Activity in the location-based advertising market is growing rapidly – and not just in North America.

That's according to Ramy Yared, managing director of adsmobi, the newly-established media buying arm of mobile advertising firm Smaato.

New York-based Yared said location-based services have been flagged up as the “next big thing” for a while. But, speaking to GPS Business News at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, he said client interest is definitely on the rise now: “It's the first time that we are seeing real traction in it.”

A recent report from JP Morgan’s analyst Imran Kahn forecast that mobile advertising is set to grow 45% to USD3.8 billion in 2010.

Headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, Smaato has been running LBA campaigns in the US for brands such as Sears and Cirque du Soleil, according to Yared. He said the type of location data provided depends on the publisher.

“It can be longitude-latitude, city name or a zip code,” he said. “This information is used to cross-reference with campaign bases and services.

“Advertising is displayed according to the location of the user. In some cases we can get down as narrow as a street – or we can go as broad as a metropolitan area.”

iPhone Driving Campaigns
Yared said LBA campaigns had so far been limited to the US – and almost exclusively to the iPhone.

He said this was only because adoption had been quicker there: “Most of it is iPhone driven because it has a lot of presence in the US. That doesn't mean we are not interested in other territories.”

Yared said there was no direct resistance to other platforms and he expected it to begin opening up.

He said LBA on Smaato's SOMA mobile advertising platform can also be offered on the Symbian and Android platforms, mobile internet and WAP handsets.

“We are able to do it on other devices. We are not limited to a specific platform or territory,” he said. “But we need to find partners.”

Yared said adsmobi was launched last week and is competing with the other mobile ad networks. He said clients would get access to Smaato's publisher traffic.

“The agency was set up to avoid any conflict of interest with Smaato. To keep the core business separate,” he said. “But we also see big potential for a separate entity to perform on its own.”