Alcatel-Lucent Gets into Mobile Advertising Business

Alcatel-Lucent has created a white-label direct marketing platform called  "Optism" that is designed to help mobile operators create “media inventory” and provide advertisers with easy access to highly-targeted audiences.

Optism is not an ad network so much as an enabler of ad networks, since it is the mobile service providers who actually will retail the services, but Optism does create a permission and preference-based mobile marketing capability aggregated across multiple mobile operators.

Optism features a media arm that brokers relationships between mobile operators and advertisers, greatly simplifying the media selling process for aggregated operator inventory.

You might wonder whether Alcatel-Lucent now is competing with Google or Apple. It says it isn't, since Optism primarily aims to create direct marketing campaigns taking advantage of mobile communication features, such as text messaging.

It's an interesting approach to creating business-to-business revenue streams that are not directly dependent on end-user subscriptions. Available as a hosted and white-labled solution, Optism might be able to get economies of scale no single mobile operator could.


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