Vodafone and Telefónica buy minority stakes in Amobee
Rating: you can’t buy sense
By Annie Turner
Vodafone and Telefónica have bought stakes in mobile advertising company Amobee for undisclosed sums.
Both operators have run trials of Amobee’s technology – Telefónica through its O2 subsidiary in the UK and Vodafone in Spain, Greece and the Czech Republic – but said they had decided to take minority stakes to improve their understanding of a potential future growth source, according to the Financial Times.
Zohar Levkovitz, chief executive of Amobee, was quoted saying, “If the user experience on a Vodafone handset is going to be Google Android or Yahoo! To Go, they’re going to be just people with a connection to the net. We are helping operators take control of their own destiny…UK and US SMS traffic is larger than all the traffic to Google worldwide. If we can monetise that traffic, this is going to be huge.”
If is a very, very big word.
Attracting these operators as investors is a huge boost for Amobee and not just in financial terms. However, spending money is no guarantee of absorbing wisdom and so long as operators try to offer ad inventory and operate as a content storefront, they’ll fail in mobile advertising. Vodafone is a great example of what not to do: it should allow on-portal banner advertising to drive off-portal traffic, but instead it takes you to another part of live! It just doesn’t work and no amount of investment in mobile advertising companies will change its deeply flawed mobile advertising strategy.
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