Microsoft’s new Windows Phone ad tells Apple and Samsung fans to stop fighting

Microsoft has created what I consider a brilliant new Windows Phone ad that tells Apple and Samsung followers to stop arguing with each other all the time. It’s true that the Android vs. iOS battle has evolved nowadays into an Apple vs. Samsung battle. Microsoft says, “Don’t fight. Switch.” and just buy a Windows Phone handset instead.

The ad takes place at a wedding. The groom’s side of the wedding all own Galaxy phones and the bride’s side all have iPhones. When someone with a Galaxy phone takes a picture, an iPhone user on the other side makes a snarky comment about how big it is. They start going back and forth until everyone at the wedding is throwing fists. Two people who seem to be working at the wedding stand calmly together as they use their Nokia Lumia 920 phones.

It’s not very often you hear the terms “Microsoft” and “brilliant new advertisement” together in one sentence, but this Windows Phone ad is really just quite well done. It gives off a good impression that Windows Phone is superior while all the inferior little brats argue, so to speak. I’m reminded of the “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” episode of the Twilight Zone when the humans destroy themselves with their own fighting and finger-pointing while the aliens end up getting to sit back and watch effortlessly.

But enough chit chat. You can watch the Windows Phone ad in its entirety right here.

Nokia Ad Makes iPhone Users Zombies

Nokia capitalizes on the zombie craze in its latest ad for the Lumia 925, targeting the iPhone 5 and its camera. You can watch the clever ad below.

It seems like the diss ads are piling up lately, making the mobile phone market look like the United States during election season. Microsoft has had some gems lately, and the Galaxy S series ads have long taken cheap shots at Apple devices’ shortcomings. This latest ad from Nokia shows a group of pale-faced, red-eyed zombies stalking a man on the night-time streets of a city.

The joke is on the iPhone camera, as the zombiedom is passed through the use of its flash. The zombies are washed out, pale and red-eyed due to the use of the iPhone 5′s back facing LED flash, much like subjects in flash photos often end up.

The Lumia 925 has excellent l0w light capabilities, unlike pretty much any other smart phone camera currently available, its CCD can take clear night-time images without the need for flash.

So, surprisingly, the joke isn’t that iPhone users are zombie like followers (a common theme in Samsung ads), it’s about the camera! Apple generally tends to take the high road with this type of advertising, and doesn’t bite back. But maybe an Apple ad focusing on the plusses of the iPhone camera will be coming soon?

Qriously Raises $3.5 Million Led By Spark Capital For Its Question-Based Mobile Ad Network

Qriously, the “question network” that’s trying to reinvent the mobile ad, has announced that it’s closed a $3.5 million Series A round led by Spark Capital. Previous backer Accel Partners also participated. This brings the total raised by the London/New York-based company to $5.1 million, having closed $1.6 million in seed funding in March 2011.

Meanwhile, Qriously says it will use the new funds to expand its U.S. and European footprint and, more interestingly, to push its new mobile ad product based on what it calls “opinion targeting” — an approach that essentially uses sentiment as the basis for targeted advertising.

When Qriously originally launched, CEO and co-founder Christopher Kahler described the startup’s mission as wanting to “democratise mass insight”. Through an SDK offered to mobile app developers, Qriously lets advertisers display questions instead of traditional mobile ads so that they can measure sentiment in realtime but also based on a user’s location. Advertisers can be ad agencies, marketers, research companies, or anybody who wants to sample the opinions and sentiment of mobile app users. A cost-per-answer revenue model is used rather than CPM or CPC.

Key to Qriously’s proposition is the User Experience it employs when displaying questions. Onscreen controls enable a participant’s sentiment on a particular issue to be measured on a sliding scale as an alternative to a purely rigid yes or no or multiple choice. Additionally, users can see how their opinion differs from the sample overall. And crucially, all of this takes place without the user leaving each app in which Qriously is deployed, which I originally likened to Apple’s iAds concept. An app within an app, if you will.

Since launch, the startup has extended its offering with products aimed at helping app developers get feedback and helping advertisers measure the effectiveness of an ad by displaying a related question after a set amount of time that it’s been on display.

Which brings us nicely to the company’s latest product, dubbed “asQvertising”, being announced along with today’s new funding. Terrible name aside, it works by displaying a question, and based on the answer given, a subsequent sentiment/interest-based targeted ad is then shown. In this way, says the company, consumers get to “self-select” mobile ads by answering questions.

Heyzap Says Its Mobile Ad Network Has Grown To 800 Games (And Makes Up The Majority Of Its Revenue)

Back in March, I wrote about how Heyzap was introducing advertising to its mobile gaming platform. Now co-founder Jude Gomila says the company has become a significant player in mobile advertising.

Specifically, Gomila sent along the chart showing the growth in publishers running Heyzap ads and the corresponding growth in ad impressions over the past six months. You can’t tell exactly where things stand now, because there’s no Y-axis to the chart. However, Gomila did note that Heyzap ads are now running in 800 games (it was 350 in March), and that number is also growing quickly. He also said that the publishers advertising with Heyzap include big names like Zynga and DeNA.

In the six months since the program launched, ad revenue has grown to the point that it already makes up the majority of its revenue. As a result, Heyzap is looking to expand its team beyond the current 25-person workforce.

“This does change our priorities,” Gomila said. “We want to offer full monetization tools for game developers. There’s also opportunity for a lot more automation.”

Gomila refers to Heyzap’s ad program as its “game discovery network” — basically, when publishers pay to promote their games, Heyzap will start recommending that game through interstitial units that pop up in the games. Those recommendations are also based on the gaming data that users share on Heyzap’s social platform, so Gomila said the discovery network and the social tools “go hand-in-hand.”

He argued that this is a much better approach for the mobile gaming ecosystem, because Heyzap can recommend games that users are actually likely to enjoy.