Marrying ad-serving expertise with ad-selling expertise, Amobee Media, a provider of advertising services for mobile operators, has tapped Winstar Interactive Media to sell its mobile advertising inventory.

Winstar, a division of Interep, will become the sales channel rep for the mobile advertising inventory of two major carriers managed by Amobee Media Systems.

By delivering content to users directly via the carriers' WAP sites, Amobee aims to revolutionize the mobile advertising industry by turning wireless carriers into entertainment programmers.

"We're looking at the wireless carriers as the media company and the media sales house as an ad sales arm, and it really works out," said Roger Wood, senior vice president and general manager of the Americas for Amobee.

"It's a great economic model - the carriers able to supplement the revenue by selling that entertainment with advertising," he said.

In addition to selling Amobee's mobile inventory Winstar will develop relationships with major advertising agencies representing media buyers.

With over six sales offices nationwide, this partnership will provide Amobee with a sales force covering the entire United States.

"Six advertising sales offices will be deploying ad sales people to the various agencies to discuss the mobile ad inventory for two specific wireless carriers, transforming them from service providers to media entities," Mr. Wood said.

Though Mr. Wood was unable to reveal the carrier, he said it focused on youth culture.

As such, the initial advertising will be aimed at a demographic that actively purchases Indie music material and whose sports tastes tend to run to action sports, or what Mr. Wood called a "Blender magazine demo" or "the Cosmo demo."

Amobee's technology allows mobile operators to dynamically insert advertising impressions in all forms of mobile communication and content: WAP Browsing, video and music, SMS, MMS and games.

The company recently ran a campaign with Apple that involved a graphical ad that opened into a map. In other cases it used the same concept, but when the ad opened up to become a coupon.

"The challenge is always how to bridge the gap between when the consumer sees the advertisement and when the consumer takes action; we're known for bridging the gap via mobile advertising," Mr. Wood said. "We think of interesting execution concepts for the advertisers themselves."

Amobee's ad serving solution is designed to facilitate the launch of advertising campaigns for brand building direct response and lead generation campaigns.

The company's media system is capable of supporting everything from in-game and in-video to in-WAP and in-message mobile impression insertions. The insertions occur with full user consent and are made in a relevant, contextual and non-intrusive manner aimed at increasing media value while giving users control over the engagement.

Although most people are enamored with video, Amobee believes the animated graphic leads the way, Mr. Wood said.

"Typically when people see an animated graphic on the screen they think of a banner on the Internet and I think the familiarity of animated graphics on the phone is good," Mr. Wood said.

"We all know what a display ad looks like," he said, "but what makes mobile advertising more powerful over the mobile Internet is the immediacy of the information that we can provide."