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Alcatel-Lucent put 'Telco 2.0' at the heart of its turnaround plan, outlined last fall, and aims to increase its business from supporting and managing carrier web services. It has taken a key step in that direction with a new location aware mobile advertising service, launched in partnership with San Francisco-based 1020 Placecast, which already boasts Fedex and Avis as mobile clients.

This will enable cellphone users to opt-in to a carrier service that delivers ads based on their location. Consumer brand owners and advertising agencies can push promotions to handsets in SMS or MMS formats, with the operator taking a cut of the revenue for the use of their networks.

ALU says it is in talks with unnamed operators with a view to starting trials this summer, and claims scalability is a key differentiator. "It can support millions of subscribers - far more than any competing product on the market today," said the vendor, and customers can not just opt in and out, but provide their carrier with a list of acceptable stores and brands.

This will be underpinned by a combination of ALU's 'geofencing' technology and Placecast's location targeting system. The new move takes ALU a step beyond its existing carrier advertising activities, notably ad insertion for IPTV. Placecast works with the advertisers to create location-based messaging campaigns and its new partner manages and delivers the content, while the geofencing technology lets the advertiser specify certain target regions. These can be very specific, but for privacy reasons, the consumer's exact location is never revealed to the advertiser, only their presence within the defined region.

According to a new ABI Research study, spend mobile marketing and advertising so far this year has been flat or slightly up, in a market where overall ad spending has fallen.

Also hoping to take advantage of that relative resilience, Yahoo has announced partnerships with Teracent and Tumri to allow advertisers to deliver 'smart ads', which are heavily customized to the customer. It will extend this Smart Ads partner program to mobile platforms soon, initially via the Teracent deal. Advertisers will be able to customize creatives to individual users in real time, also taking into account location, time of day and weather.

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