Mobile marketing has come of age thanks to social search, targeting and the ever-growing popularity of smartphones.
A new advertising medium only comes of age when it discovers the thing it can do that no other medium in the market can.
Before that point, it’s just a case of importing other advertising models. Take online. The early banners looked like press ads and there was considerable excitement when bandwidth became sufficient to show video ads. But the real turning point in online advertising came with the development of search and paid search in particular. Here was something that gave advertisers an unprecedented glimpse of consumers’ intent and could only be done online, so it’s no surprise that search continues to take the majority of online advertising spend.
So what about mobile? Despite all the successful campaigns run with SMS and the efforts made to establish mobile advertising, location has always looked like being the thing that mobile could offer that no other medium could. In the early days of the mobile internet, industry experts genuinely believed that marketing messages offering deals from every shop you passed delivered to your handset would be the way of the future, although a few dissenting voices suggested that it would still be cheaper and easier to have someone standing outside handing out flyers.
And anyone seeing the proliferation of ‘golf sale’ sandwich-board men in central London in the early part of the last decade would have been forced to admit the dissenters were probably right. In fact, although everyone suspected location information would play some vital part in the future of the mobile industry, nobody could quite figure out what it was.
Until now. The rise of deal-based services has brought location right back to the forefront of thinking about mobile marketing. In fact, at the Local Social Summit last November, industry analyst Greg Stirling talked about data showing that deals and offers were consumers’ preferred form of mobile ads. They weren’t interested in other forms of mobile advertising, he claimed.
Dissenting voices suggested that it would still be cheaper and easier to have someone standing outside handing out flyers. And anyone seeing the proliferation of ‘golf sale’ sandwich-board men in central London in the early part of the last decade would have been forced to admit the dissenters were probably right.
Sure everyone loves a deal - it’s the basis of Groupon’s extraordinary growth. But what makes this especially interesting for mobile is the proliferation of smartphones, improvements in targeting and the rise of social search. Suddenly what’s possible on mobile goes far beyond what a bloke with a handful of leaflets can achieve. The technology allows companies to target you with offers based on both your previous behaviour and your location, and will only become more accurate and useful as transactional information is integrated as well.
And the benefit for businesses is that Groupon-style offers stop pulling in people who just want a discount and can instead be used to move towards yield management. If you know who your Tuesday night regulars are, maybe you can give them an incentive to visit more often, for example. Or maybe a discount can persuade some of your Thursday crowd to come in earlier in the week. This is backed up by Google’s findings that, while PC-based searches result in an action within weeks or months, mobile searches are acted on within hours.
However, the language that location evangelists use to describe what’s possible also highlights the limitations. It feels at the moment very much like the opportunities are only really applicable to hospitality businesses and, to a lesser extent, local retailers. But as another Local Social speaker pointed out, one-third of industries are emergency need-driven. There’s not much advantage to a plumber or locksmith in being able to offer daily deals.
This shouldn’t be too much of a barrier to adoption because although search seems ubiquitous, there are still companies, particularly FMCG brands that sell through retailers, that have yet to find a way to really take advantage of search.
The other interesting aspect of the social-local-mobile discussion at the moment is how much it focuses on small and medium-sized businesses, again a return to the early dotcom days when the commercial internet was seen as a way of expanding the market for local firms. But in fact the big brands are already active in the space.
The Grand Prix at this year’s New Media Age Effectiveness Awards was won by Manning Gottlieb OMD’s Starbucks Rewards campaign, which included sending vouchers to mobile phones within a defined radius of Starbucks’ outlets. The key insight came from a Lightspeed Research study done in October 2010 that showed 28% of people were happy to receive vouchers via their phones, while a further 48% were happy to receive them if they’d previously registered with the brand in some way.
Just as search isn’t the only form of online advertising, location-based mobile deals and coupons won’t be the only form of mobile advertising. But the combination of social search, targeting and the ever-growing popularity of smartphones means mobile might have just had its pay-per-click moment.
Michael Nutley is a writer and consultant specialising in interactive media
IF You Really Want To Know The Future You MUST Watch This Video From Google
Five New Technologies that Will Change the World of Mobile Advertising
With all the advancements in the mobile arena, many people claim that we have reached our limits. “What else is left to be done?” they ask, and the truth is, over the last few years, we have taken giant steps forward. Having said that, there is always room for more. The mobile space will continue to move forward at an increased rate, both in terms of enhancements to the technology we already have, and the introduction of new and exciting technologies.
