Reliance is like the SONY of India – doing major deals in the U.S. ranging from hunting for U.S. startups to striking deals with Dreamworks. They have over 100 million customers and touch 1 in 10 Indians every day.

Zapak.com, one of Reliance’s ADA companies and India’s largest PC gaming site, has connected with U.S.-based, Greystripe, to add 900+ mobile games and applications to their mobile offering, essentially offering the App Store experience, except all of the games are free and ad-supported.

With everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft launching their own versions of game and application storefronts for cell phones in the U.S., Greystripe is one of the first companies to provide a solution similar to an app store in India.

As proven through the popularity of Apple’s App Store, mobile games and applications are a critical category for media companies looking to get into the mobile market.

What’s interesting here?

• India’s biggest media company is looking to seize on an App Store-like experience for the 5.1 million registered game players on Zapak
• Media companies, including NBC and now Reliance, are all want their own versions of branded app store like distribution – and they’re partnering with established content providers and networks such as Greystripe
• Look for this trend to continue across the industry with other media giants

On Friday Greystripe released a  quarterly update on mobile gaming consumer metrics for advertisers. With the addition of the iphone to the market, the user demographic for mobile games is changing.

The data is based on observed behaviour on the U.S. Greystripe network from July 1st through September 30th, 2008.

Greystripe’s iPhone games are the most popular among the sought-after 18 to 34- year old age group, with 48% of users falling into that category.

Here are some other highlights:

• The 18 to 34-year old demographic is well-educated and affluent, with 80% having attended college and 46% making more than $78K a year
• 75% of iPhone game players access the mobile Web at least once a day, while 66% use it more than once a day
• 87% of game players on both feature phones and the iPhone are involved in the purchasing decisions in their families, with 73% of these respondents using the mobile Web at least once per day
• With over 100 million downloads of their mobile games, Greystripe is seeing a worldwide 9.1% click-through rate on their advertisements

You can see the Report in its entirety here:

Today Greystripe released some compelling campaign results from a recent RadioShack campaign including: 

1. The RadioShack campaign resulted in a significant increase in unaided brand awareness, which rose from 15.8 percent to 24.2 percent (+8.4 points)
2. There was a directional increase in the percentage of respondents who agreed that RadioShack is a “Top Wireless Store” (+ 5.9 points at an 86.5 percent confidence level)
3. Among the 25-34 year old target age group, unaided brand awareness increased 10.9 points, while the “Top Wireless Store” metric jumped 16.7 points
4. The campaign outperformed mobile norms for unaided brand awareness by 2.2 percentage points.

 Why should you care? 

1. Greystripe’s mobile ads outperformed other advertising categories, such as online banners
2. This case study is valuable for planners looking to build a case to commit funds to this channel

CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment is dubbed the largest technology event in the mobile industry covering all aspects of wireless data. It’s actually a smaller event than their annual wireless conference in Las Vegas every spring, but the focus at this show is actually more relevant to the mobile marketer. 

The show officially starts today; however, I arrived Monday night in order to participate in a pre-show event called exploring mobile web strategies. The event was organized and moderated by Ajit Jaoker from futuretext.com who did a fantastic job of pulling in some heavy hitters in the mobile space for presentations and panels. 

I took 9 pages of notes – much of which I’ll share on this blog over the coming week as seperate entries…although if you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ve already gotten a preview of what is to come.  Topics that really caught my attention were: 

• Understanding and enticing the mobile user by Carol Taylor (Director of User Experience at Motricity)
• Mobile personas and segmentation by Pankaj Asundi (VP Media and content at Ericsson)
• Panel discussion around mobile social networks with senior representation from myGamma, mocospace, itsmy, mig33 and intercasting corp. This was probably the highlight of the day for me and will warrant it’s own entry with perspective
• Monetizing digital communities by Jouko Ahvenainen (Chief Strategy Officer of Xtract)
• Panel discussion around driving mobile web adoption with representation from Openware, Vantrix, Skyfire, Greystripe and Admob
• Panel discussion around mobile advertising – today and tomorrow with representation from Ericsson, Yahoo!, Admob and Nokia
• Designing for mobile by Barbara Ballard (CEO Little Springs Design)
• Mobile search – present and future by Bena Roberts (President, Visibility mobile) and Michael “Luni” Libes (Chief Architect of Medio Systems) – who I ended meeting later that night at the Moco mixer party

Overall it was a great start to the week. I’ve got a full day of meetings and sessions planned today and will likely be taking more notes for future posts. I’ve also brought along my video camera – so you can expect to see some video blog entries similar to what I posted at GSM and CTIA in Mach. 

I’m also still adjusting to left coast time. Speaking of which, it’s time for another coffee

I received an advance copy of a report being released today by Greystripe which has some interesting statistics for those of you interested in advertising on mobile gaming platforms.

The data is fresh – based on research from Feb 15 through May 15, 2008.

Here are 5 arbitrary highlights:

1. Average worldwide clickthrough rate for ads on the Greystripe mobile ad network is a remarkable 10.1%. This is around 6 times higher than average mobile banner ad programs
2. 47% of mobile gamers are between the age of 18-24. That number jumps to 75% when you look at 18-34
3. Men and women are pretty equally split in terms of usage (60/40)
4. 51% of gamers are the primary purchase decision makers in the household (although no word on whether living in your parents basement counts as a separate household or not)
5. Favorite types of mobile games (in order): Puzzles, Action, Arcade, Adventure, Mobile-Pets

Although no Canadian specific stats were made available in the detailed report, I’ve asked if any can be made available to be posted on this blog.

Marketers looking to reach the coveted 18-34 demographic should consider a test campaign using the mobile gaming channel.  With exponential growth in the console gaming advertising market over the last few years, mobile is a natural extension of that market.  

Greystripe is a leading ad-supported content distributor with over 65 million mobile game downloads to date. 

Click here to see my previous post on them from CTIA with a video demo of their product.

You can also request the full report by emailing insights @ greystripe dot com.

Last week at CTIA Wireless I had a chance to sit down with Michael Chang, the CEO of Greystripe to talk about mobile gaming and more specifically about his mobile advertising platform.

Greystripe currently has over 800 java based mobile games which are distributed through their own site (gamejump.com) and about 100 other sites and partners.

What makes them unique is the fact that any person with a java-enabled mobile device can download their games for free as Greystripe’s gaming network is ad-supported.

Users downloading games must view 2 pre-game ads and two post-game ads in order to access their games.

Mobile Ads have not been a barrier to engagement

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