Some thoughts on Nokia playing open in advertising and platform

The advertising space is such a heartbreaker, right? Staying on top of where your consumer sits is an eternal battle of researching demographics and trying to plug into the yoof sub-culture. Pulse-checking is a constant churn of fast moves based on changing consumer tastes. In same way as email marketing can be an effective advertising lure, mobile has been all but unexplored.

Think about it, and we’re not just talking grey text advertising. How about free, low-bandwidth, fair-use mobile data open for anyone to use, once they consume advertising? I’d give it a go. Of course, we’re possibly talking about at least five years into the future when more mobile devices have easy-to-use, intuitive web browsing interfaces. A larger selection of phones that have a rich web experiences is necessery. WAP city is not an option. The moral of the story, is that mobile advertising is sitting there in her ivory tower waiting to be rescued. There’s so many suiters trying to cozy up to her – Microsoft, Nokia and Google just to name a few.

For a change, let’s look at Nokia. Nokia is not just sitting pretty when it comes to mobile advertising. Its plan is two-pronged – twin crowd-sourced media with adverts. Back in Febuary, Nokia launched it’s advertising network, “Nokia Media Network” with a bank of impressive partners including Reuters and Sprint. It was a natural move to add a monetising trigger to its Ovi media bow. In it’s own way, Nokia wants to roll-out a homemade media network to displace Youtube as the natural upload destination of mobile videos. And in doing so, succeed monetisating this well, where other media sites have failed. So far, there’s plenty of work to do on the Ovi brand. Even friends of mine that are Nokia users upload their content elsewhere. Many of them have never heard of Ovi. Not to forget the very recent acquisition of Plazes either, that will probably prove to leverage Ovi into the future.

Today’s news of Nokia’s buying a controlling stake of Symbian and deciding to open-source it is interesting as it is indicative of a new business style the company is adopting in the mobile wars. Nokia want lots of people to work on the platform. Nokia is adopting an open approach towards to advertising space too by opening Ad Labs around the world. These centres will teach ad professionals the ins and outs of mobile advertising.

Partnerships with some of the advertising agencies would be natural and a sensible move by Nokia as it looks for a niche in mobile advertising. Offer a platform, invite developers to build applications that attract many eyes. Oh, those eyes might like to see advertising in return for something free? Ad professionals, do you want a hand mastering serving ads effectively? We can help. It’s a roadmap to try and turn Nokia into a mobile services company and marketing hub. Only time will tell, as the battle for mobile advertising will undoubtedly be a clash of the titans.

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft. The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of the company in any way, shape or form.

June 24th, 2008 at 6:09 pm • Filed in Geekery



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