Lot21 Develops Ads for AvantGo Mobile Portal

Interactive agency Lot21 on Thursday launched a new campaign that experiments with placements for mobile devices, creating ads for the AvantGo content portal.

The campaign, for software e-tailer Intraware, will appear for two weeks on the AvantGo homepage, where users start before accessing content from publishers like the New York Times, Salon.com, CNET and Wired News.

“Lot21 is constantly exploring opportunities for its clients which extend beyond the Web,” said Lot21 president and chief executive officer Kate Everett-Thorp.

“AvantGo is the largest content service on handheld and palmtop devices which makes it a natural extension to our clients’ campaigns.”

Publishers are themselves experimenting with monetizing their AvantGo pages, which are normal Web sites scaled down to be appropriate for mobile devices. Wired News is running a campaign from Sprint. The Industry Standard is running a house ad to drive subscriptions to its print magazine. EDS has placed ads on Salon.com, which let users enter their email addresses so the company can contact them later.

Agencies and ad serving companies have lately been experimenting with a wide variety of ways of placing ads in wireless or mobile content. For now, at least in the United States, advertisers are likely to be tech-oriented companies like Intraware, simply because the user is probably more tech-savvy than your average Internet user.