Mobile Ads - Australian Telco update
4 March 2009
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It’s a while since I wrote anything about the Australian Telcos, so I thought I’d make mention of a few snippets of relevance to the local mobile advertising industry.
Firstly, I recently came across the Sensis MediaSmart mobile advertising rate card online. It includes rates for buying advertising media on all of the Sensis and BigPond mobile sites. There are also descriptions of the various ad products and some case studies. Not sure how long the MediaSmart rate cards have been live for, but it’s probably been a good year since Vodafone published their mobile advertising rates in a bold move that gave the other Australian Telcos a push in the right direction 
And finally, in January this year, Natalie Apostolou from Digital Media magazine reported that Optus had announced its intention to enter the mobile advertising space. Interestingly there was no press release from Optus and no information on the Optus website (still) about this development.
The Digital Media article mentioned that “Optus has appointed digital sales agency 3D Axis as its first sales partner for the offering and will consider developing an in-house mobile advertising sales team as the market matures”.
3D Axis, previously part of the Q Ltd group of companies, was a mobile media specialist, but this company does not exist anymore! Upon investiation, qnother Q Ltd company, 3D Interactive can be seen to have included Optus Zoo (mobile) on their site list, with 4 million impressions available for $45 CPM. Given this is the same rate 3D Interactive publish for Optus Zoo online, I suspect they will be bundling online advertisers into mobile, at least initially.
It is an interesting move for Optus, given that they are already so far behind the competition locally, to appoint an agency with limited mobile expertise. It’s also intriguing to note that Optus have made so little fuss about their foray into mobile advertising. Not even a press release?
Finally we can only speculate about what will happen to the combined Vodafone and Three mobile advertising strategies should the proposed merger go ahead later this year.
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