Advertisers and marketers are finally starting to seriously look at (and put dollars toward) mobile advertising and marketing. A range of mobile services — ranging from text message campaigns to video clips to free music downloads — are now an integral part of many interactive campaigns targeting youth. Is mobile advertising and marketing ready for prime time for the non-youth population? What are the lessons learned for those who are at the forefront of mobile advertising and marketing?
State of Mobile Advertising
The seats almost completely filled up for the mobile advertising panel discussion. I think that’s a good omen that people are starting to see the amount of opportunity for advertising on the handset. Matt Jones, VP of Mobile Strategy for Gannett is seeing that users prefer online advertising to pay services, a model that has borne out well on the internet at large. He also sees the opportunity for 360 degree campaigns that bridge the mobile and desktop web and traditional media.
Eric Eller of Millenial Media provided an excellent example of using mobile as a component of a larger media campaign with Footlocker. They ran a trivia campaign for Footlocker via SMS that also included web components and kiosks in the actual stores. That seems like it would help make people more competitive and engaged if they could see the rankings.
Jon Jackson of Mobile Posse pointed out that mobile ads really are one on one advertising. This makes it critical to gather and use targeting information in order to engage users. Mobile Posse puts ads on the idle home screens of users cell phones so that they get an impression every time you look at your phone. Sean-Michael Daly of kannuu pointed out that mobile ads give you the ability to be more timely and with GPS starting to become mainstream, advertisers will be able to further target ads.
Eric Eller also talked about the audience for mobile web advertising. While the mobile web was once almost exclusivelt teens, it’s beginning to expand to match the general web demographics. Sean-Michael Daly also pointed out that these opportunities will increase as more publishers provide content formatted for the mobile web. This creates inventory around the demographics of that particular vertical that you can target.
Read on about the challenges of delivering mobile ads.
Challenges of Delivering and Measuring Mobile Ads
Moderator Paul Sweeting asked a good question about the challenges of delivering ads in a fragmented carrier ecosystem and differing mobile web standards and encoding. The consensus from each of the panelists is that you have to build a proprietary system to interface with carriers and deliver ads they way that you want. The Mobile Marketing Association has done a good job of starting to standardize ad sizes, but that doesn’t solve the problem around distribution challenges.
Another challenge around mobile advertising is that it’s hard to get economies of scale with proprietary standards. The major advertisers would have to invest in creating mobile-specific ads that they likely couldn’t use across channels on the mobile web. Another challenge is that many advertisers don’t have rich mobile web experiences themselves. Why generate traffic for a mobile web site that is nothing more than a simple landing page?
Measuring advertising effectiveness on the mobile web is a major challenge. Standard methods like cookies or javascript are inconsistent at best across mobile browsers. This works for the mobile web, but mediums like SMS and MMS are cannot be tracked in terms of views, click-through rates and source data. The panelists all agreed that it’s good to see major analytics players like Comscore weighing in on the mobile web with the acquisition of M:Metrics. The other experience that is fairly consistently coming across on the mobile web are standards like CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) and CTR (Click-through rates).
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Dave, you’re right - “measuring advertising effectiveness on the mobile web is a major challenge.” It is getting a whole lot easier with new mobile analytics tools such as the one from Bango that deliver accurate mobile specific metrics. Bango Analytics also enable marketers to measure the value of mobile ad campaigns - in fact any sort of mobile marketing campaign where the user reaches a website - to the business. What’s the conversion rate, what’s the ROI?
Encourage you to check it out at http://bango.com/analytics
Sarah Keefe,
VP Marketing at Bango
“Another challenge is that many advertisers don’t have rich mobile web experiences themselves. Why generate traffic for a mobile web site that is nothing more than a simple landing page?”
My question would be put slightly another way….why bother publishing mobile content if you aren’t even going to track usage analytics?
Working for http://www.Amethon.com the oldest vendor of Mobile Analytics I’m continually amazed when I talk to mobile content publishers who feel it isn’t worth the $250 a month minimum charge for Amethon Mobile Analytics yet continue to complain about the lack of traffic to their sites.
If you aren’t tracking interactions with your content and looking to understand what people are doing on your mobile site “once they get there” then you have to question why bother publishing in the first place.
Now there are free services like admob and bango that question is even more relevant - of course Amethon bring a whole new level of functionality if you actually have the funds to pay for the Amethon application with our dedicated wireline capture technology the only mobile analytics solution that sees 100% of the mobile traffic packets.
If you dont want to bother tracking then dont bother publishing.
Cheers,
Dean Collins
http://www.Amethon.com