Microsoft the Trojan Horse of mobile advertising?

Microsoft, the Trojan horse of mobile advertising? Please don’t laugh I mean it.

Over the past year Microsoft has made a number of interesting and strategic moves in mobile that will have competitors taking heed. The latest in string of announcements came in an interesting article from Bloomberg today. It talks about Microsoft getting a new advertising deal. It has been chosen by Hyatt to put hotel ads on Verizon Wireless phones.

The article from Bloomberg insinuates that this is an attempt by Microsoft to lift its failing ad business. But in all honesty – mobile advertising is a strong new arm for Microsoft and with Bing – I reckon that it won’t be long before Microsoft’s ad business gets a new lease of life.

For example, I have said before there are three arms to mobile advertising at the moment.

Mobile Search, Mobile Display Advertising and Mobile Media advertising. At present, Yahoo boasts leadership in mobile display advertising. Medio still retains that as a white label operator player it is the leader of the mobile search –but I think that with the upsurge of small brands such as Taptu and Truveo and also abphoneor m.yahoo; m.bing and m.google the market is still there to grab.

AOL has tried to penetrate the display and mobile space with its mobile search services and the own portal but again traffic is slow.
Traffic on the mobile web is slow. Even big guns like AdMob have stopped saying they get X zillion users a month as times are hard and use has dropped on mobile… this means that times are tough –but more importantly there are ways in which mobile advertisers can find new dynamics.

So, this is why I think Microsoft is the Trojan Horse. Over the past year it has made the strongest moves in the area of multi-media.
It has bought a stake in Coufon. It owns the patents and has launched Microsoft Tag, it has the technology behind FAST and also Motion Bridge which it never really took advantage off at purchase. On top of that it is in Verizon in the US and has a strong and aggressive plan to first conquer the US and then bring new advertising initiatives to Europe.

There was too much hype surrounding display advertising but the iPhone proves that in essence interactive ads, coupons and so are much more successful and interaction not only display. Display is important but mobile is about personalisation, sharing, recommendation and instant-appeal. These are the things that mobile advertising need to address and these things can only be addressed if interactive media is in place.

Microsoft has this media in place. It has voice services on mobile Tell Me, so interactive voice ads are possible. We already spoke about the potential of mobile barcodes and in reality a strategy that is a bit late is the best for mobile as you can learn from rivals’ mistakes.

So all in all. Google looks the weakest in mobile right now closing down early mobile ad initiatives and a print ad service. Yahoo remains the strongest, AOL has tried but there is little on the radar … but Microsoft has the greatest potential.