A Conversation With AdStar

Following up on yesterday’s mobile news roundup, we had the chance to catch up with AdStar CEO Leslie Bernhard and others during a call yesterday afternoon.

The company earlier in the day had announced a partnership with Nokia to integrate a private-label mobile advertising platform for any publisher to use to sell ads across Web, print and now mobile media. This will extend beyond mobile platforms on Nokia devices, according to the company.

The ad platform will also be offered to publishers other than just newspaper publishers, according to Bernhard, who defines the company’s target market as “any entity having its own sales force that can benefit from mobile advertising.” It will be integrated into AdStar’s ad management platform and could in the future involve cost-per-action ad features such as pay-per-call and coupons on mobile devices.

It will also offer campaign management tools for multi-platform (Web, print, mobile) advertising, and its white-label status will allow publishers to equip their existing sales forces with a new tool.

“It allows publishers to own their advertiser and not cede control to anyone else,” says Steve Brown, VP of business development, who added that the platform will have a self-serve component for advertisers and can also be used by sales reps who want to sit with their clients and build campaigns.

As mentioned yesterday, this will also bring a great deal of capability for newspapers to play in the mobile advertising sandbox  something they certainly claim to want to do. At the recent NAA show, many publishers expressed regret at being late to the online party and said they don’t want to make the same mistake with mobile.

“They took too long in the online space, and they ended up having to relinquish a lot,” agreed Bernhard. “When it comes to the mobile space, we’re really challenging them based on this opportunity to really gain more of a foothold.”

So, in essence, this partnership will bring mobile ad capability closer to newspapers and make it easier on them, given AdStar’s existing relationships with many publishers.

“That’s the point behind this whole thing,” says Bernhard. “We can say to them, ‘We already have you covered for print and online; here is a simple and easy way to bundle mobile.’ ”

There is much more to the partnership and what it could do for AdStar’s existing product and client base (as well as Nokia). We’ll continue the discussion in the next issue of Local Media Journal.