MADRID – The Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica, which bought O2 two years ago, has launched a single global platform to deploy advertising on mobile phones.
The company has established a worldwide alliance with Amobee Media Systems to provide a single point of contact for agencies and advertisers wishing to buy, deploy and monitor campaigns across all mobile channels.
The service will support WAP, games, video, messaging and other in-built applications that will enable advertisers to target its 170 million mobile customers.
Research firm Informa forecasts worldwide mobile ad revenues will rise to US$11.35bn by 2011.
“The key to successful mobile advertising is doing it in a contextual and non-intrusive way, which our global opt-in and ad-serving solution enables us to do,” said Julio Linares, chief operating officer of Telefonica.
“The benefits of a common vendor across the Telefonica group are that we are able to truly look at a common architecture that will drive cost savings for design and testing, as well as reduce deployment times.
“We believe we are accelerating the uptake of mobile advertising in all Telefonica mobile businesses across Europe and Latin America and will generate revenue from mobile advertising well beyond WAP and the mobile internet,” Linares added.
The single, centralised ad server enables precise contextual and behavioural targeting across all users on all handsets for non-voice related applications and services, including WAP, banners, games, video and music players, applications, messaging and ringback tones, as well as video and music streaming.
Telefonica will retain complete control of the solution, which means each of its operating businesses will have access to customer data, localisation, behavioural profiles and opt-in databases.
The business will then instruct the ad server to deliver a relevant ad to customers with a certain profile and handset type.
By John Kennedy
