Today’s article in the Australian gives us the usual launch and press release stuff but is pretty light on details.   B&T have managed to dig out a bit more information, including a name (Dawn Goh) to head up this new division and a URL from the Optus site www.optus.com.au/advertise (a search for Mobile Advertising on the Optus Home page still draws a blank).

We heard last week from Brad over at Digital Ministry that Optus will be using MIA’s AdFactory solution to serve and manage their mobile ad campaigns.

Although we’ve seen releases before from Optus talking about mobile advertising, with the appointment of a solution provider, it looks like it might finally be happening.  There is also a bona fide rate card up on their site, with CPM rates for banners and M-Site Builds.

No surprises there – rates are generally comparable to the other players in the market, if a big high (untargeted banners are $30-$40 CPM) and there’s not much info about targeting capability.

With Optus servicing a large portion of Australia’s iPhone customers it would be quite a coup if they could offer iPhone targeting early on.

Speaking of which, I recently heard of another  local carrier offering iPhone targeting, even though it’s not an advertised  service.  Anyone got any light to shed on this?   I regularly target iPhone users via AdMob for my clients and I am not yet aware of any other Aus business offering this – would love to know more if you know otherwise?

The original document is here AIMIA Mobile Advertising Guidelines and see launch comments below from AIMIA:

“Mobile advertising is the placement of advertisements (currently display and search are the most commonly used) on mobile internet sites – both on the carrier portal and off-portal. Mobile advertising has the potential to deliver highly targeted, highly personalised advertising to a majority of the population – all those that have a mobile phone. Brands, publishers and agencies have begun to use mobile advertising for a wide variety of marketing motivations including customer acquisition, revenue generation, brand awareness and distribution.

Following extensive consultation with carriers, publishers, content aggregators and content providers here in Australia, and with industry bodies internationally, the AIMIA Mobile Industry Group has formulated Mobile Advertising Guidelines to support the professional growth and development of Mobile Advertising in Australia. The guidelines have also been endorsed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia. This is intended to be a living document, growing and changing as the mobile advertising industry grows and matures.”

Given AIMIA intends for this to be a living document – I thought it would be good to have a central place to encourage discussion on its future.

Things move very fast in this industry, and no sooner is a document published than new handsets, browsers and standards emerge.  If you have an opinion on the AIMIA Mobile Advertising Guidelines, or thoughts on where future guidelines ought to focus, please comment below.

I’ll also update this post with links to any discussions elsewhere if you send them through.

The AIMIA Mobile Industry Group is launching the updated AIMIA Mobile Advertising Guidelines on June 10, 2009 in Sydney. The launch event is from 9.30 – 12.00 on the 10th at the KPMG Auditorium and includes presentations on Mobile Advertising from Kelly Ajai (Communicator), Kerry Field (Mindshare), Jon Slade (NineMSN) and Angus Beattie (3 Mobile). The morning will be moderated by the inimitable Jennifer Wilson, Chair of the AIMIA Mobile Industry Group.

This will be a good chance to mix it with the local mobile advertising crew, and hear about mobile advertising from the experts. I’ll be there! More info and registration details from AIMIA.

Oliver, Jenny and I have been putting the finishing touches on the course materials and I am really  looking forward to the opportunity to work with a group of enthusiastic wannabe mobile marketers!  The course will cover the latest trends in mobile technology and marketing, and teach participants how to take advantage of them.

Course Content includes:

• how to engage consumers through the mobile channel
• the logistics of implementing a mobile marketing campaign
• how to integrate mobile into your overall marketing strategies

I’ll be running the show down in Melbourne on June 18th and will have a few guest lecturers there on the day to impart their wisdom and expertise.  Jenny Williams (IdeaGarden) will fire up Sydney attendees on June 11th with a little bit of support from yours truly (I’ll be making cups of tea)

I would love to see you there.  I know if you’re reading Mobilista then you’re already interested in mobile marketing – perhaps this is the perfect opportunity to take that interest and turn it into some really exciting mobile marketing activities before 2009 is out.

