Nokia's advertising endeavour
January 15, 2008

Nokia recently acquired US-based mobile advertising company Enpocket and is thereby creating a new unit for mobile advertising with the name Nokia Ad Business. Mobil Magazine has talked to Tom Henriksson, responsible for mobile advertising at Nokia.

Tom Henriksson, Nokia Ad Business.

Mobil Magazine met up with Nokia's Tom Henriksson in Amsterdam. He is responsible for the acquisition of Enpocket and the integration of the company into Nokia.

How is Nokia going to make money on advertising?
-We are the a middle man between the ones who have the money, and want to reach mobile consumers, i.e. the advertisers and the agencies representing them, and we help them place their advertising and target their audiences.

What makes you different from the likes of Google AdSense?
- Today - not that much. Differentiation is important. We have the Nokia services, which the others don't, that is unique inventory and provide valuable ad-place opportunities. We are enabling them to be ad-monetized as we speak.

- We believe actually that we have the largest resources focused on just mobile. We did acquire Enpocket which has a mobile-specific very best of breed platform. And Enpocket had a team which we now combined with the teams we had set up within Nokia purely focused on selling, monetizing and developing mobile advertising. For the time being we stay mobile focused, we are the mobile experts. So, there is some differentiation.

What differences have you noticed in doing mobile advertising compared to regular web advertising?
- There are similarities of course, which is good. For instance, display banner type advertising on mobiles is for an advertiser quite similar to display banner advertising on the internet. Because of that, it's kind of easy for them to think about mobile. Otherwise mobile is easily quite complex, cause there's messaging, there's browsing, there's applications.

- We actually often compare campaigns with internet campaigns. And we do realize clear differences in how consumers interact with the ads, how they think about the brand before and post. It depends a bit on what is the context, who is the advertiser. Sometimes it's better on the mobile, and sometimes it works better in on the web.

- And of course, the thing is, there is not one mobile today. You can do mobile web, you can combine it with messaging, you can combine it with others. This should not be stand alone. This should be part of the larger marketing objectives of the brand. So typically it is tied into the physical world as well. You see something on a poster and interact with your mobile. That's the way you get the most powerful results.

How come mobile advertising has not been so wide spread so far?
- Oh, Many, many, many reasons. There are some main reasons.

- What does advertisers look for traditionally? One thing is reach. In the US an advertiser buys reach for 30 millions. In mobile there have not been providers who actually could offer that. One of the things we are doing is amassing that reach on actually a global scale. But adverstising is local and regional, so we do it in specific regions and locales. So that I would say is problem one.

- Another one is [that mobile advertising is] easily perceived complex. People don't know so much about it. There's different types of marketing advertising opportunities. Somebody needs to take out that complexity. That's the reasons we have brand solutions people who actually go and talk to the brands and share the best practices cases and help them understand what works in mobile, and so on, before they actually start placing the media with us.

Pointing to his mobile phone:
- Today, this nice device does all kinds of cool stuff. If you go back and look at the larger population, that has not been the case. It has been quite limited what you can actually do, the experiences for the brands to engage with the mobile consumers. Technological evolution and mass-market adoption of the new things will help a lot.

Is Ad Business similar to Google where an individual can set up an account?
- Not today. Will it be like that in the future? Absolutely. Due to mobile complexities, we are not there today, yet.

- There's one player, Admob, in the US, who has this self-serve, where the small buyer and small seller can actually meet just through an internet tool. They've started very much from the low end. The price level is low, and the quality is not controlled, and so on.

- We are a premium player, so it is much more complex to make that happen in the premium segment. But we are definitely working on it.

- Now we work very focused on, let's say, the biggest buyers and biggest publishers, but if we want this to be a very big business over time we need to be able to automate and invite all the little guys, all the local players.

- It comes back to technology, now technically we can, but in the future commercially as well we will know more where this device is and where it has been before, and what the users is doing and has been doing, if the user wants us to do that. Then it really does come dome to this location related value. Which is of course really one of the reasons why Nokia is investing heavily in maps and navigation and so on as well. That is relevant to the local advertisers. It's the music store next door or the coffee shop or whatever, we need to be able to enable those to join easily.

Some people consider some aspects of mobile advertising an intrusion into their integrity, how do you plan to handle that?
- In most countries, but especially in the Western world countries, you have to have opt-in. We start with respecting legislation. The consumer has to say that he actually wants to receive these messages.

- And in general, I would say, the two words respect and relevance are something that we are very serious about. We want to deliver services to consumers, based on, probably not all but at least part on, an ad-funded model. For those ads there needs to be a benefit to the consumer.

- The consumer in typical future scenarios will say “yes I want that”, I want the ads because I get a benefit, be it free or cheap or whatever. Even in that context, when they say “yes I want something”, it should be relevant.

- It's a two edged sword, you can know a huge amount of the consumer and be really relevant, however the consumer may not want you to know everything. If you visit some sites with sensitive content, and we'd start showing ads on the same subject, because we know that, you might not be very happy about that. So there is that barrier how much do you want to know about the consumer, and how much does the consumer actually want the provider to know about you. Without the consumers we don't have a future.

By: Jonas Kämpe