Eric Schmidt gave a very juicy soundbite laden interview to Bloomberg this morning, mostly on the topic of the AdMob acquisition, but with some interesting insight on the mobile ad market as a whole.

Om Malik titled his interview summary aptly  “Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Why We Bought AdMob,” which of course got my attention after my loudly expressed confusion yesterday morning.

Before getting into the quotes, an interesting factoid was presented in both the Bloomberg piece as well as Om’s write-up: “Together, AdMob and Google will be the largest mobile- advertising company, with about 30 percent to 40 percent of the market, according to Karsten Weide, an analyst with researcher IDC in San Mateo, California.”

Of course, IDC being an analysis firm, the hard data is hidden deeply behind a paywall, so I can’t really speak to the veracity of that statement (other than to say it flies in the face of everything we’ve ever heard from other more reputable analysts).

One of the reasons I theorized for the purchase was a marketplace play.  Simply put, Google specializes in search and Web display ads, and AdMob focuses on the iPhone:

“One the key success points for the iPhone was this enormous development of apps, and particularly free apps, which are advertising supported,” said Schmidt, 54. “Now that we have our Android platform coming out, and really with some serious partners behind it, it will also be important to have that be true for Android as well as the others.”

Or, as I said yesterday, they’re hedging their bet on the Android roll-out.

Good Press = Good Business

There was also a quote that supported my other theory – the acquisition was due to the dependence on public relations department at AdMob, and perhaps other subtle influences as well.

To be completely transparent, as I’ve conspicuously mentioned before, Millennial Media is a sponsor for SiliconANGLE. Before we accept someone as a sponsors here, we perform due diligence on them to ensure our brand isn’t damaged by association, particularly when the sponsor isn’t a banner company like former inaugural sponsors we’ve had like Intel.

Before we took Millennial on as a sponsor, we spoke to analysts from Nielsen as well as other minor players that all seemed to agree (ranging from tenuously to aggressively) on Millennial’s market leadership position.  John Furrier and I talked publicly about our findings here and there, and recieved a number of quiet overtures from folks at AdMob for “off the record” discussions as to why the data we got from Nielsen was flawed.

At the time, we were in the middle of going forward with our Millenial Media sponsorship, and shortly after we responded as interested, we made the announcement, and we’ve never heard from AdMob again. We would have welcomed the second perspective, but never were offered that opportunity. In fact, as I noted yesterday, we were actively blocked from any briefings having to do with the announcement of the acquisition (and we very regularly get updates from Google, particularly on announcements that have to do with mobile). In fact, requests to AdMob made early in the day were deferred to their PR team at 4:57 PM, too late for even a canned response.

Is AdMob Afraid of Opposing Opinions?

Meanwhile, the blogosphere filled up with glowing reviews at Techcrunch, Venturebeat and GigaOM of AdMob’s progress in advancing their agenda and their company, with nary a mention other than Millennial.

So when Eric Schmidt drops the quote: “AdMob is clearly the best of its ilk for applications monetization,” it’s not surprising to see where that perception comes from.

I suppose that if you needed a case study as to why PR in social media and tech blogging gets the job done, AdMob would be it.  To be fair, they’re probably pretty good at what they do, and their work is impressive when viewed outside the context of the four or five other companies that are doing better financially than they are.

If our analysis is flawed – we welcome a discussion as to why that might be. So far we haven’t talked to a source or been contacted by anyone other than a competitor to Millennial that disagrees with our assessment. It’s just somewhat irritating to see the PR and (in our view) flawed analysis go unchallenged and uninvestigated.