DISQUS

VentureBeat: The seven strategies for mobile ads, and which ones will work

  • Krish · 3 years ago
    Hey Ken,

    Very good write up...Great insight...Thanks
  • Peter Cranstone · 3 years ago
    Hi Ken,

    Thanks for the great post. With regard to location based advertising. We've developed a technology that allows you to stream real time GPS over HTTP from a mobile phone. We've also designed it to support additional user and phone data. All of this is controlled by the user to ensure they only share data when they want to. We can now demonstrate in real time the location of the nearest Starbucks to you, and then send you a time sensitive 1D mobile coupon which can be scanned in directly from the phone itself.

    The other advantage of having user, phone and location data is that those ads can now be tailored to the users interests, designed to work on a 320*240 phone with 65,000 colors and location based.

    All you need for this to happen is a simple 150K free client.

    All the best,

    Peter
    www.5o9Inc.com
  • Anthony (A.J.) Bayne · 3 years ago
    Make that 8-Ways.
    While “one person per presentation” is fine for areas that are thinnly populated. A more effective means will be to use the mobile phone to present advertising to persons standing near the mobile phone user while he/she speaks in a non-handsfree mode. The mobile phone can have a main screen that can be positioned/rotated/flipped to face outward, or alternatively use the smaller rear-facing screen.
    The mobile phone user will not care how much advertising is on the phone, because he will not have to look at it and may receive discounted talk time or other incentives for allowing his phone to be used as a mini-billboard.
    I think my way will be best for high-density areas (e.g. New York, India, malls during Christmas). I have invented a mobile phone that does this, as well as a system and method for measuring the effectiveness of a mobile advertising campaign.
  • Peter Cranstone · 3 years ago
    GigaOM is right on the money... it's not if, it's when. The key IMHO is cracking the relevancy issue. This removes the interruption factor which is tolerable on the desktop, but not on the third screen.
  • Marc Cohen · 3 years ago
    All of the approaches you describe are visual advertising - they require the target to be looking at the phone to receive the ad. Most interaction with the cellphone is through the ear, not the eye. The most successful approaches to mobile marketing will be audio based.
  • Dean Penman · 3 years ago
    very informative and interesting, keep giving us these updates.
  • DoNotReply · 3 years ago
    Funny to see Cellfire being used as an example!
    Maybe there should be a vote among VB readers on how many think that Cellfire is a viable technology / business. Maybe the vote can be expanded to all 7 categories above.
  • J. Frank · 3 years ago
    "Most interaction with the cellphone is through the ear, not the eye. The most successful approaches to mobile marketing will be audio based."

    I would argue that for younger cell phone users, visual approaches may work just as well. This group uses text and IM a lot more than their parents do.
  • stephanie grossman · 3 years ago
    Nice post Ken, but where is the plug for digital SIDEBAR? Unless I am mistaken, our solution is generally considered to be the one which provides the most positive user experience and the greatest potential for increased ARPU. Our customers - tier one carriers - know us well.
  • Steve Morsa · 3 years ago
    Great insight, Ken...but there's one brand new type of advertising (as explained in the white paper posted at MatchTo.com and detailed in pending patent #11/250,908) which will best all these seven.

    Called Match Engine Marketing, or paid match; by allowing advertisers to bid on their targets' actual traits and characteristics instead of only on the words they enter into search boxes; will supply phone users with up-to-the-minute ads and offers on the exact products and services these users want at that very moment.

    Target people. Not words.
  • Ken Elefant · 3 years ago
    Thanks for the comments everyone. In the interstitial area, I've seen quite a few companies but haven't made an investment (yet). One that I should have referenced in my blog is Digital Sidebar, which several of you probably know.
  • Terry Jackson - CEO, MobVision · 3 years ago
    Ken,

    Interesting discussion on WAP Banner Advertising. We [MobVision] operate Admoda ( www.admoda.com ), a WAP banner advertising solution.

    I agree with you that off-portal does indeed solve many of the issues with mobile internet advertising. Firstly the challenge of sourcing inventory… because off-portal wap sites have been allowed to grow organically over the last few years we have found that we have been able to build a huge off-portal publisher network. Luckily for us we have been in the WAP and mobile content market for 4 years before we launched Admoda so we knew who to sign up, and we already had relationships with many of the top WAP site owners. Our available inventory is now up to about 400 Million impressions per month and growing daily.

    We work closely with the WAP site owners and are currently building a number of clever ways for them to integrate our ad invocation code into their WAP sites, in a way that suits them. Many off-portal WAP site owners tend to come from a developer background and offering them fluffy marketing talk does not always win them over.

    We provide two things – the Advertisers and Publishers, and the technology to make it all happen. We believe that the inventory is firmly owned by the WAP site owner, and that the advertised content/services are of course owned by the Advertisers. Admoda ‘not-so-simply’ facilitates the ad serving and ad management of the campaigns.
  • ashu mathura · 3 years ago
    .. obviously, the WAP site owner is the owner of the traffic and therefore should get the biggest share in advertising spending. The carrier is just the ISP and get's 0% of ad spending (unless the ads are on the carriers portal of course, but than the carrier has become content publisher). The facilitator will have either a sales fee or a techical fee % of advertising revenues.

