Here is the press release that started it all:
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 Connector, a private label service for third party Publishers and Advertising Aggregators that want to extend to relevant mobile advertising. Nokia Advertising Connector 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.
It seems to be working for Zoo Vision:
First we are joining their network as a publisher. Since the ZooVision site is free and ad supported it’s a natural fit for us. Also the fact that we don’t have a European ad partner yet will also benefit us so we can target ads for those markets.
Second we are going to run ads on Nokia service to help drive more traffic to the landing pages which will in turn increase the page views for all of the pages and thus more ad revenue.
The test that we ran last week was a banner ad to UK n73 handsets driving traffic directly to our mobile site. Overall the numbers were amazing with page views up 400% from our normal daily traffic. The other item that was really high was the click through rate which was almost 20% from the Nokia site!
As a company we have an on portal and off portal strategy and we have been looking for something like this to take our off portal offering to the next level. So to say the least we are very excited about the offering.
I am a little bit concerned. I’m a part of a generation that is notoriously known for ignoring advertising. I have Adblock for Firefox, I download movies and tv shows with the commercials cut out, I never click on banner ads or adsense, yet how do people my age find out about new stuff?
"Hey did you hear about 300?"
"No."
"This movie is so you Stefan. War, destruction, Greco Romano history. Download the trailer immediately!"
That is how I found out about 300 a few months ago and I’m going to be seeing it tonight with my mates. I don’t watch TV, I don’t use MySpace, but my friends and I feed off each others collective knowledge daily. John is the photographer with a Canon fetish who buys expensive lenses, Billy is the video game expert who owns every console ever released, I’m the computer, home theatre, cellphone, and consumer electronics genius, Sean is the DJ who knows more about music then anyone I’ve ever met and Greg is the IT Admin who I’ve known since … practically forever.
When my friends and I think advertising, we imagine huge distractions that are in your face. Not helpful links pointing you in the right direction.
Is making advertising easier on mobile phones really a good thing to be doing?