At the start of the year I predicted we’d see some great local examples of mobile marketing and advertising in Australia in 2009.  Will you be behind one of those great examples??

Banner ads were shown across BigPond & Sensis mobile sites promoting a competition “Win a Yearly Metcard”. It’s a good banner ad – easy to read on a small screen and clearly branded for Connex. The call to action is clearly defined and has a worthwhile benefit to the end user.

Clicking on the banner takes the user to a Connex branded mobile ‘campaign’ site, most likely created & hosted by Sensis (sorry I didn’t check at the time – anyone know differently?)

The mobile site asks users to watch a Connex Commercial and answer a question to go into the draw. The commercial was simply a current TV campaign. Using creative developed for another medium is not something I’d generally recommend for a mobile campaign. If your agency suggested stripping out the audio from your latest TV campaign to use as a radio ad you’d probably fire their lazy asses. Mobile advertising requires specific, targeted creative that is relevant to the mobile channel and its unique usage characteristics.

In this case Connex partially redeems itself by offering a clear benefit for viewing the commercial – watch and win. Users then answer the multiple choice question, enter their mobile number and submit.

I think this was a reasonable implementation that works well in the medium and I look forward to seeing more innovation from Connex in the mobile channel.

The good news is that 48 people have signed up to the Facebook group for Mobile Advertising in Australia. That’s a great start and I plan to fulfil my part of the deal in the coming weeks, and share some of the recent mobile advertising activities in our industry.

My head is buzzing with future blog posts and I’ve made a commitment to keep them coming, short and sweet but far more often, as I do have a tendency to write an essay!

Watch this space in the next few days, and if you have any news to share, campaigns you’ve seen or run, products & services launched or companies doing interesting things, please drop me a line at emily@mobilist.com.au

Don’t forget there are many mobile people already ‘micro-blogging’ every day on twitter. My twitter name is emilyfreeman if you’re keen to join the conversation. If you’re already up there, why don’t you pop over to the Facebook group and add your twitter ID on the discussion board so the local community can find you (otherwise I may be forced to ‘out’ a few people on here for the benefit of all!)

If we are to work together as a group for the benefit of all, we need to focus on creating Community, Conversation & Cooperation. That’s right “The 3Cs of ultimate enlightenment!”. Yes I just made them up.

Community: We can’t work together if we don’t know each other, so first we need to create a community.

• You can subscribe to the Mobilista blog by RSS or email. If you are interested in being a part of this community, please sign up and we’ll take it from there.

Conversation: We need to talk to each other about our successes, failures & opportunities so that all of us learn & move forwards faster.

• If you have something to share with the community post a reply on this blog, or email me and I’ll write about it.

Co-operation: We should help each other grow. Yes it’s true many of us are competing for the same clients, but with such a small industry, if we keep our customers in the dark about the industry as a whole, we stifle growth and limit the rewards for all of us.

• I am compiling a list of people & companies that ‘get’ mobile and come recommended. Anyone from freelance designers to full service digital agencies, consultants, application developers or copywriters. If you get mobile or you’ve worked with someone who does, drop me a line.

I realise there’s plenty more that can be done, and industry bodies will almost certainly be set up, standards written & memberships called for. Meanwhile, from little things, big things grow.

 You’ve probably read all the articles about how big an opportunity Mobile Advertising is, and heard case studies for brands who’ve done ‘great things with mobile’ overseas.  But what about here in Australia.  A recent ACMA media release put the number of 3G mobile phones inAustralia at more than 4.5 million. That’s an audience worth targeting.  But what is possible, how do you do it & how much does it cost?  Oh, and what is it again??

What is it again?

I define Mobile Advertising as mobile display, mobile search & mobile content sponsorship. Unless you already have a mobile site, your mobile advertising campaign will need a mobile destination site, or mSite for the user to click through to (mobile TV advertising would be an exception here).  

