Mobile advertising
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Mobile advertising is a form of advertising via mobile (wireless) phones or other mobile devices. It is a subset of mobile marketing.
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[edit] Overview
Some see mobile advertising as closely related to online or internet advertising, though its reach is far greater - currently, most mobile advertising is targeted at mobile phones, that came estimably to a global total of 3 billion as of 2007, and will reach 4 billion in 2008. Notably computers, including desktops and laptops, are currently estimated at 800 million globally.
It is probable that advertisers and media industry will increasingly take account of a bigger and fast-growing mobile market, though it remains at around 1% of global advertising spend. Mobile media is evolving rapidly and while mobile phones will continue to be the mainstay, it is not clear whether mobile phones based on cellular backhaul or smartphones based on WiFi hot spot or WiMAX hot zone will also strengthen. However, such is the emergence of this form of advertising, that there is now a dedicated global awards ceremony organised every year by Visiongain.
As mobile phones outnumber TV sets by over 2 to 1, and internet users by nearly 3 to 1, and the total laptop and desktop PC population by over 4 to 1, advertisers in many markets have recently rushed to this media. In Spain 75% of mobile phone owners receive ads, in France 62% and in Japan 54%. More remarkably as mobile advertising matures, like in the most advanced markets, the user involvement also matures. In Japan today, already 44% of mobile phone owners click on ads they receive on their phones.
[edit] Types of mobile ads
In some markets, this type of advertising is most commonly seen as a Mobile Web Banner (top of page) or Mobile Web Poster (bottom of page banner), while in others, it is dominated by early forms, such as SMS advertising (which has been estimated at over 90% of mobile marketing revenue worldwide). Other forms include MMS advertising, advertising within mobile games and mobile videos, during mobile TV receipt, full-screen interstices, which appear while a requested item of mobile content or mobile web page is loading up, and audio adverts (eg, in the form of a jingle before a voicemail recording).
The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has published mobile advertising guidelines, but it is difficult to keep such guidelines current in such a fast-developing area.
Advertisers can run a variety of advertising campaigns. Beyond the branding opportunity of banner ad messaging, marketers can also employ a variety of response mechanisms, built into the ad displaying mechanism:
- Seek to drive traffic to branded Mobile web sites
- Campaign-specific landing page information
- Click-to-call functionality
- E-mail capture
to the user directly from the phone.
- Mobile TV as privacy-friendly multimedia that are subject to Users' choice.
- Mobile search as User-centric medium to override privacy concern.
- Personalisation of the advertisements, using any of name, age, gender, location and other data. This has the effect of increasing click-through rates and reduced inventory wastage.
The effectiveness of a mobile ad campaign can be measured in a variety of ways. The main measurements are impressions (views) and click-through rates. Additional measurements include conversion rates, such as, click-to-call rates and other degrees of interactive measurement.
[edit] Handsets display and corresponding ad images
There are hundreds of handsets in the market and they differ by screen size and supported technologies (e.g. MMS, WAP 2.0). For color images, typically PNG, JPG, GIF and BMP, with WBMP being the most basic (and the most common). The following gives an overview of various handset screen sizes and a recommended image size for each type.[1]
Handsets Display and Corresponding Ad Images:
| Handset | Approx Handset Screen Size (px W x H) | Example Handsets | Ad Unit | Ad Size (pixels) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| X-Large | 320 x 320 | Palm Treo 700P, Nokia E70 | X-Large | 305 x 64 |
| Large | 240 x 320 | Samsung MM-A900, LG VX-8500 Chocolate | Large | 215 x 34 |
| Medium | 176 x 208 | Motorola RAZR, LG VX-8000, Motorola ROKR E1 | Medium | 167 x 30 |
| Small | 128 x 160 | Motorola V195 | Small | 112 x 20 |
source: Mobile Marketing Association
[edit] Development
Martin Cooper invented a portable handset in 1973, when he was a project manager at Motorola. It was almost three decades after the idea of cellular communications was introduced by Bell Laboratories. Two decades later, cellular phones made a commercial debut in the mass market in the early 1990s. In the early days of cellular handsets, all you could do was talk, listen and dial.
