Mobile Advertising: Easier Than You've Heard

AS GOOGLE HAS SO SUCCESSFULLY shown, if you make media buying intuitive and easy, the advertisers will come. And not just the mom and pop retailers, but nearly every major marketer is now involved in some form of search marketing, if only to protect its own flanks from aggressive competitors. So, how does this translate to mobile advertising? There is still a nagging feeling out there that mobile advertising is hard to do. That it will require yet another agency specialist like search does or a fully mature mobile site, but it doesn't.

Let's start with a few facts and figures: there are three times more mobile handsets in the U.S. than PCs. In fact, 76% of U.S. households own at least one mobile phone. There are twice as many more mobile subscribers than there are Internet users. Data usage is doubling every year.

Simply put, the mobile phone has become an indispensable device giving marketers access to target audiences 24x7. It doesn't take an economist to project that marketers cannot afford to ignore this channel for long.

Mobile advertising campaigns have gone far beyond the voting campaigns we're all familiar with from American Idol. Ads delivered to mobile devices can have direct response mechanisms such as calling a 1-800 number or entering a telephone number or email to receive more information, or drive traffic to an existing mobile site.

Targeting can be set by language, country, category or by search behavior (and in some cases, combinations of various targeting parameters.) And, contrary to popular belief, a mobile site is not necessary to run a campaign. Running a campaign is exceedingly easy. With online self-service features, it takes only three online steps: entering or uploading ad creative, setting a maximum cost per click and determining the call to action required of users.

Rather than thinking of mobile as a "new, unapproachable" channel, think of ways to tie it in to your current online or search campaigns. Most companies whether brand or direct response have found ways to intelligently and easily incorporate the mobile channel into their marketing mix. Some use it as a call to action on TV, print or online to drive mobile brand interactivity while others are simply driving interested audiences who happen to be on their mobile phone to a core sales-driven action such as calling a 1-800 number, driving subscription to an online newsletter, or to a mobile alert.

While seemingly in a nascent stage, the fact is mobile advertising is projected to grow from $1.5 billion in 2006 to $13.9 billion by 2011 (eMarketer, January, 2007). The reasons are simple: mobile advertising that delivers relevant and useful ads gives users immediate answers that are regarded as valuable content; advertisers can influence their audience during the "last mile" at the moment just before a purchase in the real world. The level of targetability and reach that mobile advertising can provide will become points of success for marketers and we're well beyond the early adoption stage.

Don't be the advertiser left behind.

Source: MediaPost

Marketers optimistic on future of mobile ads

The prevalence of cell phones has marketers seriously considering the future of mobile. There is already an 85 percent cell phone penetration in the United States, according to pay-per-call company Ingenio. That surpasses landlines, which have 72 percent penetration.

“There is a lot of hype about mobile marketing and where it is going,” said Neil Strother, an analyst at JupiterResearch, which estimates mobile reach will be at 2.9 billion by 2011. Today, mobile reach is at 171 million.

“The ad model will take off as soon as consumers don’t have to pay fees for the mobile Web,” said Marc Barach, chief marketing officer of Ingenio.

According to Barach, one of the most promising ad models will combine search with mobile.

David McCarthy, vice president of advertising and business at vertical search engine Miva, agrees with Barach.

“The mobile market has the advantage of learning from the online world,” he said. “That market has been dominated by search and I expect the same to be true of mobile.”

Some think the launch of Apple’s iPhone will speed up adoption of mobile marketing as a monetization channel, but not everyone agrees.

“Mobile-marketing adoption will increase but not because of the iPhone,” said Jeff Hassemer, director of product marketing at Responsys Inc., in a DM News blog post. “Even if the iPhone meets its astronomical projections, that is still less than 0.5 percent of the market.”

He also wrote that Blackberrys and other phones already match many iPhone functions.

Advertisers need to optimize their Web sites for small mobile screens. Mobile Ready Entertainment Corp. created a Web site development service to convert sites for use on mobile platforms.

“Our service helps businesses make their Web site accessible to the hundreds of millions of mobile surfers around the world,” said Mike Magolnick, co-CEO of Mobile Ready.

Source: DM News

The U.S. Mobile Search Market

eMarketer estimates that by 2011, mobile search will account for about $715 million, or close to 15 percent of a total mobile advertising market worth $4.7 billion.

