Three Group to tackle excessive and irrelevant mobile ads

This will enable rapid roll-out of the technology to all other Three Group operators.

Network-based ad-blocking is a more powerful and effective solution for customers than application-based technologies as it reaches a broader range of mobile advertising.

Our objective in working with Shine is not to eliminate mobile advertising, which is often interesting and beneficial to our customers, but to give customers more control, choice and greater transparency over what they receive.

Our three principal goals in deploying ad blocking capability will be:

1. That customers should not pay data charges to receive adverts.  These should be costs borne by the advertiser. 
2. That customers’ privacy and security must be fully protected. Some advertisers use mobile ads to extract and exploit data about customers without their knowledge or consent. 
3. That customers should be entitled to receive advertising that is relevant and interesting to them, and not to have their data experience in mobile degraded by excessive, intrusive, unwanted or irrelevant adverts.

Over the coming months Three will announce full details of how it will achieve these objectives and will work with Shine Technologies and the advertising community to deliver a better, more targeted and more transparent mobile ad experience to customers.

Tom Malleschitz, Chief Marketing Officer, Three UK, said: “Irrelevant and excessive mobile ads annoy customers and affect their overall network experience. We don’t believe customers should have to pay for data usage driven by mobile ads. The industry has to work together to give customers mobile ads they want and benefit from.

These goals will give customers choice and significantly improve their ad experience.”