When the second generation of mobile telecoms (so-called 2G) was introduced in Finland by Radiolinja (now Elisa) on the GSM standard (now the world's most common mobile technology with over 2 billion users) in 1991, the digital technology introduced data services. SMS text messaging was the first such service. The first person-to-person SMS text message was sent in Finland in December 1994. SMS (Short Message Service) gradually began to grow, becoming the largest data service by number of users in the world, currently with 74% of all mobile subscribers or 2.4 billion people active users of SMS in 2007.
One advantage of SMS is that while even in conference, the users are able to send and receive brief messages unobtrusively, while enjoying privacy. Even in such environments as in a restaurant, café, bank, travel agency office, and so on, the users can enjoy some privacy by sending/receiving brief text messages in an unobtrusive way.
It would take six years from the launch of SMS until the first case of advertising would appear on this new data media channel, when a Finnish news provider offered free news headlines via SMS, sponsored by advertising. This led to rapid experimentation in mobile advertising and mobile marketing, and the world's first conference to discuss mobile advertising was held in London in February 2001, sponsored by the Wireless Advertising Association (which later merged into the Mobile Marketing Association). The first book to discuss mobile advertising was Ahonen's M-Profits in 2002. Several major mobile operators around the world launched their own mobile advertising arms, like Aircross in South Korea, owned by the parents of SK Telecoms the biggest mobile operator, or like D2 in Japan, the joint venture of Japan's largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo and Dentsu, Japan's largest ad agency.
[edit] Mobile as Media
This unobtrusive two-way communications caught the attention of media industry and advertisers as well as cellphone makers and telecom operators. Eventually, SMS became a new media - called the seventh mass media channel by several media and mobile experts - and even more, it is a two-way mobile media, as opposed to one-way immobile media like radios, newspapers and TV. Besides, the immediacy of responsiveness in this two-way media is a new territory found for media industry and advertisers, who are eager to measure up market response immediately.
Mobile media has begun to draw more significant attention from media giants and advertising industry since the mid-2000s, based on a view that mobile media was to change the way advertisements were made, and that mobile devices can form a new media sector. Despite this, revenues are still a small fraction of the advertising industry as a whole. Informa reported that mobile advertising in 2007 was worth 2.2 billion dollars. This is less than one half of one percent of the approximately 450 billion dollar global advertising industry.
The potential of the area was discussed at the 96th annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers, ended on October 8, 2006 in Orlando, Florida. A leading market research firm, eMarketer indicated that the world's mobile advertising came to $900 million in 2006, and estimated that by 2011, mobile advertising will grow to $11.3 billion. In the United States, mobile advertising stood at $421 million in 2006, and is projected to grow to $4.7 billion by 2011, according to eMarketer.
Types of mobile advertising are expected to change rapidly. In other words, mobile technology will come up with a strong push for identifying newer and unheard-of mobile multimedia, with the result that subsequent media migration will greatly stimulate a consumer behavioral shift and establish a paradigm shift in mobile advertising. A major media migration is on, as desktop Internet evolves into mobile Internet. One typical case in point is Nielsen’s recent buyout of Telephia.
The hierarchy of mobile media is changing very rapidly and mobile WiMax or other technologies may increase the impact of, for example, location-based mobile eCommerce. In parallel with the Mobile Advertising Guidelines published by the MMA, which focus on Text and Banner dvertising, The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is currently working on a standardization of the mobile advertising infrastructure and use cases. Operators, such as Vodafone and O2, have also published mobile marketing guidelines to protect consumer privacy.
A BBC news article of August 2006 indicated, "Young drive 'radical media shift'", pointing to a fast shift away from the traditional media. "They are leaving the traditional media and moving towards new media. This generation has grown up with new technologies - and it is this generation for whom the uptake is instinctive."
