Oracle shows a tin ear to privacy concerns with the introduction of a new mobile advertising management platform for communications service providers. Dubbed the Oracle Communications Marketing and Advertising Solution, this software is designed to provide wireless carriers with In an introductory presentation squarely aimed at showing how carriers can use the new platform to garner a share of the mobile advertising and promotional revenue streams by establishing position in the critical path between advertisers, ad agencies, ad network operators and targeted sets of mobile subscribers. Oracle claims to "put the network operator in control" of a wide variety of use cases and transactions by enabling them to operate a marketplace that manages marketing campaigns (primarily involving SMS, MMS and WAP push) which "leverages subscriber data" to support more accurate targeting. It also provides out-of-the-box portal software that supports self-service tools for flexible pricing of advertising options as well as the ability to monitor advertising performance.

In promotional literature and its Web site Oracle's overall message is that they can leverage the information they collect about their subscribers into the basis for delivering targeted ads. The special sauce is tight integration between the advertising delivery engine, with subscriber profiles and existing services to support Notification and Workflow, Bulk Messaging, Traffic Interceptor, Monitoring, Billing, and Data Abstraction. To Oracle, the Advertising & Marketing (A&M) platforms overcomes several technical challenges associated with real-time push marketing to mobile subscribers. The promotional literature makes it sound like it will be simple for carriers to leverage the tight coupling of subscriber data with service delivery into a a greater share of the revenue pie.

The unspoken term for the data that subscribers generate when they use public communications networks is CPNI (customer proprietary network information). If the Advertising & Marketing (A&M) Platform is a way to make this so-called "proprietary" data a component of a targeting scheme, it won't get very far. Yet, when one thinks of all the "network information" and activity flows that Google is able to embed in its algorithm for targeted delivery of ads, you can see why Oracle and its carrier clients might want to take a stab at it.

The very thought of using data from the existing CRM and ERP systems powered by Oracle for the purpose of targeting advertising will be a red flags among subscribers who may feel that the carriers are, in effect, selling access to their status information. With the tele-management aspects knocked, the challenges of productization and sales are just beginning. Entrenched ad networks, aggregators and other intermediaries may not be so happy to see Oracle as an arms merchant to the carriers in what's turning out to be a land grab. The red flag for wireless subscribers is red meat for privacy lobbyists who are unlikely to let the Communications A&M platform thrive unchallenged.