3GSM: AdStar teams up with Nokia to trial local ad service for publishers

by: admin Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

Rating: good news

AdStar plans to use Nokia’s S60 software platform to trial an end-to-end private label advertising service. AdStar will integrate Nokia’s mobile technologies into its ad management services, which will be extended to provide mobile distribution, including newspaper publishers. It will begin in Q2 of 2007 in ‘select’ markets.

AdStar’s web-based ad sales solution handles the transaction services for more than 100 US newspapers, as well as several online ad listing services in automotive, employment and property classifieds. AdStar wants to expand it to mobile to provide media and advertisers with the technology infrastructure to target local consumers.

The trial will test a variety of local advertising methods, including pay-per-click, pay-per-call and pay-per-coupon from graphic display ads to simple text links.

Great idea – can’t see any reason why mobile and local advertising for jobs, cars, property and so on wouldn’t be good news. Just a case of finding the right business model though trial, rather than error.