Taking advantage of the phenomenal interest in the iPhone, AdMob has created a global iPhone ad marketplace featuring new interactive ad formats created specifically to take advantage of all the device has to offer.

These new ad formats will work in both a Web browser and native iPhone applications. They meld graphics with one of eight iPhone-specific actions that take advantage of an iPhone application's ability to provide one-click access to iTunes, the App Store, audio, video, making a phone call, maps, the Web or a custom interactive user experience.

Additionally, AdMob said that it's giving away $1 million worth of advertising to developers to promote their iPhone applications and services. Interested developers can apply for inclusion in the program at http://admob.com/iphone.

Advertisers already working with the new ad formats include Ford, EA, Land Rover, Jaguar and Universal Pictures among others. You can check out examples of the new ads in the video below.

Coincident with its mobile leadership forum on Monday, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released "A Mobile Advertising Overview." The new report, the first from the IAB focusing on mobile advertising, discusses how mobile is becoming a vital platform for interactive advertising and outlines the various opportunities available for marketers and advertisers.

The goal of the report is to educate media companies, agencies, marketers and users about the current options for mobile advertising and show how the mobile platform is a viable piece of the interactive advertising ecosystem. It includes a number of mobile ad campaign case studies designed to help marketers and agencies with campaign execution.

"A Mobile Advertising Overview" can be downloaded from www.iab.net/mobileplatform.

At the Interactive Advertising Board's Leadership Forum: Mobile seminar in New York, several mobile experts said the medium is increasingly going mainstream and is proving more effective than traditional channels, MediaPost reports.

For marketers, "the key is to figure out 'what am I providing to the consumer that's useful' and they will follow you," said Vladimir Edelman, CEO of Ansible, Interpublic's mobile marketing agency, in the article. That means tailoring campaigns to take advantage of the specific advantages of cell phones. (And no, that doesn't necessarily mean to get all creepy and track a user's every move.)

Eric Bader, president and co-founder of mobile marketing firm Brand in Hand, gave an example of a mobile campaign for Tide, which offered on-the-go tips on how to treat certain stains. And moderator Julie Ask, a research director at JupiterResearch, said half of marketers surveyed by Jupiter say they are spending $50,000 or less on mobile campaigns, the report said—although Bader and others are seeing some mobile budgets in the $250k to $750k range as well.

We're not quite sure how to tackle this one, so we're just going to put it out there. MediaPost reports that T-Mobile's recent U.K. ad may be, um, testing the bounds of good taste:

"In 'More minutes for 30 pounds,' a veterinarian wearing a long yellow glove apparently puts his arm up a cow's rear end, searching for a better deal than most mobile companies offer."

The report said that the campaign, which was created by ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, takes a different approach than their ad running in the U.S.—we'll say!—though both "focus on consumers finding more minutes to talk to their hearts' content."

Amy Shea, EVP at marketing research firm Brand Keys, said in the report that most U.S. consumers would accept the UK ad, mainly because cows are not considered pets. "For most of us, they are food, and we won't respond the same to a bovine with a sardonic look as we do to Fluffy or Rex in any sort of distress," she said in the article. "There also is a rather large contingent that likes humor. This certainly fits, or should I say the glove fits."

If you REALLY want to see the video, click Continued... and don't say we didn't warn you.

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According to panelists speaking at the OMMA Behavioral conference on Monday, behavioral marketing via mobile devices is still a few years away, MediaPost reports:

"Consumers are increasingly using mobile devices to access the Internet and make online purchases, creating trails of data detailing their Web behaviors. And in theory, mobile devices offer a geographic component for behavioral targeting," according to Elgin Kim, the head of sales, West, for Nokia Interactive. Kim also said that Nokia achieved 40% conversion rates with ads based on behavioral data, specifically about people who watched movie trailers on their cell phones.

But the report said that mobile advertising is still in its infancy, and simply does not offer the scalability and capabilities needed to make behavioral marketing profitable, as other panelists countered at the conference. "I don't know if mobile advertising is even there yet at the basic level, so behavioral is probably a subject for a couple years from now," said Chris Hansen, vice president of performance marketing for 360i, according to the article.

