Mobile Marketing Blog by InMovil Media

JupiterResearch says that it has found that introducing portable media players (PMP’s) with internet browsing capabilities are likely to stimulate significant growth in the amount of people accessing the mobile web and will create additional opportunity for mobile advertisers, who are expected to spend $2.2 billion on mobile messaging, display ads, and search via mobile technology by the year 2012.

Adoption of internet browsing on mobile phones is expected to climb from 16 percent at the end of 2007 to 19 percent at the end of 2008.

Their new study was completed in cooperation with mobile advertising service provider AdMob.

According to the report, the majority of page views and advertising impressions on mobile phones and portable media players are on a small screen with a mini-browser. Impressions and click-through rates (CTR) per device, however, are higher for mobile devices with full browsers.

“Mobility is adding a time and space dimension to media and advertising that has the potential to drive up CPM’s significantly. We are finding ads with location tags are selling at five to tenfold premiums over basic ads,” said Julie Ask, Vice President at JupiterResearch and lead author of the report. “The ability to tag users with location, demographics, and behavioral data complemented by devices that support rich media to avoid having their role in the advertising value chain made obsolete must continued to push forward.”

In order to be truly successful, mobile carriers must continue to enable access with affordable portable media players, mobile devices and innovative business models while protecting their stake in the value chain by adding information layers to user profiles.

“New mobile devices such as portable media players available on the market with dramatically improved user interfaces and capable of fully rendering HTML web sites are driving consumer demand for Internet access on mobile devices,” said David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch. “Carriers should continue to enable consumers by rolling out more devices that look like portable media players at affordable prices – perhaps even as a second device – and continue to break down economic barriers of pricing and application restrictions to consumer adoption.”

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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.”

Click here to see how we can help your company to reach your audience with mobile advertising.

New Research from InsightExpress Identifies Three Mobile Behavioral Profiles. According to new research from InsightExpress, a leading provider of digital marketing research, mobile consumers can be segmented into three new and distinct behavioral profiles: Mobile Pioneers, Mobile Wannabes and Mobile Traditionalists. This research, the third installment from the company’s ongoing mobile research program, indicates that when it comes to usage, two ends of the mobile spectrum exist.

Internet, unique applications, and/or video. The majority of Mobile Pioneers are under 35 years old, one third of them have a smartphone*, and they skew male, single and minority. The Mobile Wannabe (25 percent of the market) has tried some advanced features and would like to use them more. Less than half are under 35, and only 5 percent own a smartphone. The Mobile Traditionalists (60 percent of the market) are content to use their mobiles for phone calls and texting, and two thirds of them are over 35 years old.

Which behaviors separate the Pioneers from the rest of the pack? Almost two thirds (62 percent) had sent a text message to someone in the same room, compared to 39 percent of Wannabes and 26 percent of Traditionalists. A healthy 57 percent of Pioneers had taken a picture of a product using their phone and sent it to someone to get an opinion, compared to 30 percent of Wannabes and 16 percent of Traditionalists.

While the Pioneers set the trends, the Wannabes popularize them, making these individuals particularly interesting to marketers. This group is likely a barometer of future usage trends that will be adopted on a wider scale. For example, while 79 percent of Pioneers had taught someone else how to use their mobile phone features, Wannabes were not far behind with 65 percent having done so.

Staying ahead of the mobile curve can also be dangerous. Mobile Pioneers were most likely to have walked into something or someone while using their device, and most likely to have thrown their mobile phone at someone or something. Luckily, all three profiles stated that they had added ICE (In Case of Emergency) to their phone’s contact list (35 percent of Pioneers, 25 percent of Wannabes and 22 percent of Traditionalists).

Advertisers should be interested in Pioneers and Wannabes because these groups are more likely to agree that:

• Most advertising is relevant to them
• They believe that products that are advertised are a lot better than ones that are not advertised at all
• Advertising keeps them up-to-date on products they would like to have
• They have told someone about an advertisement they liked

“Knowing which type of mobile consumer you are contacting, or want to contact, is a big piece of the mobile marketing puzzle,” said Joy Liuzzo, Director of Mobile Research at InsightExpress. “The Wannabes are especially fascinating since they are eager to learn about and use advanced features. With this research, we continue to drive the conversation about current usage profiles and where mobile behavior is headed.”

About The Research

InsightExpress fielded an online survey to 1,516 mobile device owners age 18+ in January 2008. The survey data has a margin of error of between 3-6 percent, assuming a 95 percent confidence interval.

* Defined as Blackberry or smartphone (iPhone, Treo, etc).

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