Advertising to the mobile masses

It's a sure bet that mobile content has legs when Madison Avenue starts calling. While carriers and media companies are exploring subscription methods for extracting revenues from mobile content, the wireless equivalent of a media buying firm is offering them as a--if not alternative, than supplemental--means of bringing in cash.

Third Screen Media has just released a mobile advertising platform that links advertisers, carriers and content publishers, allowing them to easily interlace ads among all types of mobile content, whether it's a picture message, a video stream or a WAP page. While mobile advertising certainly isn't a new concept, Third Screen's holistic approach to it appears to be unique.

Unlike TV or a newspaper, mobile content is not a single format--numerous content providers are providing all kinds of media isolated on the network. What Third Screen's engine does is manage a mobile content campaign across all of those different formats, ensuring an advertiser's message gets shown regardless of what type of content its targeted demographic happens to be accessing at the time. Currently, ads are "hard-stitched" into materials, either embedded in a Web page or inserted into the video stream, said Heidi Lehmann, vice president of content, strategy and acquisitions for Third Screen. What the Third Screen engine does is allow carriers or content publishers to dynamically insert ads into the content stream regardless of the format. A car video ad, for instance, would lead off a mobile TV clip, an animated banner for the same car would appear on a WAP page or be tagged as a link to the bottom of a text message--all served up from the same platform.

That's good or bad, depending on how you look at it. I can already anticipate the angry e-mails from readers who find anathema the prospect of advertising and spam creeping into your cell phones. And those are legitimate concerns. Unlike TV, newspaper and to a lesser extent the Web, the mobile networks are presence and context aware. Carriers, and by inference their content partners, do not have a good deal of information on their customers, but they know where they are and even have an inkling or two about what they might be doing at any given time, depending on their usage patterns. An advertiser could target all users of a Treo smartphone for instance, a group that tends to fall in a fairly narrow--and fairly lucrative--demographic.

So privacy may have just gone to pot over the mobile network, but on the flip side, the revenue potential is enormous. MobiTV executives have long talked about the great marketing opportunities on their unicast TV platform. MobiTV knows who you are, what you're watching and for how long. With that kind of information, advertisers can craft incredibly targeted advertising campaigns and that's information they'll pay for.

Regardless of what side of the argument you come down on, there's no question these kind of advertising services will gain traction. eMarketer estimates mobile advertising will be a $760 million industry by 2009 in the U.S. alone. If you think those are just fluff numbers, then talk to Third Screen. "We're starting to see $100,000 to $200,000 ad budgets for mobile ads, but that's just the beginning," Lehmann said. "We just closed our first $1.6 million ad spend."

Contact me at kfitchard@prismb2b.com