by Annie Turner

Ad or advertising inventory, and associated terms, are words batted about the mobile industry all the time, but what exactly do they mean?

Ad inventory is often used to describe the amount of advertising space that various publishers* make available to advertisers, for instance, within operators’ portals. Inventory is what the industry is talking about when it says that the average mobile ad inventory has a fill rate (or fill) of between 20% and 40%; that is, only 20% to 40% of the collective space available is sold and in use at any given time.

However, the Wikipedia definition never uses the term ad inventory to describe the collection of advertising campaigns within an advertising network. This is because an advertising network is a collection of (often unrelated and separate) advertising inventories.

Typically an advertising network buys ads from many sources** (in effect having ads served to it as a customer), then it tries to place them (serve them), where they work best, which usually means in an appropriate context (such as dependent on location) or based on the user’s profile (including age, gender and usage patterns. JumpTap comments, “The ad must be related to previous and likely behaviour so that it is viewed as content, not an advertisement”). At the same time, the ad network sells this aggregated ad inventory as a channel to advertisers.

Advertising networks are run by companies such as AdMob, Screen Tonic and Third Screen Media, as well as by companies often primarily associated with search technology such as JumpTap and Medio Systems, as well as by some operators such as Bouygues in France and Sprint in the US.

An advertising network is NOT the same as an operator’s advertising ecosystem, which could include its own portals, via SMS and MMS, as well as off-portal ventures, with another party. A good example of how an operator can exploit the interconnections within that ecosystem is given by Enpocket: “Unsold ad inventory becomes an opportunity for the operator to increase subscriber revenue from premium content and data services by serving targeted promotions to subscribers. In an immature market, the business case for operators is not solely founded on an advertiser revenue stream.”

*The publisher (the organisation which makes something public via mobile phones) could be an operator through their portal or via SMS messages, or a third party working (such as an ad network or a content provider in the form of games, music, videos, ringtones, wallpaper) on behalf of an operator or independently of an operator in the mobile Internet beyond the portal.

** Some, such as Screen Tonic, now owned by Microsoft, also provide the creative (that is, come up with and produce the advert for their clients as well as serve them).