GigaOM Pro

Alcatel-Lucent this morning joined the increasingly crowded mobile advertising space with a new platform designed to enable carriers to deliver ads to subscribers willing to receive the come-ons. Carriers have struggled to generate advertising dollars from the day mobile ads were born, but they’ve lost ground to third-party ad networks as users (particularly on smartphones) increasingly eschew carrier decks in favor of the unfiltered mobile web. But network operators still have an ace up their sleeves in the form of demographic and network information that only they can leverage. If Alcatel-Lucent can use that data to help deliver better-targeted ads, advertisers will come running.