In-brief: Part two of the MSG special sponsored podcast series with JumpTap, a white-label mobile search and advertising company, continues with a look at recent mobile moves from Google and Yahoo, and why operators should think twice before surrendering control over the mobile search experience to a single branded search company.

Amid the excitement at last week’s Mobile World Congress, which saw the appearance of the first Android prototypes, the full-force advance of handset makers into the services space and the welcome arrival of new and lucrative mobile advertising models, one message cut through the noise and the hype: mobile operators must look for ways to generate additional revenue from the mobile Internet.

Whether this is via mobile advertising, increasing content sales, acting as a trusted gateway to the off-portal mobile Internet, or a combination of the above, the pivotal importance of mobile search and the need for mobile operators to own the experience is clear. While operators are well-advised to embrace openness and offer their users a breadth of choice that includes Internet destinations and search engines, they must also be wary of business models and schemes that could dilute their brand over time.

This is the view of Dan Olschwang, JumpTap president and CEO. MSG caught up with Dan to learn what is at stake and what operators need to consider before cutting a search & advertising deal with a branded search provider or making a move onto Google’s new Android platform. His take: The need to succeed on the mobile Internet is so great that many operators are not paying enough attention to who is giving them the “gift” of additional revenue and why they are giving it to them. Beware of the Trojan horse.

Listen to the podcast here. [11:08]

Android: An open OS is good for the mobile ecosystems - provided it is open. “The proof is in the pudding; it’s not in the recipe. Google is a great company but they have no experience in mobile, and I see no reason to go gaga after every announcement they make….They still need to prove themselves in the mobile space.”

The battle for eyeballs: Branded search providers are also portal destinations anxious to extend their reach to mobile. “The first phase is to partner with carriers. But, in the long term, that is not a sustainable model for the search companies and therefore they’re fully motivated to divert traffic onto their own destination sites.

Disintermediation: Over the next five years watch for two types of operators to emerge. “You will have a group of operators that will get completely commoditized because they missed the opportunity [to own the search experience]. At the other end, I can clearly see that there are some other groups [operators] that are making very pro-active and very aggressive moves to build this layer [to give] users full access to anything they want, including Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, because those are good service providers and good brands and people should be able to use them. But that does not mean that those same brands - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft — need necessarily own the monetization of this traffic, and there are very clear and aggressive moves by some of the operator groups to build this layer, build this capability.”

Targeted advertising & relevancy: Mobile operators control the key analytics that allow the delivery of the right ad to the right user - and branded search providers want a piece of the action. “The question for the future will be which is the camp that will be able to create the most useful and interesting experience for the end user. The carriers that build this capability and the skillset to leverage those understandings about the end user for targeting purposes, will win a big win. The ones that don’t, and give it away, [are] obviously going to become the dumb bit pipe.”

Future roadmap: “2007 was the year that we launched our advertising suite, which is to date the broadest in the industry, and it was a very successful year for us as we took the company in terms of maturity to its next level. We are seeing success from advertising and search based advertising on mobile phones. 2008 has also been a great year…. we are in the process of launching some great new innovative formats and ways to utilize mobile phones for advertising purposes that I believe will take the mobile advertising world to a whole new level.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.