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Poor old mobile carriers, they’re being bullied and bloodied by search behemoth Google, according to Motricity, a firm which sells mobile content delivery services to carriers.

Speaking briefly but emphatically at the TC3 Telecom Council Carrier Connections conference in Santa Clara on Thursday, Motricity’s chief strategy and marketing officer, Jim Ryan, implored carriers to enlist his firm’s help in standing up to Google.
“Has anyone ever written a cheque to Google?” he asked to a room full of shaking heads.

“But how many of you have ever written a cheque to your service provider?” he asked, noting that carriers still had a significant and important role to play when it came to billing for services.

Indeed, so impassioned was Ryan that he even managed to invent a new word, “relevancy” [relevance, we assume]. This “relevancy” he said was absolutely critical if carriers were going to get the ball back into their own court.

In Motricity’s opinion, the way to get the momentum back into carrier hands is the market for preloaded content and app discovery. Of course, Motricity has its own solution to offer carriers on this front  with smartphone services like MobileCast, a widget preinstalled on phones which allows carriers to send offers, coupons and other deals to customers, pushing the services carriers want to promote.

Motricity believes carriers deserve and have the ability to grab back power from the likes of Google and Apple because they still have the ability to influence which services a consumer ultimately adopts, be it through preloading, customer service recommendation or advertisement on a large scale.

MobileCast is also meant to help carriers sell content to users, or advertise to them directly using their highly valuable customer information resources – the recipe for increasingly accurate, targeted marketing and promotional messages.

What this means in practice is that carriers can take control of the information they already possess about their customers and sell them services and products tailored to their needs.

An example of this would be if a user downloaded a poker game to his/her mobile. The carrier could use this information to push a recommendation to that user for a discounted eBook or video of improving one’s poker game. Should the user take the carrier up on the offer, the carrier could surmise that this particular customer was highly interested in poker, and may be interested in getting further SMS discount coupons for upcoming poker tournaments or other poker related offerings, which can all be bundled and discounted, but billed by the carrier.

Motricity itself doesn’t come up with the particular promotions – that’s up to the operators. What Motricity is offering, however, is the back-end technology to make the service to work.

Whether carriers take the firm up on that offer in a big way remains to be seen, but Motricity’s bottom line, as expressed by Ryan is simple:

“Do not give it up to Google. Talk to Motricity.”