Digital advertising has embedded itself firmly on the agenda at this year’s Mobile World Congress, with brands including BMW Mini, Intel, The North Face and Tesco, all announcing significant programmatic advertising deals at the four-day conference.

Advertising has long had a profile at the event, but mainly the topics of discussion have centred around hackneyed phrases such as “The year of mobile”, and “mobile as the glue of your comms strategy”. While mobile’s potential as a transformative media channel is undoubted, the show has historically seen little in the way of substantive announcements. Until 2014 that is.

With 75,000 registered attendants from every strata of the telecoms industry in attendance, it’s easy to see why mobile advertising has taken a bit of a backseat in recent years. This is despite having keynote speakers such as Google’s Eric Schmidt in years gone by (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was this year’s keynote speaker).

But this year has proven exceptional with actual brands such as P&G and Unilever announcing serious commitments to their mobile advertising strategy.

On day one of the conference, Unilever announced a tie-up with Ireland-based programmatic firm Brandtone to implement its automated advertising tool Konnect to target mobile users in high growth markets such as India, where vast swathes of the population will have their first experience of the web via a mobile device.

This was in addition to Millennial Media and AppNexus announcing the further announcement of their mobile ad exchange MMX.

Advertisers go native

However, another palpable trend was the drift towards native ad formats, with OpenX using the event to announce that it is beta-testing what it claims is the digital advertising industry’s largest native mobile ad exchange, dubbed Native O|X.

OpenX is trialling Native O|X with publishers IconApps and Tagged, advertising firms RUN and mediasmart, as well as mobile media specialist Celtra, before inviting more premium publishers to come on board.

Native O|X lets advertisers create native ad formats - both display and video advertising formats available - and then choose where to place them in a host of mobile apps that were not previously available to advertisers via programmatic advertising channels to advertisers.