As it stands, only one fifth of U.S. cell phone users receive a marketing text message of some kind in a given month, versus three quarters in Europe, the report said.

Jordan Berman, executive director of media innovation for AT&T Mobility, and Scott Kelliher, director of mobile advertising at Virgin Mobile USA, represented the carrier segment at the IAB's Mobile Leadership Forum. AT&T may have the iPhone and 71 million subscribers compared with the MVNO's five million or so customers, but when it comes to mobile advertising, both companies recognize that the key to success is recognizing that the consumer is at the heart of the situation.

When questioned about the most pressing mobile advertising issues facing their companies, Berman listed trying to align the entire organization to focus on the advertiser as a new type of customer and then connecting the advertiser to the subscriber "in a way that results in deliverables." Being much smaller, Virgin is working with its customers to come up with different ways to offer the branded content they want, Kelliher said.

Berman brought up the "halo effect" AT&T - and its rivals - are seeing thanks to the iPhone. He pointed out that Apple's iPhone not only creates more visibility for AT&T, but for the mobile Web as a whole. It "raises the bar," he said with a cringe for invoking AT&T's wireless ad-speak, and said that consumers with other phones are now looking at their devices and wondering if they can access the Internet.

Kelliher concurred with Berman, noting that the iPhone also made Virgin's customers look more deeply into their phones to see what they can do.

Throughout the various sessions at the IAB's first mobile advertising event two themes resonated: "It's all about the consumer" and "the real impact of mobile advertising is what happens after the click-through."

Some other takeaway snippets from the forum, which was held in New York on Monday.

Gary Schwartz, president and CEO of Impact Mobile noted that the role of mobile advertising is to take all the marketing material that's out there and make it clickable.

Mike Anderson, lead consultant for Live Nation's ConcertVision program, discussed how his company, the top concert promoter, has already embraced mobile and has plans to integrate it even deeper into its business model.

To read about it, and other tidbits from the conference, click continued.

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Behavioral targeting is a buzz word in mobile advertising these days. Cell phones give advertisers access to data they've never had before, since they can not only track local searches, what videos a subscriber watches, and so on, but they also can potentially access the handset's GPS chipset.

So we're not surprised that David Martin, the director of interactive media for Ignited, predicted "It's only going to get creepier" during the OMMA Behavioral conference on Monday, MediaPost reports. He said that "today's behavioral marketing is just a taste of what's to come."

On the plus side, Martin emphasized that marketers will also move to moderate the discipline in ways that protect privacy. Still, Martin said that "Minority Report isn't so far away," including the delivery of behaviorally targeted advertising in public places, according to the report.

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GigaOM has a bleak report about the state of Silicon Valley—just the thing for a cheery Monday morning. "At the turn of the century, everything went to hell with the dot-com bust," the report said. "Then the pendulum started to swing the other way; the pessimism that once reigned supreme was being replaced by wild-eyed optimism. Now Silicon Valley is in for a long-overdue reality check, one that should worry one and all. Why? Because the news coming out of advertising-focused companies is not good."

Despite our sarcasm, the report may be on to something. It goes on to list several examples of bleak earnings reports from stalwarts such as ValueClick, Time Warner's Platform-A, Microsoft, and even Google, who reported 39 percent profit growth but still fell short of analyst expectations with regard to online advertising. A drop in online and mobile advertising would have repercussions throughout the tech industry.

Eighty-eight percent of mobile phone users in the UK are willing to view a brief pre-roll ad if it means they get the content for free, according to a recent survey conducted by Dynamic Logic on behalf of 4th Screen Advertising.

The study, which ran from March 31-May 9 in an effort to test just how effective pre-roll commercials are, included 15-second ads from Citroen and LG, among others.

Viewer response was "very positive," especially from the highly coveted young male demo, says a NetImperative report on the research.

Some 59% of the participants said they were more interested in the brand after watching the ad, and 62% said the mobile ad "gave a good impression of the brands being advertised," according to the article.