Mobile Advertising might be used to build brand value, drive traffic to a mobile site or to support a mobile marketing strategy such as an SMS mailout, competition, game or giveaway.  Web to mobile techniques like beams, mobile barcodes or SMS shortcodes can be used to supplement mobile advertising.  (added later: QR Codes are also a mechanism for driving users from offline channel to mobile)

For some background on all of the above, see my recent article about driving traffic to a mobile site – reposted here on Mobilista.

Mobile advertising should support your traditional campaign goals and can be implemented independently or in support of traditional channels.  Although branding is the simplest mobile execution, traditional direct marketing campaigns convert well to the mobile channel (competitions, give-aways, direct response by phone / email etc).

As a mobile advertiser, you need to put your message in front of customers who are already looking at content on their mobile phone.  In the most simplistic terms, mobile advertising is about placing your message within that content.  Just like online media, you can serve banners into a mobile site, buy ads to appear against mobile search results or sponsor a mobile website or mobile TV show. 

Buying Mobile Media

A mobile banner is simply a clickable graphic served onto a mobile page.  Globally, click thru rates (CTRs) on mobile banners average at around 6%.
  Some local campaigns have seen CTRs of 10, 20 & 30%.   These CTRs will likely settle at between 1 – 3% as mobile advertising becomes more common, and the ‘curiosity factor’ is reduced.  Unlike online, mobile banners tend to dominate the mobile browsing experience, taking up as much as 25% of the screen.

So how do you buy mobile banner media?  In Australia the media buying environment for mobile is fragmented and the ad products vary widely.  (added later:  MDigital is a Melbourne based startup who can now take care of your aggregated mobile media buying)

The nature of the mobile industry means that your audience can be reached in three ways.  Via the mobile phone Carrier, the content Publisher, or an Ad network.   Across all of these channels, I would estimate there to be at least 500 million impressions available for buying in Australia. That includes banner ads served across the major publishers’ mobile sites, banners & sponsorships on all the available carrier inventory, and text ads using Google Mobile & AdMob. My estimate is most likely conservative. 

Based on the addressable market and performance estimates, there’s no reason an advertiser couldn’t achieve several hundred thousand clicks on a month long mobile campaign.

2008 has seen the Australian carriers really step up to mobile advertising. Vodafone, Telstra & 3Mobile have formal strategies for selling advertising on their mobile content portals.  Vodafone leads the charge in simplicity & transparency, with a published rate card available online (http://www.vodafone.com.au/personal/aboutvodafone/mobileadvertising/index.htm). 

Additionally, Australia’s major mobile publishers, Fairfax, News, NineMSN & Sensis all offer mobile advertising on their ‘off-deck’ sites.  Off deck sites are simply mobile websites that are not available from a Carrier’s home page or portal.   Even sites which ARE linked to from a carrier’s portal can be accessed ‘off-deck’ by typing in the URL, requesting a link via SMS shortcode or finding it on a mobile search engine.

Unfortunately, buying mobile media is not as simple as sourcing all the rate cards and buying up impressions.  Each carrier & publisher has a different view on how mobile advertising should be positioned & sold.  

NineMSN offers a CPM based approach, whereby banners can be served across each of their mobile sites for approximately $75 CPM.  This includes their ‘Mobilised’ portal as well as their popular Entertainment Guides, Cleo, Ralph and 9News.   

Similarly Vodafone will serve banner ads on their mobile portal ‘Vodafone live’ for between $60 – $75 CPM.  On top of this, targeting can be added at a rate of + $5CPM for each targeting filter, such as age, gender, location or device type.

