Nokia Launches Mobile Ad Network

Nokia (NOK) is announcing the launch of a mobile ad network this morning at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Named the "Nokia Media Network", Nokia notes, "The biggest brands in the world trust us with their mobile advertising because they know the Nokia Media Network enables them to reach the largest, highest quality audience on mobile and provides the best ROI."

AccuWeather, Discovery, Hearst, Reuters, and Sprint are the first companies on board. Nokia is leveraging their acquisition of Enpocket in October 2007 to optimize the ad campaigns along with providing analytics for campaign optimization. Will Nokia’s acquisition of Twango last year also offer more opportunities for the Nokia Media Network to reach consumers on any device, whether on a computer or on a mobile? 

"Nokia Media Network’s wide reach of the most desirable mobile audience is yielding click-through rates averaging 10% in certain channels, the highest reported response rates in the industry." I wonder how many of those clicks are mistakes – with my new iPhone I’ve clicked on the wrong items more than the right items so far.

To sell in ads across the world, Nokia has expanded its account management and media sales teams to include offices in Beijing, Boston, Chicago, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan, Minneapolis, Mumbai, Munich, New York, Paris, Singapore and Shanghai.

Yahoo launched a mobile ad network a year ago but I haven’t heard anything about it since then.

With mobile devices moving into rich-media browsing, do we need mobile ad networks? And will the mobile ad networks be acquired by traditional ad networks looking to offer a more comprehensive solution?