Mobile Advertising: Fiction or Friction?
If the panel on mobile advertising was held in any other country, they might have been laughed out of the room. A few facts from the Mobile Marketing Association showed that 34.7 million uniques per month are exposed to ads on their mobile device, 8.9 million download something, and 3.9 million watch video. In their introductions, Omar Hamoui of AdMob, a mobile ad network, said that they are serving 800 million pages per month. That said, the U.S. market is clearly still on the starting line.
Each panelist spent five or so minutes talking about one or more case studies. Kim Olson of Sprint showed how strong calls to action engaged the customer. In a five day campaign they were able to get 175,000 wallpaper downloads from about 8 million displays, with an overall campaign click-through rate of 4.65%. Omar was able to show similar numbers in a case where mobile was allocated 4% of the ad budget, yet brought in more than one-third of the goal for the entire campaign across all platforms. Personalization went a long way to increasing response rates - carriers can know the phone model and more. Michael Bayle of Yahoo showed some data from Japan, but he also noted that the cultural differences are great. Nobody uses their work PC for personal business there so cell phones are the outlet.
The user experience was a topic of conversation as well. Kim gave the example of a test run by Sprint where they ran a test, exposing 600,000 users to mobile ads over a 30 day period and tracked calls into the customer care center to see if there was a negative reaction or other impact. They are still showing ads now. Michael said that while users do not want to see ads, they might be willing to see them if they subsidized the content. He made no mention of reducing data costs if the ads subsidized carrier (on deck) pages. I think that is where the resistance is. Users already expect to see ads when viewing a Web site, so why should a WAP site be so different?
When asked why carriers are not opening up to 3rd party developers, Kim was at a loss, saying that she did not know why. She added that carriers are sensitive to the business and what subscribers want. Yes, but subscribers can't tell you that they want something that they have never heard of and know nothing about. Unless we get a huge influx of Asian and European residents, we might never see demand for advanced applications and features. Jack pointed out that the rest of the world has benefited from common technology and platforms as well as cultural forces. In other words, the U.S. carriers are protecting their turf by promulgating disparate standards and systems.
GSM anyone?
