Reuters Retools Mobile Site, HP is Launch Sponsor

p>Reuters has debuted a new version of its mobile Web site and signed Hewlett-Packard as the launch sponsor. The company’s U.S. mobile content channel is now 100 percent ad-supported.

New content areas on the Reuters WAP site include U.S. news, world news, investing, technology, the Internet, science, politics and health. It also added weather reports and stock-quotes. The site has been in beta for the past month and soft-launched last week.

Creative for the HP campaign consists of a small display banner at the top-center of the page with the copy “HP. Brilliantly Simple.” In addition to the front page, the ads appear on index pages, the first page of articles, and the full article page. The HP sponsorship was brokered by Zenith Optimedia, San Francisco, and the ad creative comes courtesy of Goodby Silverstein & Partners.

HP’s sponsorship is part of a global integrated campaign with online and offline components. The company has also secured placements on Reuters.com and in the publisher’s RSS feeds.

“All our mobile services in the U.S. are 100 percent free and ad-supported,” said Stephen Smyth, VP of emerging media for Reuters. “We’re making a strong statement about where we believe the mobile business is going in the U.S. Some of that [conclusion] came from our experience with Avantgo, where we’ve been making money from advertising for over two years now. We’ve seen an increase in rates on that platform.”

He added, “Much like the online video business, there’s not much supply, so we decided to help the industry with that problem.”

In addition to its off-deck WAP site, Reuters distributes content onto several carrier decks, including those of Sprint and Verizon. While as a general rule, mobile operators don’t support third party advertising on their decks, they’ve expressed interest in doing so. When they do, Reuters will likely share revenue from ads sold there. Smyth said Reuters is actively working with carrier partners and the MMA on possible solutions.

Reuters also offers news alerts via short message service, which it launched last September as a premium service. In March, the company began offering them free with ads.