Mr. Rosenblatt. (LinkedIn.com)

Go back to your lives, citizens! The markets are now closed, and so we can all quit talking about Facebook for at least a couple of hours. Instead, let's turn our attention back to another white-hot one-day IPO candidate attempting to monetize: Foursquare.

Ad Age reports that, on the heels of that paid media platform and those personalized coupons, the company has hired Steven Rosenblatt (already a consultant) as chief revenue officer. Previously he was director of ad sales and strategy at iAd and before that, SVP ad sales at Quattro Wireless, which pretty much cements our expectations, monetization-wise. 

Mr. Rosenblatt hinted to Ad Age about the prospect of "new tools for our merchant partners to be able to reach new customers," though he didn't get any more specific other than to say:

"A special is one tactic that could be used by a merchant, but there's lots of other ways to drive loyalty between merchants and consumers, and that's what our goal is," he said.

Onward and upward, as they say.

When Steve Jobs launched iAd last July, the idea was to provide a mobile advertising platform that took its cues more from television advertising than online advertising, which he deemed "irritating." As with all things Apple, iAd only works within the walled garden—selling ads within apps on iOS devices like iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches.

Advertisers would pay a premium, but could expect an advertising experience perfectly built for its environment.

According to information from the research firm IDC, however, the sales strategy that works so well to sell Apple devices hasn't necessarily paid off in the case of Apple's attempt to dominate mobile ad sales.

The Wall Street Journal says:

"But response so far has been tepid: Marketers say they have been turned off by iAd's high price tag as well as Apple's hard-charging sales tactics and its stringent control over the creative process."

Apple Insider's Daniel Eran Dilger, however, points out that the situation may not be as dire as IDC is making it seem. Last year IDC reported that Apple tied with Google for 19 percent of the market for mobile display ads. This year it's down to the no. 3 with only 15 percent share. Millenium Media took the no. 2 spot and Google's AdMob pulled in first thanks in part to more reasonable prices and the act that its device agnostic.

But as Mr. Dilger points out, Apple, which started with just 9 percent of the market of the market in 2009 (launching into mobile advertising with the acquisition of Quattro Wireless after losing a bid on AdMob to Google) has grown significantly and is still ahead of Jumptap, Microsoft, and Yahoo for example. Google, on the other hand, which 27 percent share in 2009 now has 24 percent share.

With iAd, the Journal reports, Apple is making a rare decision to compromise. In July it lowered the minimum commitment from advertisers and it's now making the pricing more flexible, and is even hosting advertisers on campus—a first for Apple, but standard fare for the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Facebook.

Weighing those moves against the poor overall market for mobile ads, Mr. Dilger says

"Apple's share is actually larger than Microsoft and Yahoo combined, making it curious why the Wall Street Journal and IDC worked so hard to portray iAd's $95 million in revenue as a fumbling failure destined for certain death."

Every Apple Has Its Thorns

The average user may not have noticed some changes to Apple's UDID, but with iOS 5 the company has closed off a valuable source of information for independent mobile ad networks. "A lot of people are scrambling to find alternatives," says Giancarlo Maniaci, the CEO of TapIt. "The UDID allowed people to track what apps a user had installed and give our clients a sense of how well their campaigns were working. Now Apple is the only one who can offer that."

On the location-based advertising side there were similar complaints. Eli Portnoy, who runs the ThinkNear—a service that helps merchants optimize their flow of customers by serving up location based mobile ads and deals—took note of it on his blog: "“So let me get this straight: mobile publishers on iOS are not allowed to pull location to serve more targeted ads. However, Apple owned iAds is allowed to pull location just to serve ads targeted to a customers location regardless of what the publisher says. To add salt to injury, this feature is turned on by default and buried in the menu system not under ‘Location Services,’ but under ‘System Services,’” Mr. Portnoy wrote. “The FTC really needs to crack down on Apple’s anti-competitive practices.”

It's Apple's prerogative to decide what user data from apps on their platform gets shared with third parties. "It's always been a tug of war in terms of Apple passing any type of user data to ad networks," said Devin Radford, a senior manager at Amobee. "The data on a user's location is very valuable, because the whole point of mobile is to deliver these highly targeted ads."

Location, says Tom Limongello, VP of Marketing at Crisp, is a value-added service in mobile advertising: "It's fair for ad networks to bitch, but they can't argue with Apple for wanting a competitive advantage."

Already some advertisers are considering a switch away from Apple. "If we can't get at the most valuable inventory on iOS, then we'll be moving more into Android and mobile web," TapIt's Mr. Maniaci concluded.

This way to the arcade.

Brush up on your ping-pong skills, advertisers, you're about to get to get the Silicon Valley treatment.

With Advertising Week poised to take New York City, the New York Times reports that the sales and marketing teams of internet behemoths like Yahoo, Google, Apple, and yes Facebook are poised to make good on their Manhattan real estate investments. Although Twitter's new Madison Avenue digs somehow don't warrant a mention.

