| Mobile Advertising |
| Wednesday, 31 August 2005 | |
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NMA : Roundtable Discussion with Jonathan Bill, John Carney, Anne Davies, Pamir Gelenbe,
Julie Jeancolas,
Matt Champion and
Steven Trew Jonathan Bill, Vodafone: There are tens of millions of people who regularly purchase or interact with mobile content. I think a basic advertising business probably can exist as a replication of an Internet advertising business, by putting ads on mobile operator portals or other off-net portals. John Carney, Marvellous: We're seeing the same thing that happened on the Internet now happening on mobile. At first brands were reluctant and their presence was very light. Now there are a number of brands that have WAP sites, but they're information-driven rather than branded content. Mobile TV is probably going to be controlled by the same people who control TV now. Every brand that has a significant customer base will have to have a mobile presence. We're talking to a number of TV broadcasters about their first stage of mobile branded content, and it's not TV, it's just about information on mobile. Anne Davis, Euro RSCG 4D: That raises the question about what the user experience should be like on mobile. At the moment there's still a lot of frustration about accessing services and looking at content because we haven't really optimised it for the device. Pamir Gelenbe, Flytxt: You're right. Content discovery is key and I think that's one of the big pain points at the moment. I-mode in Japan has recently announced the launch of the iChannel, which is all about pushing content that refreshes itself automatically overnight. A Russian operator recently announced a similar solution. It's a text ticker that has been taken up by 2m people since it launched four or five months ago. On the back of those, they have 7m content transactions. It's basically a different way to distribute content. Julie Jeancolas, Carat: When you're trying to plan mobile marketing it's very important how you use these applications for consumer interaction. You have to be careful. We need to learn more about what the consumer wants and then come up with better solutions for them. Matt Champion, MediaCom: It's quite fortunate that people are looking for an integrated campaign because we have a lack of mobile users. Right now people are very busy building mobile channels, but there are nowhere near as many mobile users as there are registered Internet users. If you sell the mobile users as early adopter types, then the package is a lot more compelling than just mobile on its own. Jeancolas, Carat: There are organisations falling over themselves to sell inventory. But the amount of money you're talking about from clients dipping their toes in the water isn't great. At the moment we're trying to deal with these companies on a project basis. The channels aren't set up for us to select a package off the shelf to present to a client. Carney, Marvellous: Case studies have been emerging for the best part of a year. There are a number of brands that we work with where we can prove mobile against other marketing channels. There are big publishers and broadcasters that already have mobile databases. If our clients want to run broadcast messages to half a million people of a certain age group, we can do that. That seems to be the next step of the model for mobile media: making sense of the mobile portal space so brand owners can play there. Gelenbe, Flytxt: On the Internet you have too much inventory but not enough clients. Here we have too many clients and not enough inventory. We've done some campaigns on the 3 portal that have been very successful in terms of ROI, the number of downloads, the number of users and so forth. But the key to all the campaigns that we've run is that we offered something that was free and entirely optional to the end user. Advertising has somehow become synonymous with the 30-second TV spot only because TV has become such a mainstream ad medium. But mobile advertising needs to adapt to the realities of mobile, and on mobile it's going to be very different from the Internet or TV. Carney, Marvellous: A large part of the role of advertising on the Internet is to persuade people who are looking at one thing to go look at another. If there's nothing to look at that presents a challenge. So what's the point of mobile marketing? Is a bit of it advertising, or is most of it the extension of a brand onto mobile? Steven Trew, FT: It's a quid pro quo because from an advertising perspective the mobile is a much more personal device than a TV. But over the years consumers have become used to the idea of putting up with advertising to have subsidised content services. So it's not a new concept. Champion, MediaCom: I think the concept of brands having 100,000 downloads in five days, or whatever the numbers are, is pretty compelling. At this stage, however, it's still very much a new thing. The question is, has those consumers' exposure to that increased their intent to purchase? At the moment we only have half the story. Gelenbe, Flytxt: I'm not really worried about the ROI question, because when you look at mobile advertising there's a tracking potential. I completely agree that at the moment there has been no methodology developed or research published to show that this mobile ad will generate this many sales or this many changes in behaviour. However, what gets me excited is that with mobile you can already run campaigns with a direct measurable link. If you have an advertiser who wants to track it directly to a call centre, you can do that with mobile. Why? Because the device lets you make phone calls as well. With WAP you can have an ad on a home page that leads you to a microsite where you click and call. Champion, MediaCom: Because all of our direct advertising is measured by response, by channel or whatever, it all gets put into one database. At the moment, as far as I know, there's no indicator to say what kind of response you're going to get, say, on a Wednesday. Therefore how do you use information like that as part of your media planning? That's something we'd like to crack. Carney, Marvellous: We're starting to get that information on some of the campaigns we're running where we've added the mobile part to TV campaigns. What's important is that we're getting significant