If you want to reach the big user bases, you need to deal with Telstra & 3 Mobile.  Telstra offers a ‘run of network’ proposition of $30 CPM for untargeted banner ads across their Sensis & BigPond mobile network.  This includes mobile sites like Yellow, Whereis, CitySearch & the BigPond mobile portal.  Add another $20 to your CPM and you can target by age, gender, income and more. $10 on top gives you location targeting as well.  Sensis MediaSmart is set to release an updated rate card & brochure in the next few weeks, which will include details of all the mobile advertising opportunities on Sensis & BigPond’s mobile sites. (added later: I still haven’t seen this)

3 Mobile has a more customised approach to mobile advertising.  Rather than offering simple banners on the Planet 3 mobile portal, 3 prefer to work with advertisers to design customised, integrated campaigns.  This customised approach is also adopted by News Digital Media who publish a news portal, Carsguide & mobile ticketing site Moshtix, and Fairfax Digital who publish The Age & SMH mobile sites, Drive, Domain and the Good Food Guides on mobile.  More on integrated campaigns below.

Buying mobile banner media is only part of the equation however. One of the tricky things about designing for mobile phones is the variance in device types.  For this reason, mobile banners need to be created in multiple sizes.  AIMIA has established a Mobile Advertising sub-committee to create and lobby for adoption of standard mobile ad sizes.  The latest version of the Mobile Ad guidelines can be found here (http://www.aimia.com.au/i-cms?page=1.35.3434.3435) and are a good starting point for consistency in mobile advertising, but not all publishers support them yet.  Until industry standards are adopted you should ask for banner specs before designing your ad creative.

A Mobile Destination

In addition to mobile banners, you will need a mobile destination site.  Also knows as msites, adsites, campaign sites, mini-sites or landing pages.  This is where your customer clicks to after seeing your mobile ad.  Whether you use banners, search, SMS or another means to promote your mobile campaign, the ultimate destination is (almost) always a mobile site.

So how do you put together a mobile destination site?  This is a complex area and one I should discuss further in a future article.  In brief, you can either outsource or build it yourself.   The most expensive option is outsourcing to a specialist mobile development house, such as TigerSpike or Icon Mobile.  The sky’s the limit in terms of cost, but this is the only way to guarantee creative control.

At the other end of the scale there are many free online solutions for building a DIY mobile destinaton, such as Mippin (http://www.mippin.com) and local startup MoStyle (http://www.mostyle.mobi). These solutions work well for community sites or for the delivery of blog & newsletter content.

Local company mNet lets you create mobile sites online for as little as $100 per month using the Campaign Mobile online self service platform (http://www.campaignmobile.com).  Campaign Mobile is well suited to simple mobile ad campaigns and your mobile site can be up and running fast.  Or if you’re willing to spend a little
more, mNet’s mobile development team can custom design a site for you for as little as $2k.  

If you want the whole thing taken care of, the easiest option is to sign up for one of the campaign based mSite solutions on offer by the Carriers & Mobile publishers.  Vodafone will build you a simple mobile site for $3750, Sensis’ template based adsites start at $3,500 and 3 Mobile’s basic offer is $2,950.  Many will now include a free mobile ad-site or landing page with a media buy, but be warned that this site may not be available off-deck and will probably be deleted as soon as your campaign ends.

These simple websites will include 2 or 3 pages of text, images, and a basic function such as a content download or direct response form.  More complex ‘standard’ sites can cost up to $10k and all offer customised development at a price, usually charged by the day. 

Integrated Mobile Marketing Campaigns

If you already have a mobile site, or have a good handle on the various components of a mobile marketing campaign you may simply want to buy mobile banner media and manage the rest yourself.  (as mentioned above, MDigital can arrange an aggregated quote for mobile media based on your requirements).  

3 Mobile work with advertisers & agencies to develop end to end solutions targeting their user base.  A typical campaign might start with a targeted SMS push message to opted in 3 customers.  The SMS would include a link to a customised mobile campaign site.  Mobile banners across the Planet 3 portal would drive additional users and content sponsorship might be arranged for a suitable section of the portal.  The mobile site itself could incorporate a competition or give-away, such as a free ringtone or mobile game.  Angus Beattie, Mobile Advertising Manager at 3 Mobile believes at this early stage that there is a large benefit from dealing directly with the media owner, and he would welcome calls from interested advertisers.

