Why isn’t everyone talking about mobile?
17 March 2009
6 Comments. Add yours
After all the excitement of ad:tech, the AIMIA awards and a very busy week in Sydney, I’ve finally managed to consolidate some of my thoughts. I enjoyed ad:tech and was delighted to be invited to speak on a panel with Oliver (Ideal Interfaces), Anton (FrontFoot) and Justin (Google). We had a good chat and got some debate going about the mobile marketing eco-system in Australia and what’s holding it back.
After the event someone commented to me that they were disappointed in how mobile was covered at ad:tech. They felt it was pitched too low, and that mobile should have come up again and again in so many sessions where it was completely overlooked.
I hadn’t been disappointed, but i realise I SHOULD have been. I have been (almost) alone in my enthusiasm for mobile advertising for so long, that I have stopped expecting people to get it. But there’s no reason for digital media & advertising people NOT to get it now and those of us who DO should be racing ahead, not holding back and waiting for everyone else to catch up.
There’s no reason a panel about brand consistency across digital channels shouldn’t be at least a third (or half!?) focussed on the mobile channel. There’s no reason for anyone to be using ringtones and wallpapers as great examples of mobile marketing solutions. There’s no reason SEM and SEO shouldn’t include mobile SEM and SEO. There’s no reason a panel about Ad Networks shouldn’t include someone from AdMob or Buzz City. I don’t think this is about the topics on the schedule so much, than about the presenters and their level of knowledge about mobile.
I didn’t go to all the presentations at ad:tech so I’m not in a great position to judge. But I suspect there was limited attention paid to mobile and what attention there was, would have been limited to push messaging and mobile banners / landing pages on carrier decks. Jennifer Wilson’s presentation about the future of mobile (now up on Slideshare) was inspirational, but we need more of that.
I’m one of the organisers of Mobile Mondays in Melbourne and we are in a great position to educate and motivate. I would like to ensure that at ad:tech next year EVERYONE is talking about mobile. If you agree and you’ve got some of that much needed enthusiasm, come and talk to us, or our peers in Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide. We’ll do our best to point you in the right direction, introduce you to people or give you an audience for your ideas.
At MoMo Melbourne in April we are going to give 5 local mobile specialists a chance to publicly pitch their ideas to a fabulous local brand - Tourism Victoria. If you’d like to start including mobile in your thinking, or extend your knowledge a little further, please come along and hear what they’ve got to say.
Finally, do you have an opinion about what is holding back mobile marketing and advertising in Australia? Is it education? The carriers? Costs? Great (successful) case studies? Creative agencies? Media agencies? Data plans? Handset usage?
Please share your thoughts!
Great question Emily!
Here’s my 2 minute take on why mobile marketing isn’t that popular (yet).
1. Agencies, and marketers in general, don’t get mobile (some don’t even get digital…)
2. Mobile (beyond SMS campaigns/ringtones/wallpapers) is perceived as scary to design for (lots of browsers and interaction methods) with little reward
3. People (in general) are only starting to turn to their mobile for richer experiences on the mobile web. Some of this is because of previous bad experiences with cost, but alot is also awareness. We constantly see this in user research.
4. There aren’t many highly publicised mobile or cross media campaigns showing good ROI
5. The dream of having a one-to-one relationship between the brand and the customer via there mobile is complex (many brands fighting for attention, relatively short campaigns don’t promote ongoing relationship etc).
(Unsurprisingly) I think brands (in the short term) will have success with the iPhone, because it a consumer oriented device (unlike Android) and the brand can have a direct link to a rich interactive application that is easy to download. The brand only has to build one application and their designers love it because they don’t have the constraints of mobile web.
For example, I just downloaded the Watchmen app on the way to the movies to check out backstory etc. It was quick to find, a rich experience and it worked. The emphasis being on a great end-to-end mobile customer experience.
I too was somewhat shocked at the minimal attention paid to mobile at Ad-Tech. Social media and twitter seemed to have anyone stunned in the headlights!
From a tourism brand marketers point of view I am very excited about the massive opportunities that mobile presents. Having piloted a downloadable mobile application, we are about to commence development of a mobile site.
Olivers comments sum up many of the key issues Ive faced to date with mobile. Its new, different, and whilst the iPhone has done wonders for mobile, its also polarised thought and strategy. But the momentum is slowly starting to shift!
