Mobile Advertising

Last Sunday I attended the IMA Mobile Advertising event. I wrote here before several times about the potential that mobile advertising has to open the mobile content market, and it's good to see that there was some progress in this area.

The event featured lectures and panels from all the "involved parties": Advertisers, advertising agencies, content companies, enablers and operators. It was interesting to see how the various parties see the issues from their perspective. I won't quote anyone here, since I am not sure who said what... but these are my general impressions (And you can take a look at the link above to see the participants list):

To get some proportions I'll start by saying that the actual advertisers (i.e. Cocacola) said that mobile advertising takes a few percents out of their budget (few=single digit, my guess closer to 0 than to 5...), and these are advanced advertisers that experiment with new media and create cool stuff online and mobile. So the market is still in its infancy. However, a few years back it didn't exist at all, and let's not forget how traditional advertisers treated the internet in the past...

As for the agencies, one of the trends we saw in recent years is the rise of online/mobile agencies, usually subsidiaries of the big agencies but sometimes independent. Most of the agencies in the panel said that this is turning around and that the new/old thing is working by concept rather than by media - i.e. unify all the activities of a certain brand - paper, tv, online, mobile under the same team, thus consolidating the online/mobile agencies back into the traditional ones. At first it may look like a bad sign for online/mobile - but i think it is actually a good sign - since the online/mobile activities are not considered an odd thing anymore.

As for content - the promise of sponsored content always seemed to me as the right thing for the mobile world. Instead of paying for games, videos etc. - users would be able to download those for free, with ads. However, it seems that there are several approaches here: One approach is that everything can be sponsored, while the other approach says that advertising applies to the mobile web (i.e. banners in wap pages) but premium content should and stay paid, since even premium content in the internet is paid (i.e. songs/videos from iTunes).

My take on this is that it all depends on what the end user gets, and that sooner or later the models we see on the web will become the standard for mobile as well. For example, if the user gets a whole song or a whole TV episode to his mobile, then the web model applies and he will pay. But if it's just a short funny video he gets, or a news-item video, this will probably be sponsored in the future, again - as it is on the web. As for games, there's an interesting question here since most games you would call "premium games" on mobile, would have been considered casual games on the web - ones you wouldn't even think of paying but rather play online and see some ads while you're out it....

Anyway, everyone agrees that advergames and adver-content (i.e. content which is the advertisement/brand itself) which are distributed free is a sustainable model, and often a good way to interact with consumers and raise brand awareness in a unique way (until it becomes mainstream...).

Technology enablers still play a major role in this market and it will be interesting to see who will rise up as the DoubleClick/AdSense of the market - in the meantime there's just a lot of competition and noise... I guess good solutions in this field need to address all of the above complexities and supply one framework that "eats all" (Easier said than done...)

And operators? Well, while everyone says they will end up being the pipeline and nothing more, they still have quite a grip on what is being done in this space. Some of them are quite afraid of ad-based content since when the user doesn't pay for the content - they don't see a piece of the action. Others are exploring this space carefully, and while you can see banners in their WAP portals, when it comes to sponsored content - there have been a few experiments, but nothing mainstream. Turkcell (who spoke at the event) did some nice projects in this field, but I'm not sure it's a good sign when advertisers approach operators directly.

Still advertisers can promote their adver-content off-deck and some did great in this way (at least in countries where operators don't block your app...)

Overall, the topic is very hot and "happening" and the event hit the right spots. We'll certainly address advertising in one of the next Mobile Monday Tel Aviv events as well, so stay tuned...