• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, March 8, 2007

Nokia is launching two mobile advertising services--Nokia Ad Service and Nokia Advertising Connector--to provide advertisers with a single point of contact for "fully managed," targeted mobile ad sales. The first brings together a group of mobile publishers in an ad network; the second is a private label service for third-party publishers and ad aggregators interested in getting into mobile advertising.

The scope of Nokia's Ad Service allows advertisers to debut global mobile campaigns, and its precision allows them to coordinate mobile ads with traditional offline campaigns. After an initial rollout this month in Paris, the service is scheduled to launch globally in the second half of 2007.

In addition to creating economies of scale by bringing together large numbers of publishers, Nokia promises to manage the planning, deployment, optimization and reporting of campaigns, including interactive content like banner ads in browsing services and video. Thus, the company supplies simplicity for advertisers that feel overwhelmed by multiple vendors, different programming languages and varying device requirements in the mobile market.

At the same time, Nokia Ad Connector hopes to attract traditional media companies like newspaper publishers, as well as online players that want to offer greater value to their ad clients. The new service provides technology that allows a program to select text, visual, audio or video ads, depending on the device's capabilities and a user's context. One factor determining type and placement of ads is the content being consumed. For example, is it digital newspaper content, TV, music or maps?

Matthew Snyder, head of business development for Nokia Multimedia's Advertising Business Program, says: "With Nokia Advertising Connector, we are partnering with newspaper publishers, other traditional media companies, aggregators, platform companies, operators and Internet companies to help them serve their current advertisers by offering easy access to a mobile audience." Plus, Nokia will provide an array of data detailing consumer interactions with mobile advertising to help publishers and advertisers measure ROI.