Virgin, AOL reach mobile Web ad deal

Virgin Mobile. The company has cut a deal with AOL which will deliver banner ads to its mobile Web customers. This is a risky endeavor, of course, since screens on cell phone aren’t that big, and banner ads might be considered intrusive by customers. Still, Virgin CEO Dan Schulman sees the value in the experiment.

“Mobile advertising is something you have to be quite careful with,” Schulman said at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York. “A cell phone is an intimate device. We pay a service provider to have that service and we don’t want to be spammed quite frankly,” he said.

Intimacy is really the key word, or at least the buzz word among carriers. They understand that people have their phone with them more than they do any kind of computer. And it’s their phone, giving a more personal connection. To spam that device is to insult the customer. So one must tread water a bit. So we’ll see how well the experiment goes. Any VMers want to weigh in on this?]]>