Europe UK : O2 signalled its intention to grow the UK mobile advertising market with a new service which will allow brands to take advantage of the significant opportunities presented by mobile advertising, and bring relevant, highly targeted and informative advertising to O2’s mobile customers.

This new service on O2 Active will enable brands to deliver both display advertising and advertising-funded content models to specific audiences. For the first time in the mobile industry, advertisers can be provided with the tools to measure how effective their campaigns are and which audiences react well to their adverts. Advertiser’s microsites will be zero rated so that customers who click through will not incur any data charges while they are browsing on these sites.

The O2 mobile advertising service was successful trialled with 500,000 O2 customers during 2007. Trialists were presented with various forms of adverts from 30 different advertising campaigns on O2 Active, the UK’s largest mobile portal, including banners ads, advertising-funded games and video from brands such as Honda, Nivea and Yell.

Results from the trial revealed that 16 million page impressions were generated on O2 Active throughout the trial, with a 6% click through rate on adverts. This compares to an online advertising average of 0.18%* highlighting the huge potential of mobile advertising to reach audiences in a highly targeted and relevant way. Customer’s also reacted well to the advertising and considered it a good experience with access to quality brands and no data charges.

O2 will be able to provide brands with more targeting possibilities than on any other traditional advertising platform, with its own service boasting opportunities to carry out behavioural, demographic, geographic, and channel-based targeting.

· Behavioural – targeting users who subscribe to football alerts or read the football pages on O2 Active with adverts that are known to be of interest to the football demographic.

· Demographic – targeting men, women, specific age groups, regions or usage (those who have made an overseas call in the last month) etc

· Geographic /locational/temporal – targeting people based on location e.g. allows advertisers to target particular regions with promotions – e.g Motoring brands wanting to generate test drives in affluent areas of London

· Channel-based – Sponsorship of the Sports section or other channels on O2 Active

O2’s advertising service runs on O2 Active, the UK’s most popular mobile portal with 7.8 million customers visiting every 90 days and we see 650 million page views per month. To sustain the impact and keep adverts within acceptable bounds for its customers, O2 will be restricting the supply of adverts on O2 Active, focusing its efforts on effective targeting and precision.

Sally Cowdry, Marketing Director, O2 UK, commented, “Mobile advertising is the advertiser’s holy grail, combining a high resolution screen in every pocket with a customer database which has the power to deliver messages to exactly the people you want. This new service will provide a boost to the market while at the same time ensuring advertising is relevant and non intrusive for our customers.”

O2 also today announces a sales partnership with 4th Screen, the leading independent mobile advertising agency, to sell its mobile advertising inventory to quality, non-competing brands. O2, with 4th Screen’s help in understanding the unique characteristics of mobile advertising, is now working with leading brands including, Honda, Nivea, Yell, Pathe, Citroen, Peugeot, EA and Nokia, to deliver effective and ROI-driven campaigns.

Mark Slade, MD, 4th Screen Advertising commented, “We are delighted to be working with O2, the UK’s largest mobile operator. I believe the significant audience reach and advanced targeting capabilities of O2 offer advertisers and their agencies a unique media channel for advertising.”

O2 mobile advertising has focused its efforts on adding value to the users and the customer experience, through relevancy and valuable offers.