FEATURE MOBILE ADVERTISING
in-application mobile advertising. “But I
think what will happen is what happened in
the fixed internet with companies like AOL.
The carriers have to be smart and be more
like media companies. Carriers have to evolve
in this direction, then there’s a strong place
for them,” he says.
For large, non-mobile sector advertisers,
reach is key. And even if carriers can
boast millions of subscribers in any given
market, they won’t be supplying service
to every member of a given demographic.
“The agencies are really anxious and eager
to spend money on mobile advertising,”
says Jeff Herrmann at Nielsen. “But they
can’t get the scale that they need. They’re
used to a volume metric, page impression
buy. They buy reach and are really focused
on reach estimates. And because of the
way the mobile ecosystem is structured
today, which is very operator centric, the
agencies—from a reach standpoint—are
left with experimentation or discretionary
campaigns.”
Global mobile advertising revenues remain negligable
Mobile advertising
99.59%
Total ad spend
0.41%
So if operators are unable to maximise
their own inventory because mobile advertising
is predominantly off-portal, how can
they maintain their stake in the game? One
option is for them to act as enablers. “For me
their best position is as a facilitator of brand
contact, for compelling cross platform activities,”
says Herrmann.
“When you consider the consumer relationships
they have, they will always be in
the process. They have the cross platform
perspective to offer integrated campaigns
like SMS tied to a mobile WAP site, a video or
even location based services,” he says. “This
hasn’t been fully developed yet but that’s how
they’ll maintain their position of prominence
in the mobile advertising market.”
Another answer, it appears, lies in the field
of profiling and measurement. Henry Jenkins
manages the mobile advertising activities of
carrier lobby group the GSM Association. “On
the long list of things that the advertising
industry would like operators to do,” says
Jenkins, “pretty much everybody agrees that
44 Mobile Communications International | First for news, best for business
some form of consistent, transparent measurement
is at the top of that list. We think
this is the key enabler that the operators can
deliver working together, an enabler for the
whole ecosystem.”
In February of this year, the GSMA announced
an initiative in the UK market that
sees all five carriers—Vodafone, Telefonica O2,
T-Mobile, FT-Orange and Hutchison’s 3—collaborating
to define common metrics and
measurement processes for mobile advertising.
The aim of the programme is to outline “a range
of metrics that will describe the mobile audience
and measure the effectiveness of mobile
advertising,” the GSMA said at the time.
Speaking in August, Jenkins clarified the
goal: “Long term, the sort of ambition that
we should be looking at for mobile is that
there’s an opportunity to say we understand
a unique user and we can actually identify
that user across multiple channels.”
This is not a simple task, but the GSMA
believes that if big brand advertisers from
outside the mobile sphere could be given
consistent, reliable, independently audited
figures like this, they would be far more comfortable
allocating more of their advertising
budget to mobile. The Association is taking
it upon itself, simply, to prove that mobile
advertising can work.
“The burden of proof lies with the operators,”
says Jenkins. “We need to demonstrate
that operators can work together and we need
to demonstrate that they can do that in a way
that adds value to the broader industry. If
we achieve that, we’re building credibility; a
trusted role for operators.”
Jenkins says that responses from all
stakeholders in the UK has been favourable.
The advertisers are interested, the agencies
that plan and manage their spend, and the
operators themselves all see real value in
the project. But still, it is a slow process. The
technical challenges involved in working with
all of the operators, processing huge amounts
of data from multiple sources are significant
to say the least, he says. “It’s a bit more time
consuming than we’d like,” he offers, by way
of an understatement.
A further problem is that this initiative is
patently not a money making exercise. The point
of the exercise is not to maximise the value of
the metrics themselves, the GSMA says, but to
grow the mobile advertising industry. And when
operators are prioritising their activities, they
tend to put the ones that generate revenue at the
top, and the ones that don’t at the bottom. »
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