Offline and online data are merged to help predict which consumers are most likely to respond to advertisers’ online ads with Q Interactive’s predictive behavioural targeting. It uses self-reported geo-demographic, behavioural and transaction-based data to work out their predictions.

Q Interactive CEO Matt Wise tells us:

“Most behavioral targeting in the marketplace is really just contextual re-targeting - delivering a female-oriented ad to consumers who have visited a women’s lifestyle site, for instance. This approach is not much more advanced than an ad exec in the 1950s placing a detergent or diapers ad in Family Circle. What differentiates Q Interactive’s behavioral targeting is that it’s proactive rather than reactive; we use a wealth of online and offline data to proactively predict the consumers most likely to respond to a given ad.”

The company’s data comes from email campaigns and form submissions. It’s now combining this with information from web display ad click-throughs.

I’ve just come across this nice 5 minute video from Google. Android, the operating system for mobile telephones, will revolutionise handset interfaces and therefore advertising on mobile telephones. If you’re at all interested in the next generation of media opportunities (and as a media professional you should be), then you should really watch. It’s going to put stuff like the iPhone to shame. Why? Because anybody will be able to develop any application they like for the system and make it available. It will make mobile phones leap ahead in usability and customisation, leaving the likes of Nokia and the iPhone far behind within a few months.

Android will appear for the first time on a consumer device September 23rd, on a T-Mobile handset (The HTC-Dream or as T-Mobile calls it, the G1) in the USA. It’s expected to be on general sale sometime in October, according to Information Week. Android’s developer blog is a very good place to catch up with all the latest software widgets being developed for the platform.

Internet on your mobile phone is the new El Dorado for the advertising business. The battles for controlling this content have been developing. Consumer data is a critical element for this new medium. The ability to know almost exactly who your target is and what they are consuming on their mobile internet is a dream held by marketers since the beginnings of the internet. And it’s the mobile phone operators that hold the key to this dream, not the handset manufacturers.

Regardless, Nokia have been setting up deals with a number of traditional publishers to create its own walled garden using their handsets. They hope that they can build momentum so that these publishing partners have no reason to go out on their own. Nokia will keep a share of any deals done, but I don’t think it’s a model that will last long.

There’s no reason for a publisher to restrict reaching an audience based on the manufacturer of the hardware. Can you imagine doing deals with tv manufacturers like Sony or Panasonic rather than the stations themselves? No, me neither. In my view, the advertising cake is going to be taken by the operators (who hold the most valuable data about subscribers) and innovators like Google, who are soon launching Android, their first mobile operating system, through T-Mobile.

The Nokia Media Network claims more than 100 million consumers around the globe. It allows advertisers to target consumers on the pages of mobile internet publishers, operator partners and Nokia services. Existing publishers on the system include Reuters and Cosmopolitan and they are now joined by El Pais, El Mundo, the UK’s Telegraph and Mirror and the International Herald Tribune. All these outfits are old school publishers who are unlikely to know what they’re doing in mobile telephony and just want the box ticked for their management. Grow up and get a little more clever guys - the world is changing beneath you.

As the Head of Nokia Interactive Advertising, Tom Henriksson, puts it:

“The biggest brands in the world trust Nokia with their mobile advertising because of the quality of the publishers on our network.”

The biggest brands in the world don’t necessarily know what they are doing.