Publicis Moves Mobile Agency Phonevalley into U.S.

Via ClickZ, Publicis Groupe announced that Phonevalley, its mobile marketing agency, will expand into the United States.  Phonevalley is already active within the European market, and recently expanded to Asia. Phonevalley, which Publicis acquired last September, counts Universal, Samsung, and Sony BMG among its clients. Publicis intends to use Phonevalley’s mobile expertise in concert with Publicis’ existing American agencies in order to enhance mobile marketing efforts.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Phonevalley will be coming stateside, considering the news two weeks ago that Phonevalley would be the first mobile agency to tap into Yahoo’s Blueprint.  Blueprint is designed to make it easy for agencies to bring mobile ads to a market with thousands of combinations of handsets, platforms, and carriers, because Blueprint itself is handset, platform, and carrier agnostic.

The move will bring Phonevalley into competition for the estimated 40 million active mobile Internet users in the US, according to a Nielsen Mobile report (pdf) released this week. Those consumers represent an enormous opportunity: an eMarketeer report predicted that the US mobile ad spend will total $1.7 billion in 2008, up from $878 million in 2007.

Paris-based Publicis has been turning towards digital and mobile, seeming to realize future of the  industry isn’t going to be buying up gatefold ads in print magazines, but instead following consumers online and onto their mobile phones. Two weeks ago, Publicis announced they would be shifting resources towards a new digital ad venture entiteled VivaKi, which would work across the four major online ad platforms: Google’s DoubleClick, AOL’s Platform-A, Microsoft’s adCenter, and Yahoo’s RightMedia Exchange.

This shift in resources has been developing for months. Back in March, Agency Spy reported that Publicis West had laid off eight to ten people. Sad news, but the interesting bit was that the layoffs weren’t due to client loss, but instead that the “the shop [is] shifting itself towards more digital and brand experience initiatives.”