There’s no shortage of companies looking to cash in by placing billboards on the mobile information superhighway. But a few of them are also working to smooth the surface of the road itself.
Quattro Wireless is the latest player in the wireless advertising game, coming out of stealth mode last week after pocketing $4 million in funding. The Waltham, Mass.-based startup was founded by two former m-Qube executives looking to help publishers create mobile Web sites that offer compelling content as well as interactive advertisements.
Univision Online Inc., a subsidiary of the Spanish-language media company, has tapped Quattro to power a new mobile portal, and the startup counts Procter & Gamble among its advertisers. Quattro also hopes to establish a wireless ad marketplace like those by AdMob Inc. and Millennial Media Inc.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the outfit is working to improve the end-user experience on the mobile Internet in an effort to spur uptake and deliver more effective ads.
“We really like the mobile advertising space, but we had a little bit more interest in the mobile Web, and we wanted to marry the two,” said CEO Andrew Miller, who founded Quattro with Eswar Priyadarshan, a former m-Qube colleague. “But before mobile advertising could take off, the mobile Web had to be a proper experience, a delightful experience.”
Space drawing behemoths
Microsoft Corp. is taking a similar tack with last week’s acquisition of ScreenTonic SA, a Paris-based wireless advertising company with carrier partners in Belgium, France and the United Kingdom. ScreenTonic powers a variety of mobile advertising formats including banners, fully branded WAP sites and SMS campaigns; the company also provides ad management and reporting offerings.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The software giant, which last year reportedly was in talks to acquire Third Screen Media, said it will integrate ScreenTonic’s technology and partnerships with its own Digital Advertising Solutions platform to deliver ads across mobile phones and computers. But while the Internet was built for the latter platform, there’s still much to be done to make it more compatible for the former, according to Matt Champagne, who heads Microsoft’s mobile product management business for MSN and Windows Live.
“There were significant issues with WAP 1,” Champagne explained. “WAP 2 allows you to improve the user experience, but there’s no sort of single solution out there. . When you consider the number of devices, gateways and networks, it’s still not an easy deployment, and it’s a long way from the (fixed-line) Web.”
ScreenTonic’s 43 employees will continue to be based in Paris, Champagne said, and Microsoft will use the company’s expertise to deploy ads on Windows Mobile services around the world.
Fork in the road
But while Quattro and Microsoft share similar goals when it comes to the mobile Internet, their strategies differ. Microsoft is a strong supporter of .mobi, the controversial top-level domain created to designate sites created exclusively for mobile devices. Mobile Top Level Domain Ltd., the company behind the effort, last week said it had registered a half-million such URLs since its launch last October.
The effort has been criticized as a “money grab” by detractors, however, who claim the suffix will serve only to confuse consumers. Popular brands and Web sites would prefer to market a single URL regardless of the platform, many believe, using technology to determine which type of device a consumer is using and deliver content in the appropriate format.
“Not everybody wants a .mobi;” said Miller. “We haven’t found any of our customers who want it.”
It may be years before .mobi can be judged a success or a failure. Meanwhile, Quattro, Microsoft and the rest of the crowded mobile advertising field will continue to work to deliver faster download times, better transcoding technology and-perhaps-a standardized format for WAP URLs. And while using a phone to go online can still be a painful endeavor, there’s no doubt that the wireless Web is a friendlier place than it was just a few months ago.
“The initial mobile Web was not a big success,” said Champagne, “but now we’re seeing some of the problems being addressed. People have learned how to provide a better experience to end users.”