New players have emerged into the mobile advertising space, such as Admob, which launched only in 2006 and already delivers over 2 billion mobile ads in over a dozen countries around the world. Another major player is Blyk, the UK based free telecoms provider, where 16-24 year old youth customers receive free calls and messages, in exchange for viewing 6 mobile ads per day. What Blyk is now doing, is revolutionizing advertising overall, by introducing the concept of "User-generated advertising" a concept so radical many consider it a contradiction in terms and utterly counter-intuitive. Yet Blyk has signed up global brands such as Coca Cola, Adidas and L'Oreal, and in its first half year of operation, ad campaigns on Blyk receive on average response rates around 30% - a whole order of magnitude better rates than on any previous mass media. Some of Blyk's early testers love the new form of advertising so much, they actually request more of the ads. Blyk is cited by many mobile and ad experts as the company to watch for re-inventing advertising for mobile.
[edit] Viral Marketing
As mobile is an interactive mass media similar to the internet, advertisers are eager to utilize viral marketing methods, by which one recipient of an advertisement on mobile, will forward that to a friend. This allows users to become part of the advertising experience. At the bare minimum mobile ads with viral abilities can become powerful interactive campaigns. At the extreme, they can become engagment marketing experiences. A key element of mobile marketing campaigns is the most influential member of any target audience or community, which is called the Alpha User.
[edit] Privacy concern
Advocates have raised the issue of privacy. Targeted mobile marketing requires customization of ad content to reach interested and relevant customers. To customize such behavioral personal data, user profiling, data mining and other behavior watch tools are employed, and privacy advocates warn that this may cause privacy infringement.
Some mobile carriers offer freebie or cheaper rate plans in exchange for SMS or other mobile ads. However, mobile TV and mobile search may override this privacy concern, as soon as they are implemented on a full-blown basis. In a naive way to override privacy concern, however, User’s prior consent needs to be obtained through membership to join or User account to set up. Both mobile TV and mobile search may supersede the way of getting Users’ prior concern through membership or User account because Users are free to choose mobile TV channels or mobile search services on a voluntary basis.
[edit] Interactivity
Mobile devices aim to outgrow the domain of voice-intensive cellphones and to enter a new world of multimedia mobile devices, like laptops, PDA phones and smartphones. Unlike the conventional one-way media like TV, radio and newspaper, web media has enabled two-way traffic, thereby introducing a new phase of interactive advertising, regardless of whether static or mobile. This user-centric approach was noted at the 96th annual conference of Association of National Advertisers in 2006, which described ”a need to replace decades worth of top-down marketing tactics with bottom-up, grass-roots approaches”.
[edit] Mobile device issues
Coincidentally, however, mobile devices are encountering technological bottlenecks in terms of battery life, formats, and safety issue
In a broad sense, mobile devices are categorically broken down into portable and stationary equipment. Technically, mobile devices are categorized as below:
- Handheld [portable]
- Laptop, including ultraportable [portable]
- Dashtop, including GPS navigation, satellite radio, and WiMAX-enabled dashtop mobile payment platforms[fixed on dashboards]
The battery life and safety issues will perhaps combine to eventually push mobile equipment’s inroads into vehicle dashtops. However, satellite-based GPS navigation and satellite radio may already hit a snag because of their part-time usage and technological hierarchy. Put differently, people want more functions than GPS navigation and satellite radios. The trend indicates an ongoing convergence into all-in-one dashtop mobile devices incorporating GPS navigators, satellite radios, MP3 players, mobile TV, mobile Internet, MVDER (vehicle black box), driving safety monitors, smartphones and even video games.
[edit] Books about Mobile Advertising
The first book to discuss mobile advertising at length was M-Profits by Tomi T Ahonen in 2002, with a chapter dealing with the topic.
In 2008 Chetan Sharma, Joe Herzog and Victor Melfi released a book Mobile Advertising: Supercharge your brand in the exploding wireless market.
The first of a series of annual guides on the topic was Tanla Mobile Marketing and Advertising Guide 2008 edited by Helen Keegan.
[edit] References
2. Internet Usage and Importance Expand
