Mobile ADS

Often when we talk about mobile ads we refer to SMS Spams, Ads on Wap sites, sponsored wallpaper and poly/ringtones, ads that only promote mobile services and content. Although mobile based ads market isn't that big, its growing rapidly these past 2 year due to telcos adaption of 3G technology. There are companies like Cellfire that took mobile ads one notch higher by providing mobile delivery of discount coupons but its not enough. For ads to be profitable it must be delivered to mass audience with the longest possible retention time. Not just by SMS broadcast that happens once in a while or via sponsored contents which users still needs to download like Game Jump.

Verizon recently announced it will be offering ads on its phones, beginning early next year, Verizon Wireless will allow placement of banner advertisements on news, weather, sports and other Internet sites that users visit and display on their mobile phones, company executives said. This is a good example of what I'm looking for to push mobile ads to go mainstream, but I have reservations depending on Verizon's final idea if its actually inserting ads into each sites the user's visit via mobile phone. That would be data tampering and a sever violation of its user's privacy, the same reason why your ISPs doesn't insert ads on every page you browse. It would be OK if Verizon will just stick their ads on their own portal which eventually one step falling short of how ads should work. It should be based on the same concept how Internet ads should work like Google Adsense. But putting Google Adsense on mobile proves to be not a good way to track impressions since current mobile infrastructure routes each GPRS or 3G traffic through telco's Internet web proxy (mobile devices doesn't have IP address anyway).

After much thought I came up with another solution to the problem, but it requires that both ad providers/server and connection provider be on the same network. The solution would totally allow the same Adsense experience on mobile which IMHO is worth venturing into especially for telcos.

I did prior test with Google's Adsense with the solution and it works for click-through ads with the ad server not being on the same network as the telco but it cannot track unique ad impressions. With this alone I'm confident the solution for mobile ads to be successful is if and only if:

Telco = Google