Nokia To Launch Mobile Ad Services
Nokia has announced that it is to launch two mobile advertising services.
Nokia Ad Service is a service for advertisers to conduct targeted advertising on mobile services and applications. Nokia Ad Service consists of a group of mobile publishers forming a mobile ad network and a platform to deploy, manage and optimise mobile advertising campaigns.
Nokia has also introduced Nokia Advertising Connector, a private label service for third party publishers and advertising aggregators that want to extend to relevant mobile advertising.
Nokia Advertising Connector is intended to operate 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.
Tom Henriksson, director of Nokia Ad Service at Nokia emerging business unit, said: “As advertisers struggle to reach personalized targeting with traditional media such as print and TV, mobile advertising is becoming an increasingly attractive channel for brands.
“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 Ad Service will begin its operations in Europe with a kick-off at ad:tech, an interactive marketing event in Paris, France on March 6th-7th, 2007 and globally in the second half of 2007.
Nokia Advertising Connector will run several pilots during the coming months and is planned to become commercially available by the end of 2007.
Commenting on the announcement, Eden Zoller, principal analyst at Ovum, said: “Nokia is positioning itself as a mobile advertising service provider, which is a bold move as the market is becoming very competitive from the platform and provisioning side of the equation.
“There are a lot of partners for the advertising community to choose from and Nokia will have to fight to stand out from the crowd. In Nokia’s favour is the fact that it is well on the way to becoming a Web 2.0 service provider.
“Some mobile operators may be uncomfortable because Nokia wants to place itself at the centre of a mobile advertising community that it controls in terms of provisioning and, presumably, revenue flows.”
Zoller added: “Nokia might seem a friendlier, more familiar entity than the likes of Google, and has more clout than some of the pure play mobile specialists given its strong relationship with many operators. Then again, there is no reason why it should not partner with the pure play specialists here.”
Nokia: www.nokia.com