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Alcatel-Lucent launches Optism to battle Ad giants
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 14 April 2010, 15:13 IST
Paris: Alcatel-Lucent has unveiled its Optism Mobile Advertising Solution in order to compete with the dominance of Google, Apple and Orange in the advertisement space. Optism will enable mobile operators to create valuable "media inventory" and provide advertisers with easy access to willing and highly targeted audiences. Optism helps mobile operators develop new business models and offer more personalized experiences to their subscribers. It also helps advertisers reach wider, yet more targeted audiences through highly responsive, permission and preference-based mobile marketing that is aggregated across multiple mobile operators, a capability unique in the industry.
A key feature of Optism is its media arm, which brokers relationships between mobile operators and advertisers, greatly simplifying the media selling process for aggregated operator inventory. Specifically, Optism brings together a wealth of experienced advertising and mobile marketing professionals to build commercial relationships with global brands and agencies, bringing the ecosystem together to facilitate the sale of aggregated media inventory across multiple mobile operators.
"The most desirable inventory involves user permissions supplemented by explicit preferences and must offer broad scale to truly harness mobile as a marketing channel," said David Kyffin, Global Chief ROI and Direct Marketing Officer of Mediacom, part of the WPP group. "Clients are increasingly asking if they can run campaigns over multiple regions and at scale. Alcatel-Lucent's operating model and access to multiplemobile operators is a big step towards meeting these requirements."
At the heart of the solution is a highly scalable, hosted advertising platform that reduces barriers to entry for mobile operators and easily and directly connects them with advertisers. Going beyond just technical capabilities, it offers go-to-market support for operators, combined with media sales and campaign management for advertisers. The solution provides an innovative business model - based on revenue sharing -- that empowers operators to play a more significant role in the ecosystem than they do today. Utilising permission and stated preferences to deliver advertising to subscribers' mobile phones, they can be connected with their favourite brands through relevant and engaging interactions that are tailored to their specific interests and lifestyles, such as discount offers on products and services.
Alcatel-Lucent is enabling mobile operators, such as Orange Austria, to connect their subscribers with the brands that they care about, and provide access to information and offers. "By working with Alcatel-Lucent, we can provide value to our subscribers by ensuring that ads are interest-based, while growing our revenue without adding complexity to our operations," said Juergen Pillinger, Senior Business Developer (Advertising Solutions), Orange Austria. "The Mobile Advertising Solution allows us to deliver targeted ads that subscribers actually want to receive, while providing a highly responsive channel for brands and media agencies."
By helping mobile operators expose a valuable asset - their media inventory - in a safe and secure way to create new services and additional revenue streams, the Optism Mobile Advertising Solution supports Alcatel-Lucent's application enablement vision to combine the capabilities of network operators with the speed and innovation of the web to provide end users and enterprises with a richer and more trusted web experience.
"Fragmentation and lack of scale have acted as a brake on mobile advertising, deterring the advertising community and slowing overall growth," said Eden Zoller, Principal Analyst, Ovum Consumer Practice. "Alcatel-Lucent's aggregated approach is working to address these issues and as such is a positive step in the right direction."
"Mobile operators have a huge role to play in the growth of mobile advertising," said Thomas Labarthe, Vice President of Mobile Advertising at Alcatel-Lucent. "Our solution unlocks that potential and finally creates a compelling proposition for operators, advertisers and, importantly, subscribers."