Alcatel-Lucent has unveiled its Optism Mobile Advertising Solution, enabling mobile operators to create the necessary tools for advertisers to access highly targeted audiences. With its media arm, the Optism platform will broker deals between mobile operators and brands/advertisers, simplifying the media selling process for aggregated operator inventory. The solution is based on a scalable, hosted platform that offers go-to-market support for operators, combined with media sales and campaign management tools for advertisers.

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today unveiled its Optism™ Mobile Advertising Solution, a unique new offering that enables mobile operators to create valuable “media inventory” (available ad space) and provide advertisers with easy access to willing and highly targeted audiences. Optism™ helps mobile operators develop new business models and offer more personalized experiences to their subscribers. It also helps advertisers reach wider, yet more targeted audiences through highly responsive, permission and preference-based mobile marketing that is aggregated across multiple mobile operators, a capability unique in the industry.

A key feature of Optism™ is its media arm, which brokers relationships between mobile operators and advertisers, greatly simplifying the media selling process for aggregated operator inventory. Specifically, Optism™ brings together a wealth of experienced advertising and mobile marketing professionals to build commercial relationships with global brands and agencies, bringing the ecosystem together to facilitate the sale of aggregated media inventory across multiple mobile operators.

“The most desirable inventory involves user permissions supplemented by explicit preferences and must offer broad scale to truly harness mobile as a marketing channel,” said David Kyffin, Global Chief ROI and Direct Marketing Officer of Mediacom, part of the WPP group. “Clients are increasingly asking if they can run campaigns over multiple regions and at scale. Alcatel-Lucent's operating model and access to multiplemobile operators is a big step towards meeting these requirements.”

At the heart of the solution is a highly scalable, hosted advertising platform that reduces barriers to entry for mobile operators and easily and directly connects them with advertisers. Going beyond just technical capabilities, it offers go-to-market support for operators, combined with media sales and campaign management for advertisers. The solution provides an innovative business model – based on revenue sharing -- that empowers operators to play a more significant role in the ecosystem than they do today. Utilising permission and stated preferences to deliver advertising to subscribers’ mobile phones, they can be connected with their favourite brands through relevant and engaging interactions that are tailored to their specific interests and lifestyles, such as discount offers on products and services.

Alcatel-Lucent is enabling mobile operators, such as Orange Austria, to connect their subscribers with the brands that they care about, and provide access to information and offers. “By working with Alcatel-Lucent, we can provide value to our subscribers by ensuring that ads are interest-based, while growing our revenue without adding complexity to our operations,” said Juergen Pillinger, Senior Business Developer (Advertising Solutions), Orange Austria. “The Mobile Advertising Solution allows us to deliver targeted ads that subscribers actually want to receive, while providing a highly responsive channel for brands and media agencies.”

By helping mobile operators expose a valuable asset – their media inventory – in a safe and secure way to create new services and additional revenue streams, the Optism™ Mobile Advertising Solution supports Alcatel-Lucent’s application enablement vision to combine the capabilities of network operators with the speed and innovation of the web to provide end users and enterprises with a richer and more trusted web experience.

“Fragmentation and lack of scale have acted as a brake on mobile advertising, deterring the advertising community and slowing overall growth,” said Eden Zoller, Principal Analyst, Ovum Consumer Practice. “Alcatel-Lucent’s aggregated approach is working to address these issues and as such is a positive step in the right direction.”
“Mobile operators have a huge role to play in the growth of mobile advertising,” said Thomas Labarthe, Vice President of Mobile Advertising at Alcatel-Lucent. “Our solution unlocks that potential and finally creates a compelling proposition for operators, advertisers and, importantly, subscribers.”
In keeping with its growing role in the mobile advertising and marketing space, Alcatel-Lucent has become a premier member and active participant in the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), as announced on Feb. 15, 2010 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
For more information on the Alcatel-Lucent Optism™ Mobile Advertising Solution click here.
For more information about Optism’s™ media arm please click here.

About Alcatel-Lucent's Application Enablement strategy

Application enablement is an industry vision and network approach that combines the trusted capabilities of network operators and the speed and innovation of the web to provide end users and enterprises what they demand: a richer and more trusted web experience and beyond. Through a strategic focus on application enablement, Alcatel-Lucent is helping its customers create new value by exposing their network capabilities in a managed and controlled way, facilitating new business models and improving return on investment. For more information, go to http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/application_enablement/

About Alcatel-Lucent
 
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the trusted transformation partner of service providers, enterprises, strategic industries such as defense, energy, healthcare, transportation,  and governments worldwide, providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry. With operations in more than 130 countries and the most experienced global services organization in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with a global reach. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 15.2 billion in 2009 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris. For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on the Internet: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com