isn’t everything on mobile. This platform takes all its mobile channels and builds them into the platform as part of an overal “digital marketing” strategy. And that, I think, is where the actual advertisers want mobile ad networks to go.