In April 2007, iCrossing reported that three-quarters of mobile Internet subscribers access mobile search services.

The U.S. mobile search market is expected to have some growing pains over the next two or three years as the major operators, portals and mobile search start-ups compete to be the mobile search leader.

eMarketer Senior Analyst John du Pre Gauntt said, "Mobile search in the US has all the right parts on the table: a huge online advertising ecosystem, the world's leading content industry, massive portal players, major league mobile operators and a host of VC-backed start-ups."

"In other words, it'll be a bloody mess over the next few years sorting out the center of gravity for mobile search, as each player tries to convince the others to follow its lead. The good news for marketers is that there's enough of a prize for the winner(s) that resolution will come."

Source: WebProNews

Back to School

ONE OF THE REAL PROBLEMS with the major carriers throughout their content and marketing chains is their sheer scale. When multimillion-subscriber companies are going head to head for market share, it is difficult to focus on your own segments. Branding messages for the tier-1 companies have been hopelessly broad for years (more minutes, better network coverage, free phones), with little effort to target specific groups very effectively, even though a range of age and ethnic demos come at their phones very differently. There is a real need here for content and service companies to cultivate the segments. "At the end of the day, they are mass market providers," says Jim Ryan, newly minted president and CEO of MobileCampus, which targets mobile data and marketing services to college environments. "I was seeing an incremental opportunity to serve more niche markets and target segments." For years, Ryan enjoyed a unique vantage point, since he ran the data strategy at Cingular/AT&T and was a fixture in the fledgling mobile content industry. He left AT&T just as the iPhone was about to launch, and according to reports was involved in making that deal with Apple. But in placing his bets with the small startup we covered last year in this column, Ryan is signaling that it is time for mobile to get targeted, and for the nascent ad model to follow.

Ryan says that the early stages of mobile marketing may be a bit misguided in following the carriers' lead into the mass market mentality. "Most of the existing players are large media companies used to the mass market and mass media advertising. They want large volumes of people. So they talk about millions of users and page impressions."

MobileCampus partners with universities to deliver free messaging services to students who opt in. The SMS system can range campuswide -- from the administration to ticklers and scheduling notes from individual sports teams or clubs. The school and its groups get the service free, with ads and offers from local vendors underwriting the cost.

Ryan believes that ad-supported systems like MobileCampus can change the mobile marketing equation. If you have tightly targeted users and you know their needs and habits well enough, then you don't need to carpet-bomb the platform or the user with ads. He expects students to receive one marketing message a day -- but a message that relates to their immediate environment and their likely needs. "It's about the value of the message, not the volume," he says. "Mass media is about volume -- millions of WAP pages -- and it uses the same model as already exists . Our model is very different. Our approach is 180 degree different."

Charging 20 cents a message, a campaign for a tech vendor like Dell might spend less than $1,000 reaching all of the tech enthusiasts on a large campus. "If we can get 30% to 40% to check it out, that translates into a lot of activity" for a small cost relative to papering the local media with ads, Ryan says. He believes that while MobileCampus is focused on the universities right now, the model is portable to a host of different demographics and niches and that this is a more appropriate way to use mobile. "I think there is a huge opportunity to evolve this market. There will be a real revenue opportunity for the company that leads that charge. To do that, you have to start with specific content."

As with all highly targeted marketing ideas, the challenge is less in the effectiveness of the promotion when it hits its target, but in the scalability. Is it worth it in the end for the sponsor/client to segment the creative, the deals, the partners into all of these niches? Yes, there is a lot of waste in mass media, but there are also efficiencies of scale. We are already a decade into the ad model online, and how many of the targeting methods available are really being used? The technologies and their proposed business and marketing models always seem to be well ahead of the ad industry infrastructure.

Ryan is right. Mobile seems to be the medium that is best positioned to lead the charge into a lot of marketing models that have been more on the periphery of digital media for years. If marketing and media are moving from mass to me, from corralling eyeballs to finding the right customer with the right message, then mobile offers a necessary challenge to the entire chain of production. But to make messages that are highly relevant to these segments, the marketers themselves have to segment their efforts and their infrastructures. How do you address so many possible niches -- and what new processes and structures within organizations are necessary to make a post-mass media world work? These are all questions that fragmented media are raising across the board, not just mobile. Everybody is back in kindergarten now.

Source: MediaPost