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Verve Wireless to ‘Mobilize’ Content for MediaNews Group, Belo, Others

MediaNews Group, Belo, Hearst and Cox Newspapers have all penned partnerships with Verve Wireless to create mobile content for their newspapers.

Verve Wireless allows local media companies and advertisers to extend their reach to mobile devices across all the major carriers, according to the company. Verve will create a platform for the distribution of mobile content for papers including the Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer (now an online-only property), and Examiner.com.

Verve already “mobilizes” content for more than 450 local media properties.

Local media publishers like Media General’s Richmond Times Dispatch and its portal (Richmond.com) are using Verve’s proprietary publishing and mobile advertising system to extend their communities and readership onto mobile phones as well as to use their local ad sales teams’ knowledge and existing relationships with local businesses to offer mobile ad solutions.

“We have been advertising in print and online with Media General and are quite impressed with the results we have gotten from our initial mobile campaigns,” Brent Barkin, vp and director of e-commerce for Shoe Station, a regional shoe store in the Southeast, with an online retail store at Shoestation.com, says. “We created a mobile campaign that included a text code that we added to our website and to the paper receipts for in store purchases. Within minutes we were seeing responses that converted into sales.”

Verve says its local mobile ad network covers the top 200 DMAs in the U.S. “We are serving over a million page views in each of the top DMAs, and even in the smaller markets, there are increasingly larger numbers of mobile views. People want to stay connected with news and events that are occurring in their communities, and mobile is quickly becoming the preferred method,” says Tom Kenney, president and co-founder of Verve.

Local advertising via mobile will be the next big ad trend, The Kelsey Group says (via Editor & Publisher). The Kelsey Group says local mobile ad revenue will hit $3.1 billion by 2013, up from $160 million in 2008. The Mobile Marketing Association claims that mobile marketing budgets will jump 26% this year.

Newspapers are struggling to expand the options they offer advertisers in order to halt, and hopefully reverse, the migration of ad dollars to the web. Newspapers are losing market share, and are expected by 2010 to drop from the third largest ad medium to the fourth, behind interactive marketing. Interactive will have a 17% share, while newspapers will maintain just 12.4%, according to GroupM’s latest forecast.