Boston, MA – March 9, 2010 -- WHERE®, North America’s leading local search and recommendation service in mobile, today announced the launch of WHERE Ads™, a hyper-local advertising network.

WHERE Ads™ Connects Consumers and Merchants 

With millions of users, WHERE is a top ranked service on all major smart phones. WHERE Ads was initially built to deliver local ads to the WHERE audience, and has been opened to and is now running on a dozen leading mobile services including Geocade, Jambase, MocoSpace and Superpages.com®. 

“We built WHERE Ads because we wanted to deliver a better advertising experience to our audience.“ said Walt Doyle, CEO of WHERE.  “Leveraging our unique access to the carrier infrastructure, we are able to deliver hyper-local, contextually relevant content. The result is that we are driving benefit by connecting the consumer and the local merchant. We’re now excited to begin offering this solution to third party publishers.” 

WHERE Ads uses location and context to deliver a superior ad solution, one that not only benefits users, but also local merchants. "The more relevant advertising is for consumers, the better they respond to it," said Greg Sterling, analyst Sterling Market Intelligence and Opus Research. "WHERE Ads promise more locally and contextually relevant ads for users that begin to fulfill the promise of LBS on mobile devices, which people have been talking about literally for years." 

”With market forecasts against mobile search and advertising exceeding $2.6B, the opportunity in mobile is staggering and location is at the epicenter of the opportunity.  The WHERE Ads solution is what the market wants.” said Jeff Rath, Global Head of Technology Research at Canaccord Adams.

Consumer reaction to locally and contextually relevant ads has been positive.  Click Through Rates (CTR) on WHERE Ads has exceeded other mobile ads by as much as three times.  This reinforces the notion that consumers will accept ads on their mobile device providing they add value.  WHERE will continue to add valuable content in the form of offers and deals from local merchants and partner with select publishers on WHERE Ads.  For more information, please visit www.where.com/where-ads.