    This has all been figured out in the Internet advertising space, so let's not reinvent the weel for mobile Internet ;)

    Ashu Mathura, Managing Director MADS
    ( www.mads.com )
  • Mark Bolen · 3 years ago
    I represent a number of advertisers through my new agency. There are only a couple of postings which are interesting here from people who have actually any real knowledge of the mobile advertising industry. Can we have more comments please from companies who have live real experience of mobile advertising, rather than people simply pontificating widely.
  • Terry Jackson · 3 years ago
    ... I should have clarified that I was commenting purely on the WAP advertising section of this article as that is our area of expertise…

    [Terry Jackson - Admoda]
  • David W Baum · 3 years ago
    Ken,

    Taking CellFire one step forward into wireless targeted ads and promotion in retail, check out www.cuesol.com. LBS does make sense when you are in the aisle getting a wireless target promotion from Coke when you are standing in front of the Coke display in Stop & Shop.

    [David W Baum - Stage 1 Ventures]
  • Dennis Marshall · 3 years ago
    Ken,
    Agree with your outlook - this is a market chasing its tail more than most. User tolerance for ads on their cell phone may be hard to underestimate and early returns (as on the web) may not be accurate indicators once the veneer of novelty wears off.
  • James Ryan · 3 years ago
    Responding to Mark Bolen's request for more comments from people experienced in this industry, I have been involved in selling and creating mobile advertising since the late 90s, first for AvantGo and now for my own company, Mobileplay. Ken's comments are largely on the money. I think there is certainly a lot of hype about how quickly this market will grow. On the other hand,concerns about user acceptance and effectiveness are red herrings. Banners or interstitials on a phone in exchange for free content are no more or less intrusive or objectionable than in any other media. Click-thru rates have remained at 2-4% for 7 years, way beyond the novelty phase. Key for the advertiser--much less of a problem in the desktop internet--is making sure there is something new and interesting waiting once a customer clicks through on that ad. Helping to come up with that strategy is where we see ourselves providing a lot of value. Three promising areas for what happens when you click that are worth mentioning are driving traffic to bricks & mortars stores, driving social interaction among phone users, particularly if that can involve the brand advertiser, and, finally, direct retail purchases. And I'm not talking about ringtones and wallpapers. I think we are going to see an m-commerce market develop pretty quickly once a couple of minor hurdles are overcome.
  • andy · 3 years ago
    This is perhaps the most uninformed article I have ever read about mobile advertising, and it's a shame when purported experts in the investment community disseminate such misinformation.

    1) Marketing via SMS/MMS: This is currently by far the largest sector by revenue in mobile marketing/advertising, and its importance will continue for at least the next 5 years. To dismiss it so casually without understanding its implications on all other forms of mobile marketing/advertising is simple-minded. Companies like Ipsh don't get acquired by leading advertising agencies because they have a dieing business model.

    2) WAP banner ads. Ken should talk to some of the companies doing WAP banner ads. There's a lot more than TSM, and while rev shares may not be exactly the same worldwide, there are very well established models. Yahoo has just started selling WAP banner ads, and you can expect Google and MSN to follow suit (they already all do a booming business in WAP text ads). When DoubleClick launches their mobile offerings in the next half year, that will be the definitive statement that the business models in this space have been proven and well-defined.

    3) Location-based advertising. LBS is an enabling technology, not an advertising medium in and of itself. There are also many forms of LBS and many underlying technologies. Fine grained technologies like AGPS/UTDOA/ECID are still the cutting edge of LBS, but local advertising in the broader sense has already proven itself. Ever heard of Google local search? Just as dodgeball showed that fine-grained LBS social networks didn't have to rely on GPS/etc but could work instead based on context-inferred location, local search will continue to evolve based on much more than the slow penetration growth of GPS.

    4) Video ads. The whole promise of video ads is that subscribers will pay less or not at all for the video services. The carriers in the end will own this market; to understand the end game, take a look at DVB-H and MediaFLO. As for ESPN Mobile, its failure had absolutely zero to do with the current quality of video ads.

    5) In game advertising. Companies like Greystripe and Amobee have created some very well-defined business models in this space. Inventory ownership in this space is exactly analogous to online banner ads (and has much less to do, for example, with the models created by Massive/Double Fusion/IGA). Greystripe alone has dozens of game publisher partners and millions of users, which seems to indicate a fairly mature business model.

    6) Mobile coupons. I agree that this should grow into a huge space, but I have doubts that any service that requires manual download and install of a single-purpose mobile application will be able to generate mass consumer adoption in the next two years. At this point, Cellfire is spending a large percentage of their VC money on subsidizing the coupons they offer, and I question the sustainability of that approach. If Cellfire dies, their attempt to jumpstart the market by buying it rather than developing true technological enablers will have been a disservice to the promise of mobile coupons.

    7) Interstitial ads. Interstitial ads?? Ken should do some reading on the MMA (and also the newly formed IAB mobile committee). Interstitial ads is a "bad" word. Companies like Sprint, to make note of the carriers that Ken points to, tried to disallow interstitials altogether in the MMA standards. Think pop-ups online. It's the same thing, only worse, because of the small screen size and slow connections. Carriers are going to stay as far away from interstitials as they can. Meanwhile, this small sector of mobile advertising will be handled by people trying to monetize off-deck content, such as MoPHAP.

    Again, please, please, please do some research before writing articles like this!
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