LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE ASIA CONGRESS 2011: Mobile advertising delivers in every way that is important to advertisers, according to Atul Satija, VP and APAC managing director at global mobile ad network InMobi.

“As a medium, mobile is fundamentally different and superior to other media on all counts that matter to advertisers – availability, targeting, engagement and measurement,” Satija told the Show Daily ahead of his appearance on the mobile advertising panel at Mobile Asia Congress tomorrow.

He said mobile devices are extremely personal and allow advertisers to access their target audience 24/7. Mobile is also better in terms of targeting audiences compared to other mediums, with advertisers able to target individual devices, operating systems and customers of particular operators, in addition to the usual segmentation used by advertisers. “Mobile offers targeting like no medium can,” Satija said.

Engagement is another area in which mobile devices have an advantage due to their computing power, touchscreens and sensors such as accelerometers and GPS.

“All these elements allow for creative ad formats and immersive engagement. For instance, a daily deal company can run a campaign where a shake of the mobile can refresh the deal on offer in that city. And unlike other media, friction between engagement and call to action is nearly non-existent for mobile, given it is a communication device at the core,” Satija said.

Finally, more detailed measurement of audience behaviour is possible on mobile devices, with advertisers able to track variables such as the number of seconds a consumer spends viewing a video or the percentage of consumers choosing a particular product.

Consumers are engaging with mobile advertising in a big way, with click through rates between two and ten times higher than online campaigns. InMobi added close to 26 million consumers to its advertising network globally in the third quarter of 2011. The company has also seen “a very healthy growth” in ad impressions, which have risen from 43.7 billion per month to 60.2 billion.

And it appears advertisers are becoming more interested in mobile advertising. The number of Fortune 1000 companies on the InMobi network increased ten-fold between summer 2010 and 2011.

The continuing development of 3G infrastructure, affordable data and smartphone penetration are all driving mobile advertising, but challenges unique to mobile advertising remain, according to Satija.

The first issue is advertising that is less engaging to consumers than the content it’s related to – the “ad-content gap.” This less-engaging advertising is holding back click-throughs but is now being addressed, according to Satija. “With the advent of rich media formats, ad creatives are beginning to close this gap,” he said.

The other challenge is that creating rich media ads for mobile has, until recently, involved complex HTML5 programming. However, Satija said tools such as InMobi’s Sprout are making the creation of ads easier.