New ways to mobile advertising
Autor: Edvaldo Acir | Publicado: 2010-04-27T07:56:00-07:00

The 2010 Mobile World Congress was held in Barcelona on February 15th 2010. The opening speech of the congress was delivered by Robert Conway CEO of the GSM Association, who in his speech emphasized the increasing importance of mobile applications and content in the context of the rapid adoption of smart phones. Mr. Conway used the Apple App Store and its 140k+ apps as an example of such rapid growth.According to the GSM Association, the mobile app market should generate about $8 billion in revenues in 2010, almost double the 2009 numbers, and that figure does not including sponsored apps which alone could ignite an even more explosive expansion of mobile apps.And with such growth, mobile as a platform for media and advertising presents an enormous revenue potential for carriers and content developers. Unfortunately, according to Mr. Conway, the mobile platform is still far from delivering the substantial and expected revenues. He emphasized the need for more accurate metrics as being the main obstacle for growth, but noted that recent acquisitions of companies in the mobile marketing have turned over $1 billion in the U.S., with AdMob being purchased by Google for $750 million and Quattro by Apple for $255 million. These acquisitions are strong indicators that industry leaders believe in the potential of the mobile channel despite the current challenges related to tracking and analytics.In his presentation, Mr. Conway analyzed the Mobile Media Metrics Initiative, which was conducted two years ago in the United Kingdom and consolidated and analyzed information from all carriers in the UK.For the study, operators in the UK agreed to disclose information and metrics in order to help build a knowledge base for more robust future mobile marketing initiatives. According to figures from the Mobile Media Metrics Initiative, as of January 2010 there were about 19 million unique users accessing the Internet through mobile networks in the UK, and the data traffic usage pattern is a mix between web browsing and online access via services offered by the carriers themselves. The conclusion is that there is certainly room for companies to serve this huge mobile audience, and revenue opportunities abound. The breakdown of the audience was as follows:Facebook had 6.3 million unique visitors, followed by Google sites (5.9 million), Vodafone pages (3.6 million users), the mobile sites of Orange (3.5 million), and the sites of O2/Telefônica (3.5 million), with the remaining users spread across sites such as Yahoo, BBC, Apple, Microsoft and Nokia. The sites' ranking varied slightly depending on the type of benchmark analyzed: pages viewed or time spent in the site, but for the most part the ranking matched the number of unique visitors. GSM Association concludes that the fragmentation of platforms and the lack of analytics data is an impediment to the growth of mobile advertising.Advertisers and agencies and the whole ecosystem of players in online marketing, will not embrace mobile marketing unless they can track and measure mobile marketing KPIs with the same ease and richness of information found in other more established channels and platforms such as keyword advertising, SEO, affiliate programs, etc. In fact, one could draw a parallel between today’s mobile marketing and social media marketing, and the difficulty marketers encounter when attempting to measure the return of their initiatives from these two new and growing platforms.Despite all the current barriers, marketers across the globe are finding ways to not only tap into the rich territory of mobile marketing, but also tracking and measuring it. In Latin America, there are some good initiatives emerging as avenues for mobile advertising. The UOL mobile portal, the largest internet web portal in Brazil and one of the largest in Latin America, now enables advertisers to create ads with the functionality of "Click to Call”. When the consumers click on the ads from their phone web browser, the phone makes a call and connects the user to the company's call center where an interaction can take place. UOL delivers the “Click to Call” enabled ads only to mobile devices that are compatible with the technology, and low-end phones will not be served. UOL promotes the service making “Click to Call” banners less expensive to advertisers.In December of 2009 Claro Wireless, which is one of the largest mobile operators in Latin America, launched a new form of mobile marketing. With technology acquired from the North American company MyScreen, Claro customers can now opt in to receive an image delivered to their handsets at the end of every call. The image remains on the screen for a few seconds during which time the user can interact with the advertisement. Users may make one click to call, click to video, or other forms of interaction.Leonardo Xavier, the CEO of Ponto Mobi, the greatest Mobile Marketing agency in Brazil, told us that communication, nowadays, has to be based on permission and relevance. If we get both the consumer will engage with the campaign or technology and use it recurrently. When it comes to mobile services or campaigns this is more important because where talking about a highly personal media. Besides, the campaigns need a broader strategy as we need to consider the consumer will interact with the brand content for a longer period of time. We have to consider that brands and consumers now have a brand new channel to communicate 24x7.Therefore, brands will need strategies to relate with their consumers both instantly and in a long-term basis.The Ponto Mobi CEO highlighted two new mobile campaigns that he considers good examples:1. Sampling Machine for Dove Men+Care. They created a SMS controlled vending machine to deliver Dove samples. It is a new use for an old technology such as SMS in an interactive en involving way. Customers are amazed by the simple fact that they just need to text to receive the product.2. Nivea Sun Application. They developed an iPhone application for Nivea Sun, a sunscreen lotion. The app tells the weather condition in your position (by GPS), asks your age, genre and skin type and then tells you which is the best FSP.Mobile marketing can be especially useful for brands that do not have a mobile-optimized site, but already have a call center and want to advertise on the screens of mobile phones. It also opens up an enormous market for small and mid-sized companies, which may not be able to afford to have any form of online mobile presence at all. This is also a gold mine for local merchants: local food delivery businesses, dry cleaners, and local service providers, just to name a few. Local merchants can not only advertise online perhaps for the first time, but can also connect to prospects who are geographically positioned near their stores in a way to increase the chances of a sales taking place.This article was contributed by Edvaldo Acir (Linkedin: http://bit.ly/1MV67Q), Business Development for FOX Latin American Channels in Brazil, and Andre Bodowski, a Brazilian-American Marketing Manager operating in New York and São Paulo, Brazil