• by Shankar Gupta , September 12, 2006

Mobile marketing technology firm Enpocket Monday released a new version of its ad platform management for mobile phone companies, which includes targeting features that cull demographic data from the carriers' own systems.

Mike Baker, Enpocket CEO, said that the new features will allow carriers--including Cingular, Sprint and Virgin--to use the data they collect from their customers to target ads. The carriers, he said, already have a huge amount of information in their databases, including users' age, gender, and size of household. Baker added that carriers can use that data to offer ad targeting to marketers. "If I've got an elaborate set of data around household income and creditworthiness, which a lot of our carriers have, I can use that data to do planning for a consumer financial services company," he said.

Ads managed by Enpocket appear within mobile browser environments, and allow users to click through to receive opt-in SMS ads. The new version has been in beta testing for the last three months in the U.S., Asia and Europe.

While mobile is seen as having large growth potential, the medium currently presents a host of challenges for marketers, Baker added. "It's a cumbersome medium right now, so we believe that to make advertising on a personal device, the ad system needs to do an incredible job producing out-of-the-box relevance," he said.