Cookie-based ad targeting has been around for a long time, Gian Fulgoni, Chairman and Co-Founder, comScore, the networking lunch's moderator said by way of introduction, but it seems just to be catching on now. Oct 12 1999 was the launch of Engage, the fist behavioral targeting ad network, says Dave Zinman, VP and GM, Display Advertising, Yahoo, who was there. "The fatal flaw of Engage," he says, "was that no one wanted to pay a premium for it. The world of search educated the market and they are now willing to pay." "Behavioral targeting itself has not changed …

Several speakers on the mobile app panel at OMMA Global confirmed that Android is a fast-growing and increasingly important part of the smartphone app market. According to stats form Canalys, Android smartphone sales increased more than 1,000% from 2008-2009, rising from 660,000 to 7.8 million in that period. More recently, for the U.S. market ComScore found that, in the three months from November 2009 to January 2010, Android's market share in the U.S. smartphone market jumped from 2.8% to 7.1%, while Microsoft Windows Mobile fell from 19.7% to 15.7%. During this period Apple's share of the smarphone market remained stable, with a …

The panel on online publishing and mobile apps at OMMA Global got me wondering: how many iPhones have been sold? Turns out, a whole friggin bunch. Worldwide, 47.8 million iPhones had been sold by the end of 2009, and the number is expected to rise to 55.5 million by the end of the first quarter of 2010.  In the U.S. market, 21.6 million had been sold by the end of 2009; if each unit sold remained in use and represented one mobile subscriber, and there was no overlap with other mobile subscriptions, that would represent 9.3% of the 234 million mobile subscribers …

Branded games -- games concocted entirely around a brand -- are another flash-in-the-pan phenomenon, according to the social game panel. Ubisoft's Krause and Zynga's Goldberg both said the development costs for a high-quality, engaging game are simply too high to make it worthwhile for brands to create their own online gaming experiences.

Asked for his predictions about social gaming in the next 12 months, Lee Blickstein said the coming year will be “about distribution, getting outside the walled garden of Facebook.� Blickstein said game publishers are moving to reach users by multiple channels, adding that this will be an important step in scaling up social game advertising.

Obviously any kind of product integration depends on contextual appropriateness, and the panelists at the social game discussion had some examples of “do’s� and “don’ts.� Adam Krause, senior manager of online advertising for Ubisoft Entertainment, recalled a promotion for Assassin’s Creed where game players could employ one of the killers in another virtual world. On the other hand Krause cautioned that “you wouldn’t, say, try to put Craftsman Tools in the World of Warcraft.�

Because advertising is still an add-on for social gaming, advertising needs to be standardized to make it easier for publishers, since their primary concern is game play and gamer experience. The concern isn’t just the appearance of the advertising, and how the game player interacts with it, but also how it fits with the back-end logistics, according to Zynga’s Robert Goldberg: “If the advertising impacts either our players or our production cycles, we won’t do it. So we need standardization to make this work.�

I didn't realize so many people have concluded in-game advertising, at least as originally conceived, is dead. But that seemed to be the consensus at the OMMA Global panel on social game  advertising. Moderator Mark Friedler, the publisher of Industry Gamers, got a laugh when he asked the audience: “Does anyone remember in-game advertising? Right, nobody wants to.�  Friedler said planning and executing in-game advertising was far-too labor intensive and complex, in short, a “trainwreck.� Glad I missed it.

Currently online casual gaming is still experimenting with ad models, in part because it's core business has been located elsewhere -- and that's a virtue, according to Zynga's Robert Goldberg: "The good thing is that this is a medium that is not ad-supported, it’s virtual goods-supported -- and that's actually good, because it means we can take our time and do this the right way." That said, Goldberg said Zynga has delivered some big successes for advertisers, including for Microsoft, where they "drove 400,000 conversions to their fanpage on Facebook in 16 hours," and Universal Pictures' Public Enemies, where "16 million gifts …