numbers of people reacting to TV ads. If you're an advocate of mobile, then you have to believe that it's all about that moment of impulse, and there's nothing greater than a big broadcast on TV that says pick up your mobile and text in this and wonderful things will happen to you. And it works. Bill, Vodafone: It's probably worth reflecting that we use mobile marketing as a route to our own customers quite extensively already, as I'm sure other operators do. There are some big, strong case studies of activities that we've done and that agencies run on our behalf. I can tell you that the response is very healthy and it's frequently in tens of percentage points. So it can be incredibly powerful, especially if you're marketing something which is relevant to the device. How does mobile advertising compare to online? Trew, FT: What's central to the Internet is that it's dealing in a similar currency and creative formats to traditional media. So if we're going to make a success of the mobile Internet we don't want to go the way the Internet went a few years back, with different sizes. If we can set that up beforehand I think it'll give us a much better chance. If you're dealing with a brand manager who has been in the business for maybe a year, then no one is really going to mind what he sticks his money into. Then someone else comes in and you have to educate the client all over again. Bill, Vodafone: Maybe there ought to be some kind of industry consensus, much like the Internet Advertising Bureau. Gelenbe, Flytxt: I remember sitting in a meeting of the Mobile Marketing Association in 2001 or 2002. It was a worldwide meeting and people were defining what banners would look like in terms of width and length. I thought what a waste of time because no one's doing banners anyway. So a lot of those parameters have been defined, the problem is taking the definitions and making sure that everyone's aware of them. Bill, Vodafone: I don't think there's an industry body that can legislate for screen sizes and how you use graphics. Who's qualified to do that? No one. More often than not, it's just a matter of brands having to create fantastic case studies. How important will advertiser-funded content be? Trew, FT: Online, there's a lot of content that's subsidised by advertisers so it's free to the end user. In mobile it's never free because there's a transport cost associated with it, especially if it's off-net. Advertising can subsidise the cost of the content, which could help to drive usage. Champion, MediaCom: A lot of consumers have had bad experiences. In the early days of WAP the data charges were horrendous, and I think people still have an element of fear in terms of what it will cost them to access content. Advertising is a great opportunity to subsidise that. Bill, Vodafone: The reason why mobile content in the UK hasn't taken off as quickly as Web content is because it's much harder to create. All the dynamics and technological barriers that you're dealing with in the mobile world are far more difficult than they are in the Web world. Davis, Euro RSCG 4D: I think it's an opportunity, though. If you look at the peer-to-peer stuff, with mobile there's a huge opportunity for people to develop a place where that starts to happen. Jeancolas, Carat: The biggest challenge is the integration of the mobile platform to enhance TV, press and radio. The second issue is the creation of unique mobile content which can be branded. Many people try to use mobile telephony as an acquisition plan, but for us it's more about relationships. We need to try to integrate mobile telephony with data. What are the ad opportunities in mobile content? Bill, Vodafone: We're at the beginning of this medium and what's very clear is that advertisers are already coming to us. We need to kick-start the industry. If you look at it in phases, I think it's very clear that Vodafone Live! and other operators have created easy access to mobile content. But I think we're now at the stage where it will start to happen outside our services. Second, we have to fix pricing and make it very clear for consumers. We need to communicate that as an industry and we need to establish a currency model. The mobile content industry, in cash terms, is very significant already. So how do we get people's attention with an incremental revenue stream that is advertising? Gelenbe, Flytxt: Web sites are pretty desperate for ad revenue because that's all that they have. But in mobile there's a billing mechanism built in, so mobile advertising is pretty much worth zero at the moment. It might be worth £100m in four years' time, but that will still be less than 10% of mobile content. Bill, Vodafone: But who pays for that content? Is it the consumer or the advertiser? If the latter, the mobile marketing business suddenly becomes hugely lucrative and you're giving people for free content that they previously had to pay for. Trew, FT: We've only come into the mobile advertising side of things this year and already it's making more money than content. If you look at newspapers and TV companies, they make much more money from advertising. So it's obvious that it's going to be the same for mobile. Bill, Vodafone: It's interesting to look at the four quarters of mobile content. So far there's the mainstream-type content - Vodafone Live!, Orange World and so on. It's about broadcast-type content to a wide audience. You then have adult content and ringtones. The final quarter, which is yet to be explored, is the brand area. What place can brands play in that space? Jeancolas, Carat: At the moment I don't think the brands or their agencies have been introduced to the opportunities that are available. Davis, Euro RSCG 4D: If you look at how Internet advertising developed, there was a relationship between agencies and brands, working together on how formats changed. That's not happening with mobile. There's doesn't seem to be much dialogue happening, and that's a problem. Trew, FT: Where the dialogue is happening is with brands like Nokia and BT, asking what mobile options we have, how we can complement online advertising with mobile. A lot of newspapers are being asked that question too, which means there are a lot of mobile services being developed and they're probably going to be off-net, direct-to-consumer services. If we're saying it's about content