Microsoft Signs Mobile Ad Deal With Hyatt

Hyatt already has an iPhone app for users to book rooms with their mobile phone. Now they signed a large-scale ad deal with Microsoft

The mobile advertising market has seen some spectacular movements lately. Most recently, Microsoft has signed a Deal with Hyatt to display the Hotel chain’s ads on Verizon phones. Microsoft has since last month been the default search engine on all Verizon devices.

While details of the deal has not yet been disclosed, market insiders anticipate that the ads will take the user to the Hyatt mobile portal, and allow them to search for and book rooms on the fly - worldwide. Another important priority for Hyatt will most probably be to sign up current and future hotel guests to their loyalty program. The entry barrier for purchasing goods and services (including hotel reservations) on mobile phones is still quite high, as compared to web-based sales, thus one would expect that Hyatt would do a lot to educate their users on options that the mobile portal has to offer.

Advertising on mobile platforms (mainly portals and a fair share of permission-based SMS marketing) is anticipated to generate revenues of 7.2 billion by 2012, according to Sanford C. Bernstein. That is far from today’s level, and will require a great deal of new initiatives in the market. Microsoft paid $650 million to win the Verizon deal. In return, they managed to generate 19 million search queries during the first 20 days of operation as default search portal.

Tags: deal, hyatt, microsoft, Mobile advertising, mobile payment

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Mobile advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.