Nokia announces advertising platform for mobile media

Nokia has announced two mobile advertising services. The Nokia Ad Service, is a fully managed 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 optimize mobile advertising campaigns.

Nokia also introduced Nokia Advertising Gateway, a private label service for third party Publishers and Advertising Aggregators that want to extend to relevant mobile advertising. Nokia Advertising Gateway operates 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.

The company says Nokia Ad Service fulfills different types of advertising needs such as advertisers deploying global mobile campaigns, agencies offering mobile advertising to complement traditional media initiatives, and publishers seeking new business models and a larger consumer audience.

This new platform promises to simplify the mobile advertising process by supporting & managing the full campaign lifecycle for advertisers including planning, deploying, optimizing, and reporting. Typical mediums of experience for mobile advertisements are in the form of interactive content like banner ads in browsing services, ads in applications, and videos.

Nokia Ad Service will begin its operations in Europe with a kick-off at ad:tech, an interactive marketing event in Paris, France in March 2007 and globally in the second half of 2007.

The Nokia Advertising Gateway on the other hand enables delivery of targeted ads to mobile devices. Ads will be closely tied and optimised to specific multimedia applications, such as reading digital newspaper content, watching TV, listening to music or looking at directions on maps.

Nokia offers access to the platform for third parties and enables their ad sales teams to sell for the mobile channel. Nokia Advertising Gateway supports so called CPA (cost per action) model and it provides usage data from mobile devices for enabling targeted ad selection and delivery to users’ devices. A key part of the platform will be the easy-to-use reporting and analytics tools for Publishers to manage their advertisers ROI (Return on investment).

Nokia Advertising Gateway will run several pilots during the coming months and will become commercially available in the second half of 2007, starting with support for converged mobile devices based on the S60 software platform.