So Mobile Monday London took place this week on the topic of Mobile Advertising and here is a write up of what went down. Overall it was another good MoMo with a good line up of speakers, with different perspectives and a lively, engaged crowd. There are quite a few stats in here on mobile advertising so hope it's a useful write up for people.
The Agency View
First up was Claire Voloti of Mindshare, the media planning agency, providing her perspective on what ad clients are looking for from mobile and its role within the media plan and schedule.
- Mobile has two roles as an ad delivery platform and as an interactive "bolt-on channel"
- important to see how mobile can interact with other media to make them more engaging
- mobile can also play a role in helping to make other media more measurable e.g. through putting a short-code on a poster, print or TV ad
- Claire was bored of hearing that mobile advertising is "going to take off this year" but things DO seem to be moving forward at last!
- industry bodies like the MMA are pushing standards and measurement systems
- consumers are starting to use mobile internet
- networks and devices are improving
- social networking is starting to move onto mobile
- although a lot of focus is on younger consumers, older age groups are also an opportunity as they typically have contract phones with better data plans, are affluent and have the best phones!
- events are driving mobile through search e.g. sports matches
- however, it can still be PAINFUL to do anything on mobile e.g. took Claire two days just to get a £40k mobile plan in place, the fragmented value chain is a problem and a real barrier to growing budgets
- some good successes e.g. Pepsi campaign generated 400k view of pepsi content, 2000 votes and 20 video uploads (although this seems really low Claire was really happy with this level of engagement given the 1:100 ratio typically seen between user uploads and viewing
- really excited about mobile coupons - could open up LOADSA MONEY for mobile but need to ensure the distribution chain is in place to take the coupons!
- mobile needs to be viewed within the context of an overall media plan, provide relevant content that adds value and have real KPIs e.g. sales, awareness
Key challenges
- Reach: only 10% of users use mobile internet, targeting isn't there yet in any scale, mobile search yet to scale (hard to spend £1k on mobile search!)
- Measurement: no standard way to measure or value mobile advertising, no socio-demographic info, too many proprietary ad serving systems, need to integrate more into existing online services
- Speed: really need fast networks e.g. HSDPA to support things like video
The Operator View
Shaun Henderson is the bigwig for mobile advertising at Vodafone, and an ex ad agency man. He opened with a few jokes and went on to outline what Voda are up to, namely:
- building inventory in terms of impressions, users, clicks
- moving beyond age, gender, postcode, handset segmentation to session length, location, behaviour
- sizeable audience but not enough scale yet to "slice and dice" too finely - need to keep things simple
- Money follows measurement in media, in order to grow the business, need to put in place measurement systems, show ROI, compete with other media etc (apparently the big guys at Voda HQ get very excited at this point with the mention of big money)
- trying to make it more efficient to buy, sell and report on mobile advertising and put in place standards and formats e.g. GSMA mobile ad metrics, auditing etc
- for Renault Twingo campaign on Vodafone mobile portal, brand awareness went up from 37% to 56%, purchase intent went up from 9% to 11% so MOBILE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!
The Mobile Ad Platform View
Russell Buckley from Admob was back at momo London after a year and a half when he last did a presentation and demo in the very early days of admob. What a difference a year and half makes! - admob is now no longer a small experimental mobile ad network but is actually beating Google in the mobile ad market. Admob have a great policy of "open sourcing" information and data (as Russell put it) and this presentation was all about sharing information about admob.
- admob took 6 months to do 30m impressions, 6 months to do 1 bn impressions, and are now doing 3.5bn every 6 months! (nice growth curve)
- mobile advertising plays different roles for different players:
- brands and advertisers can target consumers
- mobile web site owners can promote their mobile sites
- operators and publishers can monetise their traffic
- mobile content owners can use mobile as a marketing channel (very effective as promoting to users already on their phone)
- admob are seeing the range of advertisers broadening moving from mobile content players to retail and services, financial and media businesses, internet sites and consumer products
- US brands are more willing to experiment on mobile and the US is really embracing mobile due to flat rate data
- 47% of admob traffic is from the US, Germany not even in the top 10 due to high data costs, South Africa also punches massively above its weight to do data
- 70% of handsets picked up by admob are capable of viewing video, in the UK this is as high as 95%!
- the MTV Music Awards site used very relevant, fresh ads and got a 300% traffic increase and a 400% increase in downloads
- Landrover saw the following post-click actions on its admob campaign
- 88% downloaded a video
- 3% made a call (50% of calls were >30 seconds, 20% > 1 minute)
- 9% used the dealer locator
- Coke got a 130% playrate for a video on its mobile site from admob users (each user watched the video an average of 1.3 times)
- Russell also showed a lot of stats showing that mobile internet users are "influencers" and early adopters of other products
- Overall the presentation was focused a lot on the idea that mobile needs to move beyond clicks and towards thinking about where users are driven post click e.g. to a sale, action etc
The Veteran View
Last but not least was Ray Anderson from Bango, a guy who deserves huge respect for really helping to build the mobile internet right through the dark days of wap and beyond. Bango are now moving beyond payments into mobile web analytics and mobile advertising solutions. Some interesting points Ray made below:
- a lot of ad agencies and web companies are inexperienced with mobile
- google search hosted by Telefonica is very different from Vodafone or from google's own mobile search service - no consistency !
- Ray had some great data showing the importance of operators opening up and enabling off-portal content discovery through mobile advertising
- Orange added search to their portal in Sept 05 and their revenue through Bango payments (e.g. their share of off-portal content sales) doubled (because content providers could advertise on Orange search and target their users
- in Sept 06 Orange moved the search box into a better position and saw another 70% growth in payments through Bango
- Vodafone at this point was doing much less revenue through Bango but in July 07 they added search too and since then Vodafone revenue have shot up and caught up Orange
- Overall this is a great case study of why open beats closed - pay attention Novarra!
- In terms of mobile advertising the key will be to optimise the user experience - this is hard to do at the moment because mobile analytics systems aren't really there (difficult to measure mobile users due to IP address issues, can't use javascript on mobile)
- Bango has built a mobile analytics solution to help test things like goal seeking, conversions, ROI etc and optimise the user experience
Phew! Right that's it... thanks again to the organisers of Momo London for another great event :-) You can get all the presentations and so on here.
sorry, but what a load of rubbish. do consumers want adverts like mentioned above on their phones. nope. fills me dread when i hear all these measuring platforms being developed.
where is the innovation? none of the speakers above explained what value they bring to the consumer.that is not engagement. This is an advert. this will work - the role of the consumer has dramatically changed. ad value does not end at the point of consumption. hint - study it as a lifecycle. additionally, remember mobile is a behavioral based device. apols for the rant.
Posted by: ray | 07/19/2008 at 02:07 PM
typo correction - "this will NOT work"
thks :)
Posted by: ray | 07/19/2008 at 02:09 PM
typo correction - "this will NOT work"
thks :)
Posted by: ray | 07/19/2008 at 02:10 PM
Thanks for this informative stuff.
Posted by: Mobile Advertising | 05/13/2009 at 01:32 PM