Mobility World Congress: Mobile Advertising Meidad Sharon Directory Mobile Internet Solutions Comverse

by: admin Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Rating: mobile advertising is a channel

Meidad Sharon from Comverse spoke candidly about how Comverse is able to serve a multitude of mobile adverts. It pushed SMS, interstitials and frames. He said that when we talk about the mobile web we should separate on and off portal. The off-portal is much larger than on-portal and 70% of ad inventory is purchased for off-portal not on.

This is important as he also mentioned that there is a lot of potential inventory but the hiccup is getting brands to spend. This seems to be a theme constantly reinforced across the morning. The most important thing for mobile advertising is to improve the click through rate and increase the ad-spend.

Meidad states that Comverse is able to improve the click through rate to 15% from the industry average of about 3-5%.

Case study:
200,000 ads should be sent to the youth market – 18 to 20 year olds. Firstly Comverse sends out a random sample to all users in a database and optimise the means of targeting them to find what users want. This will increase click rate because all adverts are targeted and more relevant.

How?
Multi-channels and targeting engine will best leverage operators existing networks. There needs to be a central ad-serve network with ad proxies within all mobile channels from video to voice etc. This is essential to intercept the information. When the ad company knows what type of media is being sent then one on one targeting is the way forward.

What we think?
Interesting presentation but nothing overwhelmingly new. Everyone in the ad infrastructure place is in the same space.