Nokia launches google adsense-style offering for mobile

Wow, now this is interesting if you're a media company (creating content) or an advertiser. Nokia has launched a global ad service. http://www.adservice.nokia.com/news_index.jsp

It smells a lot to me like a google adsense for mobile.

And I quote from the Nokia blurb: "Nokia today announced two mobile advertising services. Nokia Ad Service, is a fully managed service for advertisers to conduct targeted advertising on mobile services and applications. Nokia Ad Service consists of a group of mobile publishers forming a mobile ad network and a platform to deploy, manage and optimize mobile advertising campaigns. Nokia also introduced Nokia Advertising Gateway, a private label service for third party Publishers and Advertising Aggregators that want to extend to relevant mobile advertising. Nokia Advertising Gateway operates as an intelligent switch, selecting between text, visual, audio and video ads - depending on the user’s context – and feeding the ad to the device. "

Ajit Joaker believes this is an extremely significant moment. Read his take here.
Alan Moore at Communites Dominate Brands has this to say.

Publishers are offered (from Nokia site):

• Our mobile ad server delivers sophisticated campaigns. Publishers can capitalize on the following:
• Categorization in Nokia ad network to receive relevant ads
• Flexible setup of any mobile publishing service
• New source of ad revenue without deploying ad sales and operations
• Full technical support to help with implementation
• Detailed user profile while respecting users' privacy
• Users' data is secure, protected and maintained in our ad platform

The implementation of the service is a 3-step-process:

Step 1: create the order form to outline different formats of advertising,

Step 2: receive ad tags from Nokia Ad Service and place them in the desired location throughout your mobile internet service,

Step 3: access full reports 24 hours a day. Metrics are available on a flexible set of cross relational rules.

This is all based on the theory that there are loads of Nokias out there to serve ads too - they are as much a network globally as the internet is. But if google comes up with something similar, surely the reach will be greater?

A little further reading of the Nokia site reveals: "Nokia Ad Service provides a worldwide reach to advertisers through its network. Nokia.mobi, one of the largest mobile portals with over 100 million monthly visits in 120 countries, has already joined the network."

I don't know about you, but I've never accessed Nokia.mobi. Perhaps its pushed more to users on handsets outside the UK? In any event divide 100m by 120 and that ain't that many users per nation per month. But I guess this is just the start of the network?

What the Nokia plan does have is that it isn't mobile-internet dependant (google adsense for mobile has to be). Nokia will serve ads against content dependant on the way that content is being seen - on a text only page, or video where that's appropriate.

I'm fascinated to try to understand the detail - do Nokia phone owners have to opt in, can they select preferences? I've got a Nokia and no-one has told me what to expect...

Whatever the case, just as everyone expected mobile advertising to be a rich picking for content providers and operators this year, along comes a supreme piece of disruption.

Think what google adsense did for internet advertising and to traditional media.

Think what it did for the drive to generate content on the internet platform too.

Then you get a sense of why the likes of Alan and Ajit are raving.