Free Mobile Service Funded by Advertising: The future?

For quite some time now, a group of well known personalities from the mobile, advertising and business worlds have been working to give shape to an initiative that may change the mobile communications market in dramatic ways. It may even have a huge impact on advertising both on-line and on any other media.

Scheduled for launch in 2007 in several European countries, Blik would be the first free mobile phone services financed by advertising. Many of us may feel tempted to quickly discard it as an ill-fated attempt similar to the majority of free Internet access services financed by advertising that were popular at the end of the nineties and beginning of the 2000 decade.

There are however, unique factors that may determine a different fate for Blik, it's sustainability, penetration and opertation. Starting with the fact that this is a project lead by Nokia's ex-president and an ex-senior executive of Leo Burnett. This gives Blik an excellent, penetration and personal relationships with each of the three industries the business model depends on: Mobile phone manufacturers, Mobile service providers and advertising.

Although it's still on a very early stage, the project already received some coverage this month (November 2006) by BusinessWeek Europe.

And the business model has been publicly praised by Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, without any mention of Blik, but explaining in detail the huge value Google foresees in such a service.