RIM reveals ad service, social layer for BBM

A new advertising service for BlackBerry apps has been released by Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM). Honing in on the apparent simplicity of implementation, RIM said developers, advertisers, agencies and brands can now include advertising in applications “with just a few lines of code.”
The company also released a software development kit for BlackBerry Advertising Service, which supports Mobile Marketing Association-compliant ads and media delivered via HTML5.
“The BlackBerry Application Platform is providing a truly powerful foundation for our developer community. The BlackBerry Advertising Service offers developers a quick and easy way to integrate advertising in their applications. The service reduces the commercial and technical complexity of enabling ads within an application and offers developers a new avenue of monetization,” said Alan Brenner, SVP of BlackBerry Platform.
RIM has partnered with a series of advertising networks, which agencies and advertisers can leverage as they determine where to place their inventory. Developers will receive a 60% split of all advertising revenue.
“This new Advertising Service not only brings new channels of revenue to our developer community, but also provides them with a single relationship through RIM to simplify the commercial and technical complexity of mobile advertising,” Brenner said. “We also feel that it is important that agencies and brands have full control of the creative process and have worked to provide features in the SDK that will allow them to bring dynamic and relevant ads to BlackBerry smartphone users.”
Elsewhere on the BlackBlerry Platform front, RIM announced the BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) Social Platform, which gives developers the opportunity to integrate BBM with their apps.
With more than 28 million users, the BlackBerry exclusive service could bring developers new ways to include that social layer. Various features of BBM including chat capability, content sharing and invitations will now be available to developers and their app creations.
Developers have a long time to test and wait however, because BBM Social Platform won’t be ready until 2011.