Thursday, March 8. 2007

Handsets or Networks

Mobile Entertainment reports on some uneasiness rippling through the mobile community with regard to Nokia’s incursion into the mobile advertising space, citing carriers and their networks have a valuable ad-insertion role to play.

Operators are starting to play an essential role in being able to serve impressions to all customers and all handsets with the benefit of information such as the users’ location. Ultimately it is the age old question about who owns the customer and the inventory. Mobile advertising inventory will exist on both the handset (through the injection of ads within the device) and within the network (WAP gateway, SMSC, and Video and Music server advertising insertions) and both will need to be addressed.

I’m not so sure. With networks evolving to support all-IP transport, any content cross the non-wire and bypass a carrier’s infrastructure these days over IP. And with GPS in phones, location too can cross that same channel leading ultimately to a balance of power and control over it. The question with regards to ad content on mobile devices is who is in the position of power to scale to support new sources of content? Carriers, OEM's, other content aggregators? I don't think it's the former, but certainly could be a combination of the later two. Stay tuned...