There are just eight business days between now and the 2011 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony, headline-sponsored by Upstream. Today, we continue our preview of the finalists in each category with a look at the entries shortlisted for the Most Effective Mobile Advertising Platform/Network.

The Awards Ceremony takes place in London on 3 November. If you havent yet booked your place at the event, theres still time – but tickets are selling fast. Right now though, lets take a look at the companies and campaigns vying for the honours in the Ad Platform/Network category, in alphabetical order.

Adfonic – Adfonic
European independent global mobile advertising network Adfonic has seen considerable growth in the past year. Its network of publisher sites and apps grew to 8,000, while its monthly ad requests across the network grew to 15bn.

Adfonic works on thousands of ad campaigns per month, working with brands such as Peugeot, Yell, Tesco, Groupon and Google, providing its clients with access to 100m unique mobile users. Advanced targeting options enable advertisers to select audiences not only by gender, age, country, device and platform, but also by geo-location at postal town level in the UK, and State or DMA region in the US. The company also offers contextual keyword tagging to ensure greater relevancy and fit with surrounding publisher content, granular reporting, and a developer wiki and SDK for iOS and Android.

Blismobile – Blis App Zone
Three years in the making, the Blis App Zone is a new product that provides targeted, non-incentivised app distribution and tracking functionality for advertising clients. BlisMobile provides a global network of wi-fi hotspots at premium sites, including airports, train stations, bus stops, telephone boxes, cafés, hotels and shopping centres, and offers a global inventory of premium advertising space over the wi-fi connection at these hotspots.

BlisMobile offers the end-user a chance to engage with a brand and download a sponsored app from one of its selected relevant clients. Whether they choose to engage or not, they can still access the internet – there is a clear option to ‘skip straight to internet’.

Campaigns aim to push apps to the top of download charts, and the likes of Google and Amazon Audible has run campaigns on the platform.

madvertise – madvertise Mobile Advertising Marketplace
Berlin-based madvertise aims to facilitate a fast, efficient, and transparent connection between advertisers and mobile publishers. madvertise’s mobile advertising marketplace lets advertisers access a comprehensive mobile-only network, giving them the opportunity to carefully target their audience.

On the other side of the mobile coin, mobile site owners and app developers engage with madvertise to leverage the company’s resources for monetising their content.

The company’s KatAPPult app solution is unique to the European landscape, and guarantees a Top 25 App Store position for a minimum of 24 hours. The company also runs a Developer Fund that gives developers an incentive to become part of the network, with a view to providing greater reach for advertisers.

The company constantly updates its technology, with a particular focus on location-based advertising campaigns for its clients.

Placecast – ShopAlerts by Placecast
Placecast’s ShopAlerts platform enables companies to deliver geo-triggered messages to their customers in real-time. Founded in 2005, Placecast was born from the idea that location would emerge as the core of the mobile experience, and the company’s ShopAlerts SMS/MMS platform works on the premise that consumers appreciate the ease of using SMS.

For this reason, Placecast created ShopAlerts as an SMS/MMS platform, which works on 97 per cent of all phones – not just smartphones. The company also offers a rich experience for smartphones, and has recently launched support for location-based push notifications that can be sent from a retailer’s app – a pertinent feature given the current desire of retailers to drive footfall into their shops.

With the overall goal to provide a ubiquitous platform capable of mass scale, Placecast continues to innovate in location-based advertising.

Smaato – Smaato Open Mobile Advertising Platform (SOMA)
Smaato started life as an app developer, but soon moved to create solutions for monetising apps through advertising. It now runs the mobile advertising optimisation platform SOMA (Smaato Open Mobile Advertising). More than 35,000 app developers and premium publishers have signed up with Smaato to monetise their content in more than 230 countries, reaching 150m mobile unique users every month.

SOMA’s aggregates more than 60 leading ad networks globally to maximise mobile advertising revenues. Through an open API and a wide range of SDKs, SOMA can be easily integrated with ad networks, ad inventory owners (publishers, developers and operators) and third party ad technology providers.
Based in San Francisco, Smaato has a European HQ in Hamburg, Germany, and an Asia-Pacific base in Singapore. 

Txtlocal – Txtlocal
Txtlocal provides clients with the technology to run cost-effective text-messaging campaigns. The company can take SMS campaigns beyond the sending of thousands of texts – offering multimedia messaging and sophisticated API Gateways for sending messages from clients’ websites.

The company’s Txtlocal Control Panel allows its customers to create their own campaigns, offering a completely automated, self-service system. The user can manage the creative of the campaign, develop messages, and pay for the non-contractual service through an easy-to-use, feature-rich interface.

Additional services, include the ability to deploy shortcodes for lead generation and payments; mobile web building services; an email-to-SMS Gateway that allows businesses to send and receive text messages from any email program; and sophisticated campaign measurement and analysis tools.

To book your place at the Awards Ceremony, please email [email protected] or telephone +44 (0) 77696 74824. The event is strictly limited to 250 people. Tables of 10 cost £2,050, while individual seats are priced at £225.

And dont forget theres a native iOS app, a hybrid Android app, and a web app for other platforms, for the event. More details on that here.