There's great opportunity for network providers today to monetize their subscriber data.  But you're wondering what are some of the advertising applications available to you, network operator, that you can use?

Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) might have something of interest. They've recently unveiled their Optism Mobile Advertising product, a new offering to let mobile operators create 'media inventory' - available ad space - and provide advertisers with access to 'willing and highly targeted audiences.'

Optism is engineered, Alcatel-Lucent officials say, to help mobile operators develop new business models and offer more personalized experiences to their subscribers: 'It also helps advertisers reach wider, yet more targeted audiences through responsive, permission and preference-based mobile marketing,' which is aggregated across multiple mobile operators.

'Fragmentation and lack of scale have acted as a brake on mobile advertising, deterring the advertising community and slowing overall growth,' said Eden Zoller, principal analyst, Ovum (News - Alert)Consumer Practice.

Company officials are pushing a key feature of Optism as being its media arm, which they say 'brokers relationships between mobile operators and advertisers,' the advantage here being that it simplifies the media selling process for aggregated operator inventory.

Specifically how it works, is that Optism brings together 'experienced advertising and mobile marketing professionals,' company officials said, 'to build commercial relationships with global brands and agencies, bringing the ecosystem together to facilitate the sale of aggregated media inventory across multiple mobile operators.'

It sounds like a mouthful, sure, but it's an intriguing tool.

'The most desirable inventory involves user permissions supplemented by explicit preferences and must offer broad scale to truly harness mobile as a marketing channel,' said David Kyffin, global chief ROI and direct marketing officer of Mediacom, part of the WPP group. 'Clients are increasingly asking if they can run campaigns over multiple regions and at scale.'

The Alcatel-Lucent operating model and access to multiple mobile operators is being billed as a way to meet these requirements, because at the heart of the product is a scalable, hosted advertising platform that reduces barriers to entry for mobile operators and connects them with advertisers.

'Going beyond just technical capabilities, it offers go-to-market support for operators, combined with media sales and campaign management for advertisers,' company officials say.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Erin Harrison