MoVoxx Acquired by Mobile Ad Firm Adenyo

MoVoxx today announced it has been acquired by mobile marketing firm Adenyo for an undisclosed amount.

Adenyo offers a mobile ad platform including an analytics engine, mobile payments and coupons. It’s strong in Europe, but it hopes MoVoxx will give it better footing in the U.S. MoVoxx also brings a stronger presence on the 80+ percent of the U.S. market carrying non-smartphones, through its extensive SMS ad network.

As we’ve written, and as CEO Alec Andronikov showed at our March Marketplaces conference, MoVoxx is also doing some interesting things with local targeting on mobile devices. This involves local targeting for national brands as well as the more elusive area of mobile ads for SMBs.

It does this by creating SMB profile pages for local publishers like Citysearch. It then drives traffic to these pages from the 700 million monthly impressions and 40 million monthly uniques it reaches through its publisher network of SMS and in-app inventory.

Recently, it also launched its geoSense platform, which gives advertisers more precise geotargeting capabilities for smartphones and non-GPS devices alike. For all these reasons, it’s gone further down the local targeting path than arguably any other major mobile ad network.

Smaller mobile local plays can’t be ignored here, however, including WHERE, LocalAdXchange, AdLocal, Placecast and Citysearch to a certain degree. If anything is clear right now in the mobile space it’s that we’ll see more interest and investment in the field that’s becoming known simply as “location” (or just “geo”).

The more sexy story there is the mobile/local/social plays (Foursquare, Gowalla, et al). But equally important are the ad networks creating more valuable ad inventory and engagement levels through content (and delivery methods) inextricably tied to location relevance. Lots of growth to come in this segment.