You have to admire a man who can squeeze “load of bollocks” twice into one interview, dishing out commonsense advice for his old operator colleagues. But Graeme Furguson, ex Head of Global Content Development at Vodafone and now Managing Director of Content at Picsel did exactly that in a recent interview with Paid Content.

Picsel, I think it’s fair to say, have a lower profile in their home markets of the West, with their serious successes coming in the East. Despite rather dryly calling themselves a “mobile software solutions company” (who isn’t really?) they have a range of great products, including a stunning browser and an application that allows brands to exactly replicate their look and feel on a mobile device, which is a pretty tall order in normal circumstances. So far, their apps are embedded on 125 million handsets, so this isn’t a here-today-gone-tomorrow outfit. Check ‘em out.

Anyway, back to Graeme’s words of wisdom:

1. “Now every one’s got music, so why are operators even trying to be in that game?” says Graeme, pointing out that operators lose money on every track they sell.

To which I’d add the thought that in order to launch a new product into a market, it needs to be hugely better than any incumbent - being as good as the competition, or just slightly better, doesn’t hack it.

And downloading the tracks Over The Air doesn’t make it “hugely better”, when sideloading is perfectly acceptable to more users.

If I were an operator in charge of music, I’d be looking to acquire Shazam, as I reckon that the combination of track ID, OTA and fixed price download (ie data cost and track cost) could be constructed into something that could at least compete in this space.

2. Graeme on Mobile Advertising: “This whole idea of mobile advertising as a panacea to the industry is a load of bollocks.”

He cites that any advertising play is all about scale and no single operator on their own will ever reach that scale. He also claims that there’s no talks in place to even discuss how the industry could enable a pan-network buy. Until the industry can offer advertising colleagues large buys across the whole network, it’s not going to take off, except perhaps in the US, where one or two operators might have the size to be interesting.

Perhaps oddly, given that my day job is to run the European end of the Mobile Advertising company, I couldn’t agree more. Why?

First up, mobile advertising is seen by many operators as the next big thing that will have a direct impact on ARPU and their bottom lines. The numbers simply don’t support this. Global telecoms is worth $2000 Billion. The total global ad industry is worth perhaps $500 Billion. Of that Digital Advertising is worth roughly $50 Billion and within that mobile advertising is worth what(?) $5 Billion to keep the numbers easy (and to overstate the case somewhat). So if all Mobile Advertising switched straight into operators tomorrow, it only increases the market by 0.25% - not exactly something to get the City slavering. Hell, even if all digital advertising went mobile and via operators (which is never going to happen), it only moves the revenue needle by 2.5% and the bottom line even less.

Now this is still a great business for someone. But it’s probably not worth the investment of time, focus and money that some operators might be tempted to give it, as spending $100 to make $50 never makes sense whatever the context. That doesn’t mean to say that they can’t or shouldn’t benefit from these revenues, but that it’s not worth the focus that it might at first appear.

There is, it’s worth also pointing out, an alternative approach to the pan-network approach that Graeme talks about and that’s an off-portal pan-Global network, like we’ve created at AdMob. The fact that we’ll serve around 1.5 Billion ads this month demonstrates that scale can be provided to advertisers across all operator networks today.

And he’s right again, in that the US is easily the biggest market.

3. Talking about acquiring exclusive rights, Graeme says “You need to be someone who has the scale to support those rights; otherwise it’s not worth spending a penny on them. It’s only Orange France hanging onto the idea of paying for exclusive content. It’s a load of bollocks. I guarantee that the number of people going to Orange France because they have the Rugby World Cup on their network is no higher than the number of people in this room [three].”

Can’t argue with that.

So go and check out the whole transcript for some more unequivocal no-holds-barred thoughts of someone who knows the industry and is prepared to tell it like it is.