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Russell Investments runs mobile banners in financial apps

Russell Investments is running display ads within Transcontinental Media's latest applications dedicated to financial professionals.

Russell has placed clickable straight banner advertisements on the top fold of both the Investmentexecutive.com and finance-investissement.com apps where users who click will land on Russel's mobile site. Ivestmentexecutive.com and finance-investissement.com applications are meant to give Canadian financial industry executives and advisors access to the latest financial and economic news relevant to their industry.

"The demographic that we want to reach here is the corporate sector," said Patrick Gagné
director of business development at Transcontinental Media, Quebec, Canada.

"This is a business to business app," he said. "It is also an application that is targeted to an audience of investment executives or any executives in the financial area. It's a very targeted niche compared to others that are more business-to-consumer."

Transcontinental Media is a Canadian print publisher claiming to be the largest publisher in Canada of French language consumer magazines and educational resources.

Russell Investments provides investment products and services in more than 40 countries.

The applications give users the ability to monitor current financial and economic events throughout the day, so that readers of Investment Executive and Finance et Investissement can stay up to date with their favorite publications.

Both apps are available on the iPhone, iPod touch and BlackBerry for free.

Transcontinental Media claims that this mobile initiative is part of a three-pronged platform involving electronic and print editions of the company's content.

The company also claims that this implementation is intended to keep its readers ahead of the action in the financial industry as well as broadcast content in real-time in a new channel.

"The monetization strategy for all seven of our applications is basically through advertising space," Mr. Gagné said. "We have display advertising within these applications and we're working on a model to monetize our content.

"We'll release further versions of some of our apps in the next six months to monetize some portions of our content," he said. "Since its targeted niche content we believe there's value behind it and we hope to monetize that content as a premium."

The applications were created by Polar Mobile and are downloable from the Apple App Store, BlackBerry's App World or from the mobile browser by entering in http://m.investmentexecutive.com or http://m.finance-investissement.com.

Both applications keep financial industry leaders in-the-know at all times by delivering the latest financial news, exclusive news on the industry, its stakeholders, regulations, compliance, economics and taxation, and the ability to bookmark articles and communicate with the authors.

The launch of these applications, along with the other five apps from Transcontinental Media, gives the company a new platform to offer to advertisers such as Russell, as two banners are available on every mobile application.

"There is a lot in store for mobile in terms of relevance and how we develop our mobile presence," Mr. Gagné said. "Mobile is a different beast altogether, compared to Web, and we want to make sure to exploit the premium value we have in our content on mobile.

"It's a strategic area of investment," he said. "We will definitely develop more specific content related to mobile in the future."