Facebook has already thrown a lot of money at mobile in the past few months and is now rumored to be eyeing an acquisition of Opera's mobile Web browser. Such a deal could significantly enhance the social giant's ability to deliver targeted mobile advertising.

At the same time, Amazon is reportedly considering its own mobile advertising push via a possible purchase of ad network Jumptap or another mobile advertising player. Both developments, if they were to happen, underscore how important a role advertising is playing for companies as they try to monetize mobile.

?This sets Facebook up well for growth in international markets where Opera is already well established, but it will also allow them to control an important software layer that could help them run their mobile applications, and more importantly their mobile ad products, more predictably across more devices,? said Dave Martin, senior vice president at Ignited, El Segundo, CA.

?This could be their first step toward building a true mobile advertising network,? he said.

?It also means that if Facebook ever wanted to build their own phone, they?d have a great head start in the development of a proprietary operating system, as more and more apps, both system and third-party, are built from within the browser.?

Targeted mobile ads
Facebook has been investing heavily in mobile, having recently acquired the mobile photo sharing app Instagram for $1 billion as well as a handful of other mobile companies.

Any deal for Opera would also likely require a major investment from Facebook, which raised a significant amount of cash in its recent initial public offering.

While the IPO has been beset with a host of problems in part because of the difficulties Facebook is facing monetizing mobile (see story), a deal for Opera could help Facebook address some of these issues. For example, a deal by Facebook to acquire Opera could bring with it significant mobile user data.

Opera, which reportedly has 168 million unique users, uses a proxy system so it can quickly deliver Web pages to a mobile browser. Because Opera is hosting a version of a Web page on its own servers, this presumably allows it to collect additional data about the users viewing those pages.

Opera?s user data could be combined with Facebook?s own user data to deliver the kind of highly targeted mobile advertising that many marketers are looking for.

The deal could also help Facebook address the consistency of the experience for users across a variety of devices, including in developing markets where smartphones still have low penetration levels.

Delivering a consistent experience is also important from the advertiser?s perspective.

?What?s important to Facebook from both the user and advertiser perspective is a consistent experience,? said Noah Elkin, principal analyst at eMarketer, New York.

?From the advertiser?s perspective, it is really a matter of insuring that with the variety of mobile devices out there in any given market, that you are going to be achieving a similar placement across that universe of devices,? he said.

Tablet advertising grows
For Amazon, a deal to acquire a mobile ad network such as Jumptap could enable the company to leverage the significant growth it is seeing in mobile use as well as the growth in tablet advertising.

The Kindle Fire tablet was introduced last fall and has quickly become a significant player in the tablet category, attracting user traffic and marketers who have launched apps for the Kindle Fire.

However, to date the opportunities for brands to market to Amazon users in mobile have been limited.

"This is less about a threat to the established players and more about Amazon historically taking poor advantage of the audiences they?ve built through their owned media properties,? Mr. Martin said.

?Silk was built with dynamic advertising in mind and yet Amazon hasn?t made a strong move to start monetizing all of its users,? he said.

?This acquisition just means that Amazon will be better set up to participate in the overall growth of mobile ad spending than they were before. It also shows that they clearly believe in a bright future for Kindle.?

While mobile ad spending still lagging far behind mobile usage, it is likely that brands are going to begin shifting more dollars from other channels into mobile over the coming months.

As a result of this shifting media landscape, companies such as Amazon and Facebook are looking to invest in mobile so they are well positioned to take advantage of the growth.

?The acquisitions of Opera by Facebook and Jumptap by Amazon, if they were to happen, are both clear attempts to improve the potential to monetize mobile usage ? a real problem that looms in the future for both companies as their costumers migrate from traditional Web to mobile,? Mr. Martin said.