• by Shankar Gupta , March 12, 2007

Fox News last week sealed a deal with mobile advertising technology firm Third Screen Media to power the advertisements across its mobile property, replacing Fox's previously hard-coded advertisements.

Fox will not, however, be joining Third Screen's ad network--all of Fox's mobile ad space will be sold by its internal sales staff.

"This enables them to manage and forecast their ad inventory," said Jeff Janer, Third Screen's chief marketing officer. "From an operations standpoint, they know what they're dealing with, and from a sales standpoint, they know how to package it."

Jeremy Steinberg, vice president of digital media services and business development for Fox News, said that offering mobile ads was a good way to expand the Fox brand.

"Fox News is always looking for new opportunities to expand the brand, and the mobile sector provides many possibilities that will both benefit the viewers and advertisers."

Janer said that keeping control of its own mobile ad space rather than joining the network was a trend that Third Screen is seeing.

"Initially, we have many publishers starting out in the network, but we're seeing the larger media companies say we're going down this path, let's just get in and go," he said.

Third Screen's platform, dubbed MADX, supports mobile video, network-aware applications, mobile Internet banner ads, and monthly messaging service ads, akin to e-mail embedded advertisements.