A New Kind of "Network" for AT&T, Verizon, Sprint

If you ask Trevor Healey, new CEO of Amobee, what role mobile operators or telcos can play in the mobile advertising business, you have to understand that there are segments within the market. Local and small businesses will use different tools, and run different types of campaigns, from the largest brands that traditionally have used "Madison Avenue" agencies. Telcos might not have natural advantages in the "small account" portion of the mobile ad market.

But large telcos are Fortune 500 companies. That means telco CEOs have opportunities to "hang out" with other Fortune 500 CEOs, the ones whose firms spend the most money advertising and running very-large campaigns. So re-imagine the CEOs of large, global service providers as the linchpins of the relationship selling needed to generate business from the largest and most-sophisticated accounts.

Of course, the platform has to be in place. The skills and capabilities have to be there. But that done, mobile operators, especially, could have an important and substantial role to play in mobile advertising campaigns used by the largest brands and firms. Someday, people might think of Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint as "networks" in a new way. Networks of the NBC, Fox Network, Discovery Channel sort, with scores of millions of people engaging with their screens every day, everywhere they are, all day long.