Building a Case for Mobile Marketing and Mobile advertising
Many advertisers are in wait-and-see mode on mobile advertising. “At the moment, the level of transparency is not enough to drive significant budgets into this medium,” acknowledges Henry Stevens, director of media and entertainment at the GSM Association, a trade group that represents wireless service providers.
Even as ads on mobile phones become more common, advertisers are holding off on a full-blown embrace of the tiny screen as a marketing tool.
There’s no denying mobile phone users are seeing more ads. A Mar. 4 study by Nielsen found that 58 million U.S. wireless subscribers had viewed an ad on their mobile phones in the past month. The problem is that mobile advertisers don’t know what users are doing, if anything, when they see the ads. Until advertisers find out, they may hold off on committing more precious marketing dollars to the mobile medium. “Advertisers that are used to full accountability are left in the dark,” says Farhad Divecha, director at London-based ad agency AccuraCast.
The hesitance is understandable. In the online marketing world, determining how well a campaign is performing is easy. Web sites embed tracking software known as “cookies” on your personal computer. Those cookies monitor your browsing activity and pass the information to advertisers and the ad-placement networks that distribute their ads across the Web.
A Consistent Yardstick
The mobile industry has refused to facilitate this tried-and-true approach. Most wireless service providers block cookies before they can ever get to cell phones, arguing that to allow them would open a hole in their networks for computer viruses.
Complicating matters, what little data the wireless service providers do pass back to mobile advertisers varies widely in terms of what they measure. Mobile-advertising networks, in turn, crunch the disparate data in different ways to gauge the audience response to mobile ads.
One mobile ad network might report the number of phones that received an ad, while another might report how many users actually viewed the ad. The distinction is subtle, but important for mobile advertisers. Without a consistent yardstick, it’s hard to compare the results of a campaign.
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Wait and See
Even Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), which is determined to extend its dominance in Web advertising to cell phones, has no reliable analytical tools customers can use to gauge the success of mobile marketing campaigns. “The mobile ad space is nascent, and we are currently working to figure out the best ad formats for our advertisers and users,” Google spokesperson Daniel Rubin wrote in an e-mail.
As a result of these obstacles, there are doubts whether the mobile advertising market will fulfill robust predictions, such as a Gartner (NYSE: IT) 
forecast for US$11 billion in global ad revenue by 2011, up from less than $1 billion last year.
Measures of Success
In a bid to rectify the situation, the association announced in February that five of its most prominent members — Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) , Telefonica O2 Europe, T-Mobile International, FT/Orange Group and 3 — have formed a working group to define common metrics for mobile advertising. By year-end, these companies hope to develop a set of standard measures and then launch a trial in Britain. Using input from mobile ad agencies and wireless carriers worldwide, the group will attempt to define everything from what constitutes a click to how to measure different kinds of user behavior. “The experimentation stage is almost over and, in order to scale, operators need to work together (to fix this problem),” Stevens says.
Not surprisingly, we see the urgency in delivering more reliable mobile data to their clients. “We want to enable mobile advertisers to understand the added value of mobile ads more deeply,” says Bas Vervoort, vice president of InMovil Media. “We want to let our clients see where a propsect goes, which phones they use and when. To make sure our clients truly engage with their audience.”
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Tags: mobile ad agencies, mobile advertisers, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, mobile marketing campaigns