CTIA: Brendan Benzing Vice President Search and Advertising Infospace or now Motricity Mobile Search

by: admin Thursday, October 25th, 2007

Rating: huge huge potential

So first of all I have to apologise because I just realised that I met Brendan before and I spelt his name wrong on this blog and also on the podcast. I wrote Brenzing on Benzing. So sorry.

Well, I managed to get a meeting with InfoSpace at CTIA and it was great to catch up so soon after the sale to Motricity and to get some vital details needed for my article on the purchase for The Mobile Search Analyst.

But Brendan was in great spirits and you could see that he was very proud of the move to Motricity and thought it was very good for business. I mentioned that Motricity already had an mCore solution (without search) and he said yes. The best of both companies would be combined to make the service better and the portal business would accelerate.

But I (surprisingly enough) spoke more advertising than search and portals to Brendan. This was a huge surprise because InfoSpace doesn’t have an advertising solution. But, InfoSpace can push advertising within the search and it might be more effective for them to partner with existing companies to manage the advertising than to create a new segment.

This would make Motricity Mobile Search advertising ready immediately and offer a network of solutions (similar to InfoSpace online business to mobile) which would really mean strong inventory for the mobile search because operators could plug and play into different ad channels.

I love it! (The idea, that is).

But; its not the first time I have heard about this and other companies are coming with a similar solution. A lot depends now on how Motricity wants to integrate the business and if Search will run separately. I think it should because it would be more scalable for business solutions than packaged within the existing or new mCore infrastructure.

Related: http://www.gomonews.com/pushing_the_barrier/2007/07/tea-with-infosp.html

http://www.gomonews.com/pushing_the_barrier/2007/09/lunch-with-info.html