The ad battle moves to mobile - but maybe they are drawing the wrong lines?

One of the most critical business battles of the early 21st century is raging - for dominance of the mobile advertising market.

Google has lit the blue-touch paper on adwords for mobile and just days later Nokia announces it is buying Enpocket

Nokia says: "Enpocket is a global leader in mobile advertising; providing technology and services that allow brands to plan, create, execute, measure and optimize mobile advertising campaigns around the world.

"By acquiring Enpocket, Nokia will accelerate the scaling of its mobile advertising business, leveraging Enpocket's platform and strong partnerships with advertisers, publishers and operators. In addition to key assets, through this transaction Nokia is gaining a team with strong expertise in global mobile advertising across disciplines."

Big guns - and all blazing.

Looks like the big fish are starting to snap up the clever ones.

Wonder what it all means for Admob?

I also wonder how strategic these decisions are - and how tactical.

For me, the forms of mobile advertising we've seen so far are of the kind Tomi Ahonen would characterise as 6th mass media plays on the 7th mass media. That is the kind of ad styles/inventories are pretty much like internet ones, squeezed on to mobile internet - with less cookie-driven relevance. (see Mobile as the 7th Mass Media, top of page). Which take advantage of what makes mobile different?

No one has gone (alan moore's) engagement marketing route, though I suspect Blyk will get closest of all when it launches before the end of this month.

Expect a lot of eyes pointing in Blyk's direction. And a lot of people wishing they were under 24...

Why Nokia bought a photo and video sharing site

The common sense view of Nokia is that it is a mobile phone manufacturer. Those who look a little closer note that is about as close to the truth as describing it as a rubber boot manufacturer (which it once was...).

The deal to buy Twango (click here for report) is extremely revealing. Nokia is clearly positioning itself as a media company - the definition of which stretches by the day.

The Twango deal (an image and video sharing site with fantastic mobile accessibility) makes obvious sense when you also consider that Nokia is the world's biggest manufacturer of cameras (yep, the ones integrated in your converged handset).

They also believe themselves to be manufacturers of computers (yep, once again, that converged device somewhere very close to you right now).

And the appetite to see themselves as a media company is clarified when you note that Gerard Wiener, is the company's vice president of multimedia mergers and acquisitions.

A Nokia phone user can snap photos or videos while at a sporting event and have those images integrated with their online photo collection at Twango's Web site. It works the other way too - so you can view images from your pc on yoru mobile (a la Orb).

And all deployed through your (Nokia) Widset for fast internet access perhaps? And with Nokia Adservice ads against it?

Make no mistake, Nokia is in the game.

Yahoo launches its mobile internet advertising model

Yahoo weighs in. More here
This is interesting, particulary given yahoo's relationships with operators (eg 3).
Makes it easy for the mobile internet publishers to get their content funded. And look what that (google adsense) did for the amount of content on the fixed line internet.
Sounds like a similar approach to that taken by Nokia with its AdService.
But the great thing is this is global and will work with any mobile internet device. It's offered across the world and to a range of publishers (there is a sub 1 million page impressions a month level to select).
Yahoo says: "The Yahoo! Mobile Ad network lets you leverage Yahoo!’s scale and expertise as a global media powerhouse. Joining the network gives you access to Yahoo!’s worldwide sales force and its relationships with top advertisers across 19 countries. In addition to these advertisers, Yahoo! welcomes those of all sizes who have relevant offers for the mobile audience – increasing further the relevancy and volume of ad inventory available to you."
And more are coming. I hear google's mobile adsense is in test mode.

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.