Mobile Advertising - What Next?
I was on a panel at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising last night, discussing mobile advertising and ad-funded mobile content with an audience. There were definite moments of deja vu: over the years I’ve worked on WAP activation projects, MMS activation projects, mobile content viral projects and one of the questions that came up a few times was whether we were at a turning point for mobile advertising.
It seems to me that there are some strong grounds for optimism, but these need to be qualified, because different people think differently about what mobile advertising will be. I think some expect banner and PPC advertising to take off on mobile, and that this ad revenue will fund development of sites, services and content somewhat as it has for so many web 2.0 start-ups. I doubt this is true, but other aspects of the web 2.0 thing will cross over, and these are important.
If we compare the web today with the web 5 years ago, it’s gone all interactive. People have blogs, Myspace pages, Flickr and Youtube accounts. My family is collaborating on a Geni family tree, and it’s impressive how many of them are chipping in. Why is this good news for mobile? Because the mobile is already a primary device for interacting: it has advanced messaging and multi-media capabilities, it has a high speed web connection, Java and masses of storage. It’s the perfect extension for people who are interacting online already. Adding Youtube, Myspace and who knows what else to the mobile is obvious, and Vodafone (for example) are already putting deals in place. This development will lead to a substantial uplift in mobile web usage over the next few years, led not by technical feasibility or a business need to recoup investment in 3G licenses, but by a significant change in user behaviour. People are collaborating and creating, and they’ll do that with their mobiles.
There are financial reasons to be optimistic: flat fee mobile data will be normal for most contract mobile users in the UK by the Autumn. Three and T-mobile have it, Vodafone intends to launch it in the Summer. So monthly contract users won’t have to worry about data charges any more. For the pay as you go, ad-funded usage is evolving: customers will soon be able to sign up to receive marketing SMS, or streamed content with ads in the stream. The mobile portals are getting their act together for serving, measuring and billing for mobile advertising. Put these together, and you see a context where mobile data isn’t going to cost anything like as much, which means something users are becoming interested in will also become affordable to the mass market.
What does this mobile landscape look like? I don’t think anyone at the meeting had the answers, and that’s not surprising. What struck me was the size of the eco-system that is developing. Several people approached me after the panel session to expound on their mobile social networking products. People are working on ad-serving, gaming, location based services, all sorts of things. I was told there’s a mobile social networking conference coming up in Rome. All sorts of innovative and interesting things are happening, but it’s hard to say what the killer apps will be.
Clients are definitely interested in mobile, where most thought it over-hyped 18 months ago. They want to know how mobile can be integrated with the rest of our work, they’re looking for clever ways to introduce interaction with their brands into the mobile space. Research I was looking at last week showed (again) that pass-along, word of mouth content is highly trusted, and this has to be one of the biggest opportunities on a mobile. If kids are uploading photos of their schoolteachers to Youtube already, the propensity, technology and knowledge are there already, for sure.
