Nokia enters advertising business — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{Selling contacts and piping ads} Nokia enters advertising business

8 Mar 2007 at 19:24 GMT Timo Poropudas

Nokia is launching mobile advertising services to more fully exploit its huge customer and device base.

Nokia has already unveiled a number of wireless music, gaming, and multimedia services over the past couple of years. The launch of “Nokia Ad Service” and “Nokia Advertising Connector,” however, will take the company into the new sector of mobile advertising, putting it in competition with web giants like Yahoo and Google.

The advertising services follow the mobile search media model. Also in mobile search Nokia is working with yellow page and other partners and sharing the proceeds.

Nokia Ad Service is a fully managed service for advertisers seeking to target users of cellular phones. It will provide planning, deployment, optimization, and reporting for clients’ advertising campaigns, while providing support for interactive content like banner ads in mobile browsers, and multimedia ads embedded in applications and videos. In this space Nokia will actively sell adverting space.

Nokia Advertising Connector, meanwhile, helps companies target different ads to different devices, switching between text, image, audio, and video ads, depending on the handset a viewer is using.

Both services are expected to launch commercially sometime in the second half of 2007.