Of course, these new technologies will benefit first and foremost the end user when it comes to how they interact with their phones. There is, however, another realm in which new mobile advancements will change the world. Mobile advertising is already a booming industry and advertisers are now realizing that spending their resources on traditional marketing such as newspapers or billboards, might not be as effective as reaching audiences on their mobile devices.
Mobile advertising is already advancing at an extreme pace and new technologies will only act as a catalyst to speed up the process. A reality in which the majority of the world’s marketing campaigns are implemented on mobile devices, is a reality that is much more believable than it was just a few years ago.
The following are five new technologies that are already showing their face and will have a great impact on the mobile advertising universe:
4G Networks: As you probably know, 4G broadband is already making waves in the mobile world. Phones like the new HTC Thunderbolt with LTE support are outselling the popular iPhone at Verizon. It is important to remember that without the accompanying infrastructure, 4G is useless. Based on current predictions, within a few years, 4G will be available globally and our phones will access the Web significantly faster than today. This will of course have a major affect on mobile advertising. One consequence we can expect to see is a higher average CTR on mobile devices since the process of clicking an ad, viewing a landing page, and going on with whatever you were doing, will be shortened significantly.
NFC: Near Field Communication, a technology already integrated in some high end mobile devices such as the Nexus S, is expected to go mainstream in the near future. Recent reports claim Apple is considering NFC integration into iPhone 5. Once again, without the infrastructure, NFC is not worth much, but from what we hear, certain Asian countries have already implemented this technology and NFC has taken off. In terms of mobile advertising, the effects are obvious. Imagine a world in which you hold your mobile device near an ad in a magazine, and the ad then becomes interactive on your device’s display. Such a campaign would once again generate more clicks due to its interactive nature. NFC will change the mobile advertising world as we know it.
HD Displays: Whether the displays of the future will be HD as we know it, there is no doubt that after the iPhone 4′s Retina display, screen resolutions will only continue to get higher. One of the many features experts are predicting in the next generation iPhone as well as iPad is a higher resolution screen. Of course, the higher the resolution of a display, the more life-like the content on the screen appears. This will also have a real impact on mobile advertising, and will give advertisers a whole portfolio of options that were not available in the newspaper or billboard eras.
3D: Companies like Samsung and others are already bringing 3D technology to TVs and other devices. Nintendo just released their 3DS device, which offers 3D graphics on a gaming console without any glasses. Of course, with all the buzz and competition surrounding the mobile market, it won’t be long before we have a full fledged 3D experience on our mobile phones. How will this affect mobile advertising? I think the question is, how will it not affect mobile advertising? The potential is endless.
Interactivity: We have already seen interactive Youtube videos, interactive online marketing campaigns, and even an interactive Facebook campaign (which was later removed by Facebook). With HTML 5 hitting mainstream, we can expect to see full interactivity on our mobile phones very soon. When that day comes and we begin interacting with our phones the way we interact with people, that is the day traditional marketing companies can close down shop. The advantages of a mobile phone being accessible to billions of people at all times, combined with rich media and interactive abilities will truly change the mobile advertising world forever.
Of course, this is just a short list, but there are many more technologies that will provide more abilities in the mobile advertising space. Then there are the ones we do not even know about yet. The bottom line in all this is, the world of mobile marketing is an exciting place to be right now!
The population of mobile video viewers in the US will grow nearly 30% in 2010 to reach 23.9 million, according to eMarketer’s forecasts. The still represents a reach of only 7.7% of the total population and less than 10% of mobile phone users, but those numbers are set to double by 2013 and increase still further in 2014.
The number of mobile video viewers, which includes people of any age who watch video content on mobile phones through mobile browser, subscriptions, downloads or applications at least once per month, will continue growing in the double digits for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8% from 2009 through 2014.
“Video is in many ways the most fragmented of the three primary mobile content categories,” said Noah Elkin, eMarketer senior analyst. “Video consumption on mobile phones can take place through various channels, including paid and free applications, mobile websites, pay-per-view downloads and subscriptions through mobile carriers.”
The quality of the viewing experience and the cost associated with subscriptions have historically impeded the growth of mobile video. But with the steady improvement of devices, the increase in mobile broadband availability and the emergence of viewing options outside the carrier networks, the mobile video audience is set for expansion.
The increase in the mobile video audience combined with the ongoing digitalization of media spells opportunity for producers of video content. eMarketer predicts that mobile video revenues, including direct downloads, subscriptions and ad-supported video, will roughly triple between 2009 and 2014, rising from $436 million to $1.34 billion.
Of these three primary revenue streams, the ad-supported component will be the fastest growing, much as it is in the online space. Ad-supported mobile video revenues will post a 60% CAGR between 2009 and 2014.
