Buying mobile inventory is a messy business. The space is very disjointed and lacks real transparency. Industry observers obsess about why more money isn't going into the mobile display space. The reason is basically down to poor infrastructure. There is no real established ad serving infrastructure for mobile display - fact. And because of the absence of this crucial piece in the mobile eco-system, big agencies have been reluctant to put decent chunks of ad spend into the mobile channel. Now that Doubleclick has integrated a mobile ad serving functionality into DFA that's likely to change. I'm not blowing the trumpet for Google here, but think of this announcement from the perspective of the large media buying agencies. They simply don't want to use different ad servers for mobile and display, and have separate teams servicing both channels. In many cases it would be considered a step too far in terms of cost and resource.

That's probably why you've seen little big agency activity in the mobile ad space (iAd being the exception), and why the ad budgets flowing into the mobile display channel have been anaemic. There's also the little issue of tracking campaigns across mobile. A lot of campaign reporting relies heavily on numbers supplied from mobile ad networks and publishers, making it nearly impossible to verify CTRs and campaign performance being reported by the sell-side. A lot of the time the agencies are blind. The trafficking of ads is also an issue for agencies. A lot of the trafficking has to be done manually by the ad networks or publisher. It's very inefficient, and difficult to manage. Now I'm just wondering with the release of Mobile for DFA how many ad nets and indeed publishers will be integrated with DFA Mobile. Will it just be Admob to start with? I would love to know the thoughts of any “independent” mobile ad nets out there.

Here are the new DFA Mobile features in full:

Serve mobile ads in DFA

Trafficking mobile ads in DFA is easy. You use the same process as you would for any campaign in DFA. Mobile is just another ad type and placement type that you would select within the DFA trafficking interface. You don’t even need to create a separate campaign for your mobile ads in DFA, you can include them in any existing campaign alongside the rest of your online creatives assets.

Serve mobile ads to a variety of mobile platforms

DFA mobile ads are designed to be trafficked on inventory that is optimized for mobile browsers or within a mobile application. Tailor your message to each of the major mobile platforms and automatically serve the appropriate Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) creative size to a broad array of mobile devices. You also have many of the existing DFA targeting features at your disposal such as day-parting, keywords and geo-targeting.

Integrated reporting

With fully integrated reporting you get mobile impression and click data all in the same place as the standard DFA reports. There is also a mobile-specific report which shows a breakdown of stats for your mobile placement by wireless carrier, mobile platform and country.

Mobile-optimized tags

The mobile placement in DFA generates tags that are optimized to run on a wide variety of mobile devices ensuring that your campaign has the reach you desire. These tags work seamlessly with the Doubleclick Mobile publisher platform and have been tested successfully on a number of other leading publisher technology providers. If you’re a publisher and want to accept DFA mobile placements, just log into your site directory account or email sd-support@google.com.

Standard ads go mobile too

As many mobile phones come with full Internet browsers, you’ll often find that your standard ads are being viewed on mobile devices too. So, alongside the mobile placements we’re also releasing mobile browser targeting for standard ads. This gives you the opportunity to control the creative you serve alongside standard web content when it is viewed on a mobile device (e.g., iPhone, iPad or Android devices).