When I reported on Nokia’s newly announced Ad Service and Advertising Connector platforms, I also voiced a concern that operators might be worried about the launch of potentially competing products and the vendor’s latest move into the service sector. Mobile Entertainment reports that the bold move has also caught advertising companies by surprise. It quotes a statement by Israel’s Amobee Media Systems, a company in the ad-funded space, that outlines the role of the operator and the potential clash with other companies in the food chain. “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,” Patrick Parodi, Amobee’s chief sales and marketing officer, said in a statement. “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 the network (WAP gateway, SMSC, and Video and Music server advertising insertions) and both will need to be addressed.”
Eden Zoller, an anaylst at Ovum, points out Nokia doesn’t seek to compete with companies head-on, although it “wants to place itself at the center of a mobile advertising community that it controls in terms of provisioning and, presumably, revenue flows.” The jury is out on this one, but Nokia may have an edge because it “might seem a friendlier, more familiar entity than the likes of Google, and has more clout than some of the pure play mobile specialists,” she concludes.
Related:
—Nokia Combines Content And Context In New Mobile Ad Services