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Mobile Marketing Takes Giant Leap Forward: AOL Buys Third Screen Media

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May 16, 2007 

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Sarah Novotny  |

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Mobile Marketing Takes Giant Leap Forward: AOL Buys Third Screen Media

AOL has agreed to acquire Third Screen Media who will act as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL’s third-party ad network Advertising.com. The financial details of the acquisition are presently undisclosed.

Third Screen Media has two distinct advantages in the mobile marketing universe — flexibility and compatibility. The company connects advertisers, publishers and mobile phone carriers on a common platform, allowing ads to be managed and delivered through wireless application protocol (WAP), down loadable applications, text-messaging, or SMS, multimedia messaging service, or MMS and mobile video.

Thomas Burgess, founder and CEO of Third Screen Media, said, “We can now offer advertisers and publishers a comprehensive suite of interactive advertising solutions for every type of device, platform and program.”

And the acquisition is being seen by analyst as a very positive sign for the entire mobile marketing industry as a whole.
“This deal brings mobile further into the mainstream advertising environment by allowing for integrated ad buys,” said Charles Golvin, principal analyst at Forrester Research. Mobile marketing has seen surges in the past due to Google/DoubleClick’s mobile capabilities, and even Microsoft has made inroads to the mobile frontier. The software monolith agreed to purchase ScreenTonic, a French mobile ad company, earlier this month.

U.S. mobile advertising is expected to grow from $421 million in 2006 to $4.7 billion by 2011, according to eMarketer. Worldwide, the market is expected to expand to $11.3 billion by the same year.
However, serious obstacles remain for the mobilemarketing industry. First is the fact that mobile Internet users make up only 11% of all U.S. mobile phone subscribers, which amounts to about 23 million consumers, according to Forrester Research analysts. Second, is the issue of effective ad placement because mobile carriers–the only ones with access to user behavior patterns–have been slow to make such information available to advertisers.

These challenges represent obstacles which all fledgling markets face. Aligned industries will eventually begin to realize mobile marketing as just another alternative revenue model.

Tags: AOL and Third-Screen-Media

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