News Limited & Fairfax also work with Advertisers to design appropriate branding opportunities on their mobile sites.  Banners, co-branding and content sponsorships can be arranged.  

Commonwealth Bank’s sponsorship of Fairfax’s Domain mobile site (http://m.domain.com.au) is an example of a mobile sponsorship that works well for both parties. CBA includes branded banners on each page of the Domain mobile site, which click through to an mSite listing recent offers & an interactive mortgage repayment calculator. Talk to Chris Watt at Fairfax to find out more.

As well as offering simple CPM based media buys, Vodafone’s rate card also offers SMS & MMS mailouts, mSite development, Mobile TV sponsorship, Bluetooth and an image recognition tool called ‘Colour Snap’.  For full reach of Vodafone’s audience, you can also advertise on the phone bill & in Vodafone’s glossy print mag.

The limitation of developing an integrated campaign with one carrier is that you are constrained to their user base.  A mobile site built by a carrier is generally rated ‘free to browse’ for their customers.  This means you don’t need to worry about your users copping data charges for interacting with your campaign.  On the other hand, if you want to extend your reach beyond the carrier’s user base, this may be cause for concern.

NineMSN perform something of an aggregator role, as they can arrange mobile banners (on their own properties) across several carriers, as well as onselling some of Vodafone’s inventory.  Not just a media aggregator, NineMSN have an impressive portfolio of Mobile Marketing case studies through their 5^th Finger company and can put together a mobile solution to suit most scenarios. 5^th Finger make excellent use of messaging in support of mobile advertising, will build a mobile campaign site to your specs and can work with some of the carriers on your behalf.  

Alternatively you can put your own campaign together by buying a selection of targeted banner media from one or more of the carriers/publishers, choosing the mobile site development option that gives you the most flexibility, and even setting up a simple push SMS to your own database of customers.

There’s nothing stopping you from driving additional traffic to a site built for you by a carrier or publisher – it’s just a website after all, with a URL that can be distributed in various ways. Below I describe some of the ways you can drive additional Australian users to your mobile site.

Off Deck Traffic & Mobile Ad Networks

Mobile Ad Networks Google & AdMob offer Advertisers the opportunity to buy traffic on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis.  These Ad Networks generally focus on users looking at off deck sites.  

Both Google & AdMob deliver simple text based ads with character limitations of around 30 – 40 characters.  CTR averages range from 0.3% – 3% depending on the campaign & message. 

Google Mobile Adwords is a search engine marketing (SEM) product, very similar to their online SEM offering.  Google has a mobile search engine which can be accessed by visitinghttp://m.google.com.au . Several of the Australian carriers also make Google search available on their portals.

Advertisers bid for mobile keywords separately to online keywords. Mobile text ads look much the same as Google Ads do online, except they are a little shorter.  Ads are returned in search results, usually at the bottom, and they link through to a mobile site, or a ‘click to call’ phone number. 

Usage of Google Mobile in Australia is still small compared to the number of customers browsing the carrier portals.  But at an average of 10c – 15c per click, mobile search is a cost effective way to generate additional usage & awareness of a mobile campaign – after all you only pay when someone clicks.  Google has recently launched Mobile Image ads in Australia, which gives Advertisers the opportunity to extend an existing graphical banner campaign.

AdMob is a global network of mobile publishers who are willing to display your ads on their site. The ads are text based and are very similar to Google Ads.  Each mobile site publisher in the AdMob network is allocated a channel such as Downloads, Entertainment or Communities. Advertisers bid by channel to display their ads on mobile sites within that channel.  Average bids range from 25c – 60c. 