Rather than flying big brands out to the West Coast, they've set up shop in the Flatiron (Apple's new iAd division), Times Square (Yahoo's new digs), Madison Avenue (Facebook and Twitter are new neighbors), and don't forget the Googleplex East on Eighth.

Those companies will be on display at Advertising Week's 200 events with panels on mobile connectivity, online privacy and social networking, but the real ticket are the baller office parties to entertain clients as the digital world goes searching for their one guaranteed revenue stream: ad dollars. Yahoo has purple conference rooms and door pulls in the shape of exclamation points and Google has a heli pad and, Betabeat's persona favorite, a food truck that sells a mean knockoff of the Momofuku compost cookie.

But Facebook is playing up the startup vibe:

The company’s new office evokes a kind of romanticized view of a Silicon Valley start-up, including an open bar, video games and threadbare couches that reflect the dorm-room sensibilities of the roughly 100 employees who work there.

“When you get to that critical point in terms of the number of employees,” said Carolyn Everson, the vice president for global direct sales, “we like to have a look and feel similar to how Facebook looks and feels in Palo Alto and Singapore and London. And with this market — where we’re all on Madison Avenue and entertaining and meeting with clients every day — we wanted to have a proper presence. And we just weren’t able to do that in the limited space that we had across the street.”

We hope the gift bags include hoodies.

A Medialets streaming ad inside the NY Times app.

When Betabeat last wrote about Medialets, we highlighted the fact that they offered rich media solutions through HTML5, meaning advertisers didn't have to worry about tweaking their campaign for Apple versus Android versus RIM. This had helped Medialets to score clients like The New York Times and The Daily, which despite being in bed with Apple during its creation, chose Medialets over iAd for their rich media needs.

Today Medialets announced it would begin offering the same services for the mobile web. "We didn't go into mobile web first, even though there was audience, because the browser wasn't ready," Eric Litman, CEO of Medialets, told Betabeat by phone this morning. "But Apple and Google have been doing a ton of work on this, to the point where the mobile browser can support things like location or an accelerometer."

As for the debate over what will eventually triumph, the closed app experience or the open mobile web, Mr. Litman says it's all fairly academic. "It's an ongoing debate, and no can tell you how this will all end. What out clients want is a cross platform solution that allows them to avoid stress. We deliver that--along with top flight analytics on the back end that allow them to measure in detail how their campaigns are performing."

Mr. Litman says he sees two different kinds of relationships developing on the mobile front. "For the things you do every day--check the weather or read the news--you want a premium app experience. That's what we do in app with clients like the NY Times or The Weather Channel. For the one-time things that come up, you might prefer a lightweight, mobile web solution, and that's what we're going to start offering as of today."

Betabeat has written before about Medialets, a fast growing New York start-up that's beating Apple on its home turf, capturing the lions share of blue chip publishers on platforms like the iPad.

Today Medialets introduced Muse, a self-service platform that lets publishers plug their "creative" into a set of templates and easily layer features like mapping, social widgets and photo galleries on top.

Considering how quickly the app ecosystem is growing, this seems like a big opportunity. A lot of smaller developers are going to be interested in using rich media ads when they develop for smartphones and tablets, but won't have the budget for a $500,000 iAd campaign.

Medialets claims that users can create an ad in as little as 15 minutes, which raises the possibility of folks firing off some half-cocked ads. Luckily there is also a collaborative workspace where users can spend a little time thinking about their message before firing off a Groupon Superbowl style mistake.

But when it came to the advertising that would be featured in The Daily, the logical choice for ad placement, Apple's iAd, lost out to the New York start-up Medialets, which provides a similar service with a few key differences. Medialets provides the technical platform for publishers and agencies to collaborate on creating rich media advertising, and instead of taking a percentage of the ad revenue for apps — which is Apple's model, to the tune of 40 percent — they get a small ad-serving fee each time the spot is shown.

"As Apple continues to expand its boundaries into the core parts of many publisher's business, there is a growing opportunity for alternatives," says CEO Eric Litman. "From a technical perspective iAd is very compelling, but in terms of business, it just doesn't fit with the way publishers think about the world."

Founded in 2008, Medialets has since signed on over 100 top media players, including The New York Times, WSJ, CondeNast, Hearst, NY Mag and CBS.

"The entire industry was using Flash, and then the iPad came along and didn't support that, so everyone had to scramble to figure out what the best new tool was," says Marc Frons, who runs the technology group at the NY Times. "Medialets has emerged as a new leader."

Medialets shares detailed campaign reports with publishers and agencies, while Apple has increasingly cut publishers off from user data. And because Medialets relies on HTML5, publishers don't have to worry about Apple versus Android verus RIM. "Advertisers don't want to think about devices, they want to think about audiences," says Litman.

These competitive advantages are showing up in the bottom line. Medialets' premium inventory across iPhone, iPad and Android devices increased nearly 300% in fourth quarter of 2010. To keep up, the company has expanded from five original employees in 2008, to 55 today.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper