The big Australian publishing concerns are girding their loins to move into mobile — News Corp is in talks with carriers to launch MySpace on mobiles and PBL Media will make the move through its online portal JV with Microsoft, NineMSN. “Ninemsn’s mobile content platform is understood to use various PBL TV and print brands and will trial a number of mobile advertising applications”, according to the SMH. Chris Noone, the group mobile director, refused to give details of the plan he admitted will be announced soon.
Beware Online Going Mobile: In a separate but seemingly related story the SMH notes that the big promise of mobile advertising could be dashed by foolish implementation, and claimed that “it was the big, traditional online publishers such as ninemsn, Yahoo!7 and Fairfax Digital who were fingered as those likely to do most damage in the mobile arena”. The argument comes from the head of content at 3 Mobile, Annie Mackin, who is concerned the online portals will try and do mobile advertising the same way they do online advertising. “We can’t just copy an internet model onto the mobile phone. If you do that, you’ll get spam and the early days of the internet when people were just bombarded with ads. We think it’s a medium where we can provide additional value by being highly targeted and offer our customers a real benefit,” said Macklin.
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