AdMob provides some impressive targeting which makes their local proposition appealing.  Ads can be targeted by country, carrier & specific device (added later: now includes iPhone targeting & iPhone specific ad units).  This means for example, a mobile ad campaign booked onto the BigPond portal can be supplemented with text or image based ads through AdMob, targeting only Telstra customers using eg. Nokia N95 and iPhone handsets.  Australian traffic on the AdMob network is significant, with many millions of impressions.  Even with a CTR below 1%, a typical campaign can result in as many 10,000 clicks to your mobile destination.

To drive mobile traffic from your online site, check out new beta service BeamMehttp://www.beamme.info/.  BeamMe offers a send to mobile button that you can insert on your website.  Users enter their mobile number to receive an SMS with a link to your mobile site. Alternatively you can set up an SMS shortcode that allows users to SMS a request for your link to be sent to their phone. SMS the word ‘TV’ to 19 34 34 to see how it works.

QR codes are an option for driving traffic from a print or outdoor medium.  QR codes are a type of  barcode that can be printed or displayed in a newspaper or magazine or outdoors on a poster, billboard or bus shelter.  When customers scan the code using scanning software on their mobile phone they are instantly linked through to a mobile site. Check out local startup QMCodes (http://qmcodes.com) for more information.

Get onto it!

If you’ve made it this far, there’s no reason you can’t launch a mobile advertising campaign inAustralia right now.  Admittedly it is a complex and fragmented market, but this shouldn’t stop Advertisers making the most of the opportunities that are on offer.  When you start planning your campaign, don’t be afraid to ask questions and demand flexibility.  Many of the major players would prefer you deal exclusively with them, but no-one has all the answers and in the current marketplace you can pick & choose the services you need.

If you’re interested in finding out more you can contact me on emily@mobilist.com.au or subscribe to this blog to stay up to date with the latest industry offerings.  My business Mobilist provides mobile advertising consultancy and Mobile SEM services.

NOTE:  This article was originally published on Digital Ministry, but has since been moved or deleted (?)  I have reposted it here so that it will have a permanent bookmark.  

NOTE: the facts in this article were valid at May 2008.  For an updated view please feel free to contact me on emily@mobilist.com.au

(sorry I’ve had to block comments temporarily to deal with spam on this post.. commenting will be back up soon!) 

In my last article I talked about using a mobile website as a content or advertising medium. Once you have a mobile site, you would naturally be keen to drive traffic to it.  Discoverability is a significant challenge in the mobile market today.

Accessing a mobile website on a phone can be quite cumbersome.  Almost all new mobile phones are released now with a mobile web browser resident on the handset.  Each handset is different, but usually there’s a menu item or button called ‘Web’ or ‘Internet’ that the user can select to load up the browser. 

To enter a URL you usually have to navigate through several menu options (eg. Bookmarks, Edit Bookmarks, Enter New Bookmark), then type in a URL using the mobile keypad. Although new handsets like the iPhone make this process far more intuitive, finding all the necessary dots & symbols on some handsets can be clunky & tiresome and many people don’t make it that far.

Given this barrier, solutions for the discovery of mobile websites are paramount, at least until more mobile phones are intuitive for URL entry & uptake of these devices reaches the mass market.  

Carrier Portals

The most common way that mobile website are discovered is through their Carrier’s content portal.  Each of Telstra, Optus, 3 & Vodafone operate a mobile content portal, on which selected content & information services are listed.  In many cases, users are unaware of any other way to access mobile content from their phone.

For the content owner, being included on one or more of these portals can be a challenge.  Each carrier operates a different policy for management of their portal.  Some require a revenue share of profits from the mobile site, others pay a fee to brands & content that complement their vision, while others include only content that they have commissioned & developed internally or with business partners.  

As an example, Telstra has recently divided their mobile portal into two sections labelled ‘Home’ and ‘Web’.  The mobile content and sites on the ‘Home’ tab have been endorsed by Telstra, and are free to browse (ie. there are no data charges for accessing any content), whereas sites linked to from the Web tab are independent and users will face data charges for browsing.