Hey Em!
It is a good question and one that I think in the near term is being answered by the iPhone, which I really see as being the first properly consumer oriented mobile device.
I really feel that until the iPhone everyone was working with (extremely) substandard interfaces and frankly shit operating systems (Sorry Sony and Nokia, Symbian et. al. really ARE crap).
Which means we reached the start of the mobile marketing age about 8 months or so ago.
I’m hopeful that we’ll see a lot more in the way of cross platform strategies going forward (even if iPhone is the only mobile platform being built for) - again until Nokia etc start to pay attention to what people actually want from their mobile devices I think they’ll be at a significant disadvantage here.
Hi Simon, Michael & Oli
Thank you so much for your thoughts, and I really must apologise for not responding when Mobilista was at its old home. This new blog interface makes it so much easier to find and reply to comments.
I think we are all speaking the same language when it comes to our thoughts on the evolution of the market - and where we’re at right now.
The thing we all need to work on is giving “mobile” a higher profile in our local market to encourage brands, advertisers and content publishers to start getting involved.
MoMo is a great platform for that, and Oliver & team up in Sydney, as well as we MoMoMelb organisers are seeing increased attendance and energy at our events in the last few months.
I’d love to see more attention given to mobile in the events space. Particularly marketing & advertising industry events. If you’re organising an event, drop me a line and let me know your topics and themes. I’d be happy to introduce you to a knowledgeable local presenter or two with mobile expertise.
Emily
Nice article Em, and I think Oliver W (the other Oliver!) sums it well. I agree with Oliver’s comments and in particular point 3, not necessarly the previous bad experiences but just that mass market acceptance of mobiles as more than voice and text is still in its infancy.
I saw an interesting summary of speech where the speaker explained that social networking was not yet a mass market phenomenon. He asked everyone in the audience to raise their hands if their children AND their parents had an email address, pretty much the entire audience raised their hands, indicating email was a mass market product. But when he asked the same question for whether their children AND parents had joined a social network it was down to 10% of the audience. I believe it would be the same for mobile. It is exciting and it is getting there but at the moment it is still in its infancy.
It is certainly growing faster than TV did, I would love to be able to compare Mobile today with TV in the 60’s / 70’s when people were first buying TV’s and marketing exec’s were planning their first TV commercials - “But everyone has a radio! Why would we want to something on TV when only the 10,000 (???) rich people have TV’s?”
Love the new site, let me know if you need something writing on a particular topic…
Ol
Hi Emily
I flicked to this post, after coming from one of your tweets, just see see if anything had changed over the few years that I have become less involved with mobile. The roots of I became less involved go to many the reasons expressed about what’s holding back mobile ads etc. So my conclusion is that nothing has improved significantly, at the best there is more awareness of the potential.
What I did pick up however is a little word which always thrusts me into a “will or will I not react” mode. And that word is “new” - that mobile advertising is something new.
It’s now new, it is extremely well understood, the largest agencies are in Japan and Denso part-owns one, and that one alone turns over multiple $$ BILLIONS of revenue.
I’m more of an industry structuralist and like to understand the cometitive and value dynamics and customer value analysis of where I am playing. In that regard I think it would be much more profitable if everyone killed the lame “it’s new” excuse and said let’s understand why it works in Japan and elsewhere and what are the factors here to make it not work.
Those factors include many of the things people write about, but to line them up against successful parameters of another market makes for a more positive understanding of how to go forward. (It also makes it possible to assess from a business perspective whether it is WORTH trying to go forward on an ROI basis.)
The exercise is one of understanding what are controllable variables or variables which can be influenced, and by whom in what timeframe and at what resource cost.
Think of the success story (say Japan) as where you want to get to, and the analysis is where you are now, and then you have to fully understand constraints and risk and resources to make the journey, and what kind of trials and prototype actions you need to make to test and manage the risk of the journey.
This then gets over the time wasting lamenting of this being new and different and also people wasting time reinventing the wheel. I hate reinventing the wheel as it just destroys resources and potential wealth generation by doing something.
I also think that without this type of approach or something similar people like you and your colleagues who want to do more in this space will simply be slaves of small time tactics and hostages to the big players in the ecosystem.
Cheers, Walter @g2m
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