CTIA: Openwave, Nielsen bridging gap between operators, advertisers

Openwave Systems (NASDAQ:OPWV) is teaming up with the world’s largest parser of consumer media consumption Nielsen to create a combined demographics and analytics engine aimed at giving advertisers a much more granular picture into consumer behavior on mobile networks.

The combo, which the companies will announce Tuesday at CTIA Wireless, will fill in the missing pieces for two industries that have long tried to tap into the potential of the mobile advertising market but, for the most part, have always come up short, said John Giere, senior vice president of products and marketing at Openwave. Mobile operators have long collected detailed information on their subscribers, but have been unable to leverage that data into mobile advertising campaigns, Giere said. Meanwhile, media companies have the ability to provide deep insights into mobile consumer behavior, but have lacked the raw data to perform such analysis, Giere said. By linking Openwave’s Analytics, a real-time trend prediction and optimization platform, with Nielsen’s Prizm consumer segmentation solution, operators and advertisers can effectively bridge that gap, Giere said.

“What Nielsen has typically lacked was a way to plug into a network anonymously to compile mobile data usage information,” Giere said. Providing Nielsen with that means, however, has been a long arduous process.

perators have struggled to find ways to best use the reams of consumer information, which while nominally at their finger tips, might as well have been oceans away from the mobile media companies that could have used it. At first, that info remained locked in their back office and billing systems, unavailable for internal marketing use to say nothing of third-party advertisers. “Most of the information existed within their networks, but if you asked the marketing people they were still sourcing third-party data,” Giere said. “It was a lot of work for the marketing people to go in and extract that information from the operations people.”

As the mobile Internet took off though, and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and other Web companies began making tapping into the nascent mobile advertising market, operators got wise to the potential value of their information. Mobile Web platforms like Openwave’s Integra and Analytics gave operators a means of accessing and sorting their consumer data so they could put it toward their own use, Giere said.

But they still haven’t been able to provide that link to the outside media world. Many operators tried to work directly with ad buyers themselves, which presented two problems: they were only providing the mobile part of the picture, not the insights necessary to build cross-media ad campaigns, and they weren’t presenting the data in a format that advertisers could use, said Anand Chandrasekaran, director of ecosystem product management for Openwave. “Mobile wasn’t delivering data in a language that everyone was speaking,” Chandrasekaran said.

Consequently mobile advertisers pursued the market independently of the operators, looking to companies like Google’s Admob, while Nielsen looked to gain deeper insight into mobile usage patterns by acquiring Telephia. By providing a direct data feed of mobile consumer information to Nielsen, Openwave is looking to reverse that trend, Giere said, by simply acknowledging that the wireless operator can’t do everything itself.
“In the past, we at Openwave or the operator would have aspired to play multiple roles,” Giere said. “Now we’re going to hand that information over to Nielsen.”