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In the current Australian market, inclusion in some way on a carrier portal is almost a guarantee of usage & awareness but as the market becomes saturated with content offerings, and ‘slots’ on portals are increasingly difficult to acquire, content owners are becoming more innovative in their attempts to attract usage.  

Mobile Search

Not unlike the mobile industry today, In the very early days of internet, people would find websites by visiting portals.  Usually these portals were the homepage of their Internet Service Provider (ISP) and included lists of links to recommended websites.   Before too long, users discovered that there was a world of content outside this “walled garden” and began exploring the wider web.  Search made that possible.  These days, it would be almost unthinkable to attempt to find ‘web content’ without using a search engine like Google.

The mobile web is currently a little like the early days of internet.  All of the major search engines have a mobile service and people are beginning to realise they can search the mobile web, just as they currently search the ‘normal’ web.  Try Google Mobile by entering http://m.google.com.au in your mobile browser.

In Australia the major carriers are embarking on relationships with search engines and implementing search on their portals.  For example Optus makes Google available on their mobile portal so that users can carry out mobile searches without having to leave the portal and enter in the Google URL.  Telstra also recently signed a deal with Yahoo to deliver Yahoo results in searches made from the BigPond mobile portal. 

As in the online industry, it is possible to use Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to buy mobile keywords, so that customers will see your text ad above mobile search results.  It is early days for Mobile SEM in Australia, but local publishers including CarsGuide, Fairfax & Sensis already buy mobile SEM keywords using Google, and traffic from mobile specific ad networks like AdMob (more on this in a future article).

Mobile Banners

Increasingly, local advertisers are testing the water with mobile banner campaigns.  A mobile banner behaves exactly the same way as a simple online banner, in that a clickable graphic is served onto a mobile website.  <
/span>When clicked on, the banner takes the user to a mobile destination site. NineMSN regularly serves mobile banners on their mobile sites, including  http://news.ninemsn.com.au/mobile/ (the 9 News mobile site).

Depending on campaign goals, the click through destination could be a permanent mobile site (such as http://mobile.whereis.com.au) to which the advertiser is attempting to drive traffic.  Alternatively the destination could be a campaign site which has been set up specifically.  Peugot recently ran a campaign whereby mobile banners were served on NineMSN’s mobile network.  The banners clicked through to a mobile campaign site for the Peugot 308.

Buying media for a local mobile banner campaign remains fairly fragmented.  Each of the carriers controls access to its own mobile customers, and although NineMSN performs something of a aggregator role as well as serving ads on their own network of mobile sites, each o
f the networks prefers to encourage advertisers to use only their mobile properties. Melbourne startup MDigital now offers a mobile media buying aggregation service, and my own business Mobilist can also help out in this area.  Before making mobile media decisions I highly recommend looking into all of the options as no single network can offer comprehensive coverage of the Australian market. 

SMS Shortcodes

Another way to cut out the tedious typing of a URL into a mobile phone browser is to send users a link via SMS. Many larger companies with mobile sites have established an SMS shortcode to simplify discoverability for new users.  

Usually the shortcode number is listed on a website, or included in an ‘offline’ advertisement (eg. magazine, bus shelter,  billboard etc).  Users send an SMS to the shortcode and receive a link back instantaneously via SMS.   Eg. to save entering http://cleo.mobi you could instead text the word ‘cleo’ to 19 34 34.and receive an SMS response containing a clickable link to the mobile version of Cleo Magazine.

The AIMIA ‘You can on a Mobile’ campaign website lists URLs and SMS Shortcodes for accessing many local mobile sites. (http://www.youcanonamobile.com.au/top-sites.html)

NOTE: This  article was originally published on Digital Ministry in April 2008, but has since been moved or deleted (?)  I have reposted it below so that it will have a permanent bookmark. 

NOTE: some details changed to update facts / links etc since April 08