Suppliers Join Forces To Create New Tools To Drive Ad Revenues
By Peter Lambert

• Mobile Cohesion’s content management system enables third-party advertisers to access the mobile operator’s ad server and campaign management systems;
• Anam provides messaging systems that append ads to Short Messaging Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) messages sent by subscribers who opt in to advertising in exchange for free or discounted messaging;
• Cibenex provides an on-device Java portal that takes control of a mobile handset idle screen and connects to a network ad server to enable ad streaming to the handset;
• Openet provides a transactional intelligence platform that collects ad-insertion ‘events’ and transmits them to the campaign management system and to operator billing and rating systems to fulfill service discounts according to ad consumption on a per-subscriber basis; and
• SLA Mobile provides campaign management and service systems integration services.

The overall challenge for operators seeking to experiment with offers of free or discounted service in exchange for viewing ad-insertion platforms with operator billing and subscriber management platforms, says Shane O’Flynn, Openet’s vice president of client services,. “We connect to the ad server, and as it inserts an ad, we collect that as an event and pass it to the billing system.”

To optimize the relevance of each ad inserted, the joint solution from the vendor partners – introduced at the Mobile World Congress in February as the Mobile Advertising Alliance – will leverage an operator’s per-subscriber intelligence.

“The operators have the exact demographics and behavior of the subscriber, and marshalling that data becomes very attractive to advertisers, but it’s still unclear what that information is worth,” O’Flynn says. “Nobody’s quite sure. If they pay 10 cents per eyeball on a Super Bowl TV ad, how much is the eyeball worth if you know it is in the key demographic you want? The only indication is Google is making a fortune. Everybody knows there’s a big market.”

O’Flynn insists that the Alliance approach will ensure not only that ads are relevant and delivered only to volunteering subscribers, but that the ads will be relatively non-intrusive. “There have been successful opt-in campaigns,” he says.

On the business-to-business side of the platform, the Alliance system provides thirdparty access into the ad server, campaign manager and operator back office. Through what O’Flynn calls Mobile Cohesion’s “low-touch” portal, an advertiser can log into the system to manage a campaign and upload ads. To manage targeting, the system queries subscriber profiles held in the ad server. The ad server ‘answers’ whether a person has opted in and then matches that person’s demographics to the demographics identified by various ad campaigns.

The Mobile Advertising Alliance partners further believe that their integrated platform can become something of a learning machine, in large part through continual recording of transactional events across large operator networks. “We watch and monitor everything that passes through the network, and over time we collect data on click-throughs,” O’Flynn explains. In practice, the cost of computing realtime personalization across tens of millions of subscribers will “have its limits,” O’Flynn says. “One-on-one rating plans where every subscriber gets a personalized plan and personalized targeted advertising have been discussed for years, but the value of getting down to that level of granularity probably isn’t there.”

The alliance may add additional partners to the mix, he says. “We’d like to also link with the folks who are already doing the ad aggregation. That’s one area where I’d think we might sign somebody additional up to the alliance. They’d be the next thing at a top layer. At the lower level, we also might want to integrate with an IVR system or other components of devices or data messaging.”