Nokia, which finds it hard to see something happening in the mobile market without wanting a slice, has announced the launch of two mobile advertising services.
Nokia Ad Service is a managed service for advertisers to conduct targeted advertising on mobile services and applications. The Service consists of a group of mobile publishers forming a mobile ad network and a platform to deploy and manage mobile advertising campaigns.
Nokia has also introduced Nokia Advertising Connector, a white label service for third party publishers and advertising aggregators that want to extend to relevant mobile advertising. Nokia Advertising connector operates as an intelligent switch, selecting between text, visual, audio and video ads — depending on the user’s context — and feeding the ad to the device.
“As advertisers struggle to reach personalised targeting with traditional media such as print and TV, mobile advertising is becoming an increasingly attractive channel for brands,” said Tom Henriksson, Director of Nokia Ad Service at Nokia Emerging Business Unit. “We have completed a number of pilot campaigns with advertisers and mobile publishers for testing the Nokia ad serving technology and consumer experience. The feedback has been very positive from all parties.”
Nokia is by nomeans the first in to the mobile ad serving market. Patrick Parodi, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at one ad platform provider,Amobee Media Systems, and Global Chair of the Mobile Entertainment Forum, said,
“An obvious question raised by this announcement is whether or not both operators and brands would be willing to accept Nokia taking on the role of an ad-serving platform.
“Operators are starting to play an essential role in being able to serve impressions to all customers and all handsets with the benefit of information such as the users’ location. Ultimately it is the age old question about who owns the customer and the inventory. Mobile advertising inventory will exist on both the handset (through the injection of ads within the device) and within within the network (WAP gateway, SMSC, and Video and Music server advertising insertions) and both will need to be addressed.”
But Matthew Snyder, Head of Business Development, Nokia Multimedia, Advertising Business Program, said Nokia would help all parties benefit in the advertising value chain. “We are partnering with traditional media companies, aggregators, platform companies, operators and internet companies,” he said.