Alcatel-Lucent has pitched into the mobile advertising market with a server-come-service offering that lets businesses host and serve highly targeted advertisement campaigns to mobile devices.
It is a proposition that is targeted at mobile telco providers, Rudi Broos, Director of Marketing for Alcatel-Lucent’s Digital Media and Advertising Division told us. “They have the necessary intelligence both about the consumer and the network for them to become major players in the mobile advertising serving market.”
Market development has been slowed because ad management and ad delivery have to date been tightly coupled, creating silos in specific inventory areas and technology niches. There has also been a lack of common platform across inventory types, Roos added.
He explained that Alcatel-Lucent had been developing and refining its value proposition over a couple of years for a system that allows service providers to set up targeted mobile ad campaigns across different inventory which serves ads to various end points and people according to their demographic.
The Advertising Selection Server launched today is being sold as a turnkey on-premise product, as well as a hosted service.
The company said its server would provide mobile service providers with a single platform able to deliver via SMS, MMS and WAP a mix of push and pull targeted advertising campaigns tailored to an individual subscribers’ opt in preferences.
The Advertising Selection Server also offers a unique interface for inventory and campaign management and acts as a single front-end for advertising players, and features a suite of APIs for tight integration with third party services, profiling, and billing systems.
The system is designed to add a contextual basis to how ads are served to mobile carrying consumers, Broos claimed. “The market is nascent still, but we think this takes the technology to the next level, serving ads across different inventories, and which avoids the current siloed approaches. We can consolidate the ad inventory across the channels of WAP, SMS push, MMS and really leverage the use of different inventory by checking click-throughs, so that the campaign can be tweaked as it progresses.”
The company announced today that a first service provider to use the system was Germany’s E-Plus group, through its Gettings subsidiary.
In the Gettings application E-Plus’ consumers choose between three packages where they will receive between 10 and 25 mobile ads per week in return for a small discount in their service charges. The Advertising Selection Server enables users to provide their preferences so they receive only mobile ads that interest them – both enhancing their experience and providing advertisers with a higher value, more targeted campaign.
Alcatel-Lucent said its new server features targeting algorithms that by integrating with existing CRM or billing engine applications makes it easy for mobile service providers to offer advertisers highly focused and impactful advertising campaigns.
“As a demographic group, millenials figure as an obvious target for these new service offers” Roos said, the consumer gains in receiving a payment discount or other entitlement for opting in, the service provider opens a new revenue stream, and advertisers have a channel to a group difficult to hit with more traditional channels of print, TV and radio.
Measured in terms of the amount of total advertising budget drawn into the mobile channel, the sector is miniscule. But the expectation is that it will become one of the fastest growing.
Industry analyst estimates cited by Alactel-Lucent suggests the sector was worth no more than $160m last year. It could rise to around $3.1bn by 2013, according to numbers proposed by The Kelsey Group in February 2009 however.
The Advertising Selection Server is part of plans Alcatel-Lucent has to support a broad personalised content and advertising strategy, geared toward enabling the delivery of relevant, interactive and personalised advertising to consumers over communications networks of all kinds.
