Pro-carrier Mobile Advertising Alliance launches

By Mickey Alam Khan

February 6, 2008

Nic Stirk is chief executive of Stirk Lamont and a cofounder of the Mobile Advertising Alliance

Five plucky Irish companies launched the Mobile Advertising Alliance to make sure that wireless carriers aren’t marginalized in the mobile advertising marketplace.

The software vendors – Anam, Cibenix, Mobile Cohesion, Openet and Stirk Lamont Associates’ SLA Mobile – have banded together to create a mobile advertising platform that promises to deliver both mobile brand advertising and direct marketing. Membership from other system integrators will be considered.

Nic Stirk, chief executive of Belfast, Northern Ireland-based Stirk Lamont, takes questions on the Mobile Advertising Alliance. Excerpts from the interview with Mobile Marketer’s Mickey Alam Khan:

What’s the thinking behind this alliance?
The Mobile Advertising Alliance defines the enablement platform that mobile operators need to implement to monetize the mobile advertising ecosystem.
 
Is this the first mobile advertising alliance?
The MAA is the first collaboration of leading software vendors to market a complete end-to-end mobile advertising platform to mobile operators worldwide.

There have been initiatives launched by the GSM Association with the Mobile Marketing Association whereby both organizations will collaborate to deliver standardization and transparency around current mobile advertising activity. But unlike these initiatives, the MAA delivers a commercial solution driven by deployment experience and real operator requirements.

The MAA will work closely with standardization initiatives like the GSM Association and the Mobile Marketing Association [developed] to help define best practices across the industry.
 
Why launch the alliance now? Is it only Europe or worldwide?
Faced with declining voice revenues and having under-exploited the first SMS-based mobile marketing wave, mobile operators view mobile advertising as a key new revenue stream.

However, the size of these revenues will depend on how much of the mobile advertising value chain the operators manage to control and the extent to which they leverage their customer base through effective use of their CRM data.

We think now is the right time for operators to do something about it and we intend to help them in achieving their ambitious goals this year. We intend to serve worldwide markets.
 
How did the alliance members come together?
The alliance members were repeatedly being selected in various operator deployments because of their category-leading products.

The vendors recognized that by pre-integrating their products they could provide a low-risk, end-to-end platform capable of supporting evolving mobile advertising business models, which would help operators [to] exploit the new opportunities and position themselves strongly in the mobile advertising ecosystem.
 
What is each member contributing?
Each alliance member brings unique expertise and experience to different aspects of the mobile advertising ecosystem. Together, they provide the mobile operator with a closely integrated solution that leverages best-of-breed technology at every point in the end-to-end solution.

Anam was the first company to offer mobile advertising over SMS and helped pioneer the use of new revenue generating SMS applications.

Cibenix is a leading provider of rich media applications and on-device portal solutions for mobile operators.

Mobile Cohesion is a leading provider of partner relationship management software that helps operators build more effective content partnerships.

Openet is a leading worldwide provider of event processing and transaction management solutions.

And SLA Mobile's advertising server provides the mobile operator with a core platform for targeted advertising, easy to manage, flexible for the advertiser and offering a great experience for the consumer.
 
How will it work for the mobile advertiser?
The MAA mobile advertising platform supports the three essential criteria for successful advertising, namely analytics for the analysis of the target market; reach for the number of people exposed to a specific media vehicle, here the mobile device; and purity for the quality of information on the target market, which the mobile operator can provide.

The MAA platform has been designed with advertisers in mind as an easy-to-use platform to deliver both mobile advertising and mobile direct marketing.

The platform provides secure access to operator-owned demographic, behavioral and contextual profiling data and provides multiple media channels to deliver personalized and targeted advertising. Flexible campaign management and real-time feedback reporting ensure that advertisers can continually refine campaigns and only pay for results. 
 
How will it change the way ads are run on mobile?
To date, mobile advertising has mostly focussed on intrusive direct SMS marketing that has failed to capture the imagination of advertisers, and on placing on portal banner ads, a capability more suited to the bigger screen sizes of the Internet domain.

Mobile operators have some very unique assets, including control over multiple communications channels and access to valuable real-time context, demographic and behavioral data.

Through advanced subscriber profiling, operators can offer more personalised advertising to their advertiser partners. As ads become more individualized, the distinction diminishes between what is purely advertising and what is considered by the subscriber to be a valuable service.

Through targeted advertising and by delivering campaigns over subscriber-selected communications channels, operators can successfully overcome the user experience problems of current mobile advertising solutions.
 
Some clients of each alliance member.
The five founding members of the alliance have been working with mobile operators for many years, installing and maintaining software products with, among others, Telecom Italia Mobile, Orange Group and One Austria in Europe; Telstra, Hutchison CAT in Thailand, Thai Mobile and Celcom in Australasia; and AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the USA.
 
What’s the state of mobile advertising? Is this year the tipping point?
In line with many analysts, we estimate from our discussions with key industry players that mobile advertising revenues globally should reach a few billion dollars this year, so this is very much a tipping point in terms of scale.

Also, as more operators are gaining experience with this relatively new medium and end-users see the point of accepting advertising on their mobile device – provided it is relevant and unobtrusive – we're on the cusp of a major market being realized.
 
So what challenge is this alliance meant to address?
By implementing an end-to-end mobile advertising platform that delivers personalised and targeted advertising across multiple delivery channels including direct messaging, on portal advertising, rich media ODP advertising and in-message advertising, operators can meet and exceed user experience expectations.

By implementing an end-to-end platform, operators can enable the rapid introduction of innovative advertising business models.

Also, by consolidating operator-owned subscriber data and feedback analytics, mobile operators can demonstrate the value of their network and justify mobile advertising costs to the as-yet-unconvinced advertisers.

Rather than attempting to achieve all this through a bespoke solution, operators can pick and mix market-proven components to match their subscriber demographic and network capabilities in order to deliver a comprehensive mobile advertising platform that cements the operator’s position in the mobile advertising ecosystem.