While many have hailed the iPad as a future mainstay of targeted mobile marketing campaigns, no shortage of advertisers are taking a wait and see approach with regard to the new Apple tablet. However, if the pre-order stats from this past weekend are any indication, the iPad could very well have a much larger than expected audience right out of the gate.

The unofficial count of first day orders for the iPad presents an estimated 120,000 tablets were sold. And according to the information and sources cited in a multitude of media reports, that estimate could very well be a low-end conservative one.

A truly remarkable fact about the iPad’s pre-order explosion is that tens of thousands of consumers are purchasing a device that they have never before seen, touched, or experimented with in person. But if the tablet resonates with consumers as the iPhone has, it’s easy to understand why many industry analysts predict millions of iPads could be sold before the end of 2010.

With the iPad’s already established popularity will come an array of unique digital content offerings to the tablet, like the freshly announced Barnes & Noble e-book reader app. An application designed exclusively for the iPad, the e-reader app will provide access to the B&N eBookstore as well as any ebooks already located in the user’s digital library.

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While many have hailed the iPad as a future mainstay of targeted mobile marketing campaigns, no shortage of advertisers are taking a wait and see approach with regard to the new Apple tablet. However, if the pre-order stats from this past weekend are any indication, the iPad could very well have a much larger than expected audience right out of the gate.

The unofficial count of first day orders for the iPad presents an estimated 120,000 tablets were sold. And according to the information and sources cited in a multitude of media reports, that estimate could very well be a low-end conservative one.

A truly remarkable fact about the iPad’s pre-order explosion is that tens of thousands of consumers are purchasing a device that they have never before seen, touched, or experimented with in person. But if the tablet resonates with consumers as the iPhone has, it’s easy to understand why many industry analysts predict millions of iPads could be sold before the end of 2010.

With the iPad’s already established popularity will come an array of unique digital content offerings to the tablet, like the freshly announced Barnes & Noble e-book reader app. An application designed exclusively for the iPad, the e-reader app will provide access to the B&N eBookstore as well as any ebooks already located in the user’s digital library.

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A new survey published by Compete.com indicates smartphone owners are very receptive to mobile coupons, especially when it comes to grocery coupons that are easily redeemable via barcodes scanned directly from the device.

The survey, which looked at the time of day most smartphone owners use their devices, as well as what mobile advertising concepts they’re most interested in, found that usage during commutes to work and while watching TV were the highest on the list by far.

To find out their receptiveness, the survey asked smartphone owners how interested they were in receiving various types of mobile advertising.  The results were quite interesting, indicating consumers were most interested in receiving grocery coupons (36%), scanable barcodes (29%), offers to save and pursue at leisure (26%), movie theater offers (26%) and ads via SMS when going by a retailer with a promotion / coupon (21%).

The fact that over 1 in 5 smartphone owners would be interested in these top-5 concepts is very promising for the mobile marketing industry, considering that it’s still in the early stages of mainstream adoption.  Given the nature of smartphones, adoption via this user-group will signal what works and what doesn’t- with concepts that do see mainstream adoption via smartphones making their way to feature phones eventually.

It’s not surprising that barcodes, coupons and other retail-oriented mobile technologies are the first to catch on with consumers.  It’s a concept that provides the most value to users, while not interfering with daily usage like some other concepts.

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YouTube is making a dramatic change to its mobile web presence. This week, YouTube revealed that it will begin incorporating advertising services throughout the mobile site.

Naturally, YouTube is optimistic that advertisers will find enormous value in placing adds for their products and services on YouTube’s mobile site – a mobile presence that realized a 160% traffic increase in 2009.

Adds will run across the home, search, and browse pages in both the US and Japanese mobile YouTube sites.

According to the YouTube Biz Blog:

The increased usage of high-end devices like the iPhone and Android is also making mobile advertising easier and more effective for advertisers.

“Test campaigns” are already underway by L’Oreal and Land Rover. Initial results indicate promising rates of click-throughs, positive user experiences, and greater brand awareness.

We’ve already seen some early campaigns run on YouTube’s mobile site by advertisers like Sony (for the DVD release of “District 9″) and Kia, both of whom were able to easily reach their target audience, no matter where they were looking for video.

The addition of advertising space to YouTube’s mobile website is not only of great interest to mobile marketers, it also comes as a blow to rabid YouTube critics claiming that YouTube would falter in finding new ways to create profitable revenue models.

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If you’ve ever used one of the Location-based apps like Foursquare, Gowalla or Brightkite, you’ve gone through the steps of checking in to a location to earn some sort of reward for being there.

Now that these early-stage start-ups have proven the interest in Location-based Services, Twitter and Facebook want in (joining Google, Apple and Nokia in trying to figure out how knowing a users’ location can lead to major mobile ad revenue.) In 2010, in the least, we’ll see both Twitter and Facebook’s take on LBS, a smart move for both companies which are experiencing massive mobile access growth.

Facebook, which according to a new comScore report saw access to its mobile browser grow by 112% in the past year, is expected to add location sharing in its users’ News Feeds, which may more than just intrude on the smaller companies’ courts. An article yesterday in the New York Times cited sources saying that Facebook would announce the news at its F8 developer conference in April.

Meanwhile, Twitter, which saw access to its mobile browser explode 347% in the past year, is already testing out a geolocation feature, which some users have seen in various beta forms as they go about their tweets. Foursquare, still a solid player in the game, will offer a free analytics tool and dashboard to give business owners information and stats about their visitors. These days, there isn’t a company in the consumer mobile space that isn’t interested in Location-based Services, and the market is ripe for innovation.

Knowing where users are is one of the most useful pieces of data available for mobile marketing. Mobile advertising and marketing companies like 1020 Placecast, which send customers offers on their phones when they are near a brick-and-mortar store of a brand they’ve opted to receive messages from, go about the mobile marketing in a different way then would a Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare.

For the social media upstarts of the world, especially Facebook and Twitter, the audience is much wider. For Facebook, the largest social network with over 400 million users who are mostly connected to their real-life friends and family, users will be most likely to share where they are at any given moment. On the other hand, the type of person willing to share their location with the masses on Twitter and Foursquare is still a rare breed. That breed may still be valuable to target and for marketers, but Facebook has the opportunity to offer Location-based Services to a much larger audience, and as always they will try their best to appease privacy and business needs.

Also in the game, big mobile players Google, Apple and Nokia are also working on understanding where advertising dollars and mobile location meet. Apple is looking to use its GPS data for mobile advertising and Nokia is a key player in the international LBS market with their Ovi maps coming integrated with their phones for free.

Google is trying desperately to get its social Buzz going, but it’s struggling to find the sweet spot in social media. TechCrunch states “It’s a mess,” and for the time being, I agree. However, Google’s Location-based Advertising patent won earlier this month may help them in the long run if they can ever get their buzz going. Filed six years ago, the patent is fairly broad. It covers using location for targeting, setting a minimum price bid for an ad, offering performance analytics, and modifying the content of an ad.

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