Telefonica Announces Global Mobile Advertising Alliance

Telefƒ³nica is to launch a single global platform to deploy advertising on mobile phones through a world-wide deal with Amobee Media Systems. Telefƒ³nica says that it aims to provide a single point of contact for agencies and advertisers wishing to buy, deploy and monitor campaigns across all mobile channels for its 170 million customers.

Julio Linares, Chief Operating Officer, Telefƒ³nica, said: "The key to successful mobile advertising is doing it in a contextual and non intrusive way, which our global opt-in ad-serving solution enables us to do. The benefits of a common vendor across the Telefƒ³nica group are that we are able to truly look at a common architecture that will drive cost savings for design and testing as well as reduce deployment times."

Linares added: "We believe we are accelerating the uptake of mobile advertising in all Telefƒ³nica mobile businesses across Europe and Latin America and will generate revenue from mobile advertising well beyond WAP and Mobile Internet."

"Winning the global Telefƒ³nica business is a huge vote of confidence for Amobee," Zohar Lekovitz, CEO of Amobee Media Systems, said. "Mobile is the next mass medium, delivering reach and relevancy that blows away traditional media formats. With over 170 million mobile users globally, Telefƒ³nica is setting a new standard for how advertisers reach their target audiences."

The single centralised ad server enables precise contextual and behavioural targeting across all users on all handsets for all non-voice related applications and services including WAP banners, games, video and music players, applications, messaging (SMS & MMS), ring back tones as well as video & music streaming.

Telefƒ³nica retains complete control of the solution which means that each operating business will have access to customer data, localisation, behavioral profiles and the opt-in database. The business will then instruct the Ad-Server to deliver a relevant ad to customers with a certain profile and handset type.

The advertising impressions from the Amobee platform occur in a relevant, contextual and non-intrusive manner, thus giving the users control over the engagement. The alliance with Amobee will enable Telefƒ³nica to fund its growing number of mobile data services, while ensuring that customers get better value, as well as a richer mobile experience.

Deployment begins in the UK, Spain, Mexico and Colombia this year, and will roll out across the remainder of Telefƒ³nica's regional businesses in 2009.

Posted to the site on 29th June 2008