and that's what will bring people onto the mobile Internet, then there are enough drivers to develop these products and for services to take off. Is Bluetooth marketing a viable idea? Bill, Vodafone: The call to action can be switching it on. So it's a poster site asking you to switch on your Bluetooth. The recent Coldplay campaign, where you could download tracks off their new album, was all about switching it on and off. The consumer is once again in control. Davis, Euro RSCG 4D: Bluetooth received some bad press because it was feared everyone was going to be bombarded. But it's a PR job to reassure people that not every brand out there is going to continually hit them. Trew, FT: But who does that PR job? It's not an operator job, because Bluetooth is completely out of their sphere of operation. What's the body that stands up and does that? It doesn't really exist. Gelenbe, Flytxt: Nokia has a really interesting Bluetooth solution. It has developed a local marketing solution in which you download to your handset a single application that constantly scans for a Bluetooth signal. If it finds one it will immediately shake hands with it and download information from it. But it's all permission-based because if you don't open the application on the handset then you won't receive anything. Do traditional ad agencies understand mobile yet? Bill, Vodafone: We've had strategic relationships with the biggest ad agencies for the last three or four years. But they don't have mobile on their radar. They're seduced by TV. Carney, Marvellous: I think what will drive it, from an agency, brand and industry perspective, is whether we can spend enough money to make it interesting. Agencies aren't that interested if the campaign can't reach enough people. Bill, Vodafone: Mobile doesn't have to be made differently to traditional advertising, it just has to be considered completely differently. Branded content will be an exciting area when brands say here's my TV offering by my brand agency and here's my mobile offering. The mobile offering is going to be short, snappy and very impactful. Gelenbe, Flytxt: With our ads for 3, we've had three scenarios. One was that, for a 30-second ad, the subtitles were too small and you couldn't see anything on the handset. We produced a second ad with big subtitles and that was fine. The third case is if you need something to be produced for mobile which didn't exist previously, there are now companies that do produce content specifically for mobile. So that marketplace is evolving. What about downloadable applications? Champion, MediaCom: The thing about Flash is it's more visual. So it depends on your content. Gelenbe, Flytxt: It's a very good application. The downside of these downloadable applications is that you have to download them in the first place. That always creates a barrier to entry. Trew, FT: There are now companies that go to a content owner and offer to develop their mobile proposition for them in return for it being promoted on their properties. So why would we give that valuable ad space to a service where we have to share revenue on content and advertising? Carney, Marvellous: Isn't it just to avoid bill costs? Trew, FT: The bill costs are minimal. To get a WAP service up and running you're talking about perhaps £50,000 or £60,000 the first year. That's not a huge amount of money. Bill, Vodafone: I think the user experience is actually quite interesting. Those sorts of application can be quite rich, and it gets over the whole signposting issue as well. Champion, MediaCom: It's also more visual and the brand imagery is getting fixed in your head, whereas on a WAP site you have to wait a few seconds for the image to load. Trew, FT: The best thing about Java in terms of content, from a brand owner perspective, is that the icon resides on the handset and it's there until the user deletes it. When will MMS be a viable ad medium? Bill, Vodafone: People actually quite like receiving MMS messages. So if you can send them something that's good-looking, compelling and relevant, they attribute quite a lot of value to that. Gelenbe, Flytxt: Some of the basic issues around MMS are around being able to click through to something else. You can send a wonderful slideshow via MMS, but what's the call to action? Bill, Vodafone: I think MMS, in terms of broadcasting messages to a defined audience, is fantastic. Not only for people who love receiving messages from brands that they trust, but the responses to them are far greater than SMS. Davis, Euro RSCG 4D: Clients say they'd like to do this sort of mobile advertising, but want a discount because they'll be trying it out for the first time. Bill, Vodafone: I've never heard that. In comparison to other channels, mobile is cost-effective. Is mobile starting to play a role in brands' customer relationship management strategies? Bill, Vodafone: That's another area where mobile has yet to be proven, but it can be. For example, you've just bought a DVD recorder and you need to register it. You can start that process on mobile, and continue it as a dialogue point for certain types of information. Gelenbe, Flytxt: We're seeing an increase in companies that have fairly large call centres, but using mobile to reduce call centre costs. Bill, Vodafone: One other area regarding CRM is communities being very hard to find. For example, if you're a brand that needs to communicate with a number of defined retailers that tend not to be online, then text works really well. Is spam still an issue? Gelenbe, Flytxt: I think spam is a big issue. The perception of it definitely is. The problem is that people put all types of spam in the same bucket. Champion, MediaCom: I think it's a big risk, and it's part of the reason why MMS works, because you don't get that many spam messages. Gelenbe, Flytxt: I agree, but if you compare email and mobile spam, you'll receive hundreds of email spams because it's fundamentally free. With mobile you're paying 5p per message, and spammers are very ROI conscious. Bill, Vodafone: I think it's naive of us to imagine that this is going to disappear. It's a technological communications channel and you're going to get all the good and the bad that goes with that. © Copyright Flytxt Ltd 2006. Unauthorized use of any content constitutes a material breach. |
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