Smaato featured in Red Herring Cover Story on Mobile Advertising
Red Herring (www.redherring.com) published a cover story about mobile advertising in its digital edition today. UK-based editor Peter Purton gives a great overview about the players and the current trends in mobile advertsing globally:
“Mobile advertising and marketing using the cell phone to sell is quietly turning into a global phenomenon. While web advertising has been getting all the attention, mobile advertising has grown up in the background, attracting the attention of tens of millions of people. […]
The prospect of getting this unprecedented level of access to cash-wielding consumers has lots of companies excited from global automotive brands like Toyota, BMW, Ford, and Peugeot, to consumer players like Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble, and Johnson & Johnson, to media groups like Warner Brothers, not to mention companies from the telecommunications, computing, and Internet worlds.”
Peter goes on and features several leaders in mobile advertsing, including Advertising.com’s newly acquired Third Screen Media, Screentonic, other players like Vodafone as well as Smaato.
“… San Mateo, California-based mobile advertising platform maker Smaato helps produce advertising revenue for off-deck services by allowing developers of mobile services to integrate ads with their content. Harald Neidhardt, Smaato’s chief marketing officer, agrees that carriers have a substantial advantage. But they won’t always, he says.
The carrier deck may be prime real estate, he adds, but you can’t put everything on the carrier deck. Mr. Neidhardt compares the situation to the days when AOL and Prodigy had all the content. They wanted to keep people within their walls but what the web people wanted to use was a thousand times bigger. And that is where they ended up going.
The lesson of that era leaves no doubt in his mind about where things are headed: “the off-deck market will explode”, he says. …