Associated Press picks platform for Mobile News Network
April 25, 2008
A mobile site on the Verve Wireless platform
The Associated Press has picked a platform for the launch this quarter of the AP Mobile News Network for mobile consumers.
The organization has tapped Verve Wireless Inc. to provide a wireless publishing platform that is advertising-supported and geared for smartphones.
"We view our partnership with the AP as complementary to our other media partners, most of whom are members of the AP themselves," said Greg Hallinan, vice president of marketing for Verve, Encinitas, CA.
"Since the underlying technology is the same, our platform allows all of our partners to share content and revenues more easily," he said. "This affords all of our partners an additional distribution point for their local content, and when matched with the AP's leading international, national and rich media coverage, provides our other media partners some very useful assets for their own mobile properties."
The Mobile News Network is the first product from AP’s Digital Cooperative, an effort to find new digital outlets for news and information produced by AP members.
Included in the network is local news contributed by AP members, along with international and vertical information from AP such as sports, business news and entertainment.
Participating AP members can generate revenue through local and national advertising.
Founded in 1846, AP is one of the leading wire services worldwide. Competitors include Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg.
AP’s Mobile News Network will rely on Verve’s Verve Local Content Gateway platform that lets local publishers and advertisers reach mobile devices across all big wireless carriers.
Verve currently works with more than 60 media firms and brands, including McClatchy Interactive, San Diego Tribune, San Francisco Bay Guardian and the AP.
All told, Verve enables 4,000 mobile sites.
"The technical platform, our Local Content Gateway, is exactly the same," Mr. Hallinan said. "Content is ingested, indexed, parsed and presented into a number of different formats depending on the device type, and then advertising is trafficked through the platform and displayed based on a subset of variables.
"This is an important point of distinction for us and, frankly, one of the main reasons why we can turn quickly and scale solutions for both the largest media properties and the smallest community paper," he said.
"These are not one-offs or isolated products, nor are they a one-size-fits-all, but instead they are partner-customized solutions off the same core platform. Our Local Content Gateway is a platform-as-a-service model, such that an improvement to the system for the AP or a large media partner is also readily available for the smallest suburban newspaper or local radio station."
Verve's advertising module within its platform was developed on open source and can manage all forms of mobile advertising, including display ads, in all their various ad unit sizes from banner to full page, mobile coupons, text and MMS-sponsored programs and click-to-call.
The technology company is also said to be equipped to handle some of the newer mobile ad formats currently in experimentation in the market.
"Where it gets interesting, at least from my point of view as a marketer, is how those campaigns are managed and flighted," Mr. Hallinan said. "Blending national and regional ad buys with a local, and what some call hyper-local, or neighborhood ad buys -- this is where we believe the long-term value of mobile is headed.
"It is no longer enough that advertising be contextually relevant," he said. "It needs to add real value immediately in mobile, if nothing more than because mobile devices have such built-in emotive qualities.
"In order to do this, our system integrates in to a number of current ad systems and mobile ad networks and blends a number of the traditional variables -- for example, category, keywords, declared interests, browsing history, day parts, et cetera -- with some newer variables such as location, carrier, device type, network speeds, actual content sources and consumption habits, and a few others in order to be a learning system.
"If mobile is the ultimate personal communication and information appliance that’s always carried with us, and we believe it is, then why shouldn’t the advertising follow the same level of customization and personalization offered within the content itself? We think it should."