Mobile advertising is becoming a very competitive business, with operators keen to serve up content and specialists like Enpocket, Amobee and Admob competing with the likes of Google and Yahoo. Now Nokia is joining the fray.

The handset maker has announced two interesting new mobile advertising services – a fully managed service for advertisers to conduct targeted advertising on mobile called Nokia Ad Service; and Nokia Advertising Connector, a private label service for publishers and advertising aggregators who want to deliver targeted ads to mobile devices.

With existing mobile content sites such as nokia.mobi that services 100m hits per month in 120 countries, Nokia is in a strong position to inject advertising into its existing mobile network and has an army of content suppliers that it can also collaborate with for a mobile advertising platform.

And from the advertiser’s perspective, the Nokia Ad Service in particular provides a very interesting alternative to third parties – potentially it provides access to all Nokia devices across all operators in all territories, with the opportunity for precise targeting because the web-mobile gateways are run by Nokia (off portal).

But Amobee’s chief sales and marketing officer Patrick Parodi – who is also global chair at the Mobile Entertainment Forum – suggested that the operators might be unwilling to accept ad-serving by Nokia. “Operators are starting to play an essential role in being able to serve impressions to all customers and all handsets with the benefit of information such as the users’ location,” he noted.

More at http://adservice.nokia.com