Mobile Marketer

A CLASSIC GUIDE
TM August 14, 2009
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THE NEWS LEADER IN MOBILE MARKETING, MEDIA AND COMMERCE
www.MobileMarketer.com

Mobile
Classic Guide to

Advertising
simple. mobile. advertising.

Mobile Marketer TM CONTENTS

C L A S S I C G U I D E T O
O 48 The appeal of interactive voice respons
by Charles Edwards

M O B I L E A DV E R T I S I N G 49 Flexibility is key for SMS coupon
by Jeff Brown and Ron Vetter

B A S I C
C 50 Web analytics and mobile analytics are not similar
by Jose Villa
4 Editor’s note: Mobile advertising’s appeal grows. So should its budgets
51 Local TV stations see mobile in the picture for advertisers
6 Mobile is critical component of Microsoft Advertising’s strategy by Leon Spencer
by Mickey Alam Khan
52 Value best practice in mobile marketing
8 The New York Times on mobile: All the news that’s fit to pinc by Chris Brassington
by Mickey Alam Khan and Jordan Crook
53 Porsche mobile effort outperforms online display ads
12 What is mobile advertising? by Giselle Tsirulnik
by Michael Becker
A D VA N C E D
15 How to plan for a mobile marketing program
by Ben Gaddis 54 Building a successful mobile business model
by Jay Neuman
17 The ABCs of SMS advertising
by Philippe Poutonnet 55 Hear that? Voice is killer app on mobil
by Stéphane Attal
20 SMS is key to advertising mix
by Gregory J. Dunn 56 ABCs of mobile advertising optimization
by Harald Neidhardt
21 How brands can structure an SMS campaig
by Shira Simmonds 58 Maximizing mobile advertising potential requires broad collaboration
by Guy Yaniv
22 Working with an aggregator on the lifecycle of a short cod
by Ben Tannenbaum 59 Mobile advertising and the African opportunit
by Alexander Gregori
23 How to make a valuable ad impression
by Steven Rosenblatt 60 AP Mobile: the new wireless service
by Jeffrey Litvack and Daniel Hodges
24 Mobile video belongs in the multichannel marketing mix
by Frank Barbieri 62 Big brands turn to mobile advertising and marketing
by Dan Butcher
25 Mobile will enable brands to align with consumption patterns
by Alexandros Moukas 64 Mobile Advertising: Smart money on smartphones
by Giselle Tsirulnik
26 The rich in rich media – goals, design and results
by Jon Altschuler and Eswar Priyadarshan 66 Look beyond the Apple iPhon
by Jeff Hasen
27 Role of branded apps in mobile advertising
by Ken Willner 67 World Wide Where? Getting location­based mobile marketing righ
by Chris Glodé
28 Mobile delivers moment of truth at retail
by David Spear 69 Why reach is the critical mobile advertising metric
By Erin (Mack) McKelvey
29 A roadmap to mobile marketing
by Jose Villa 71 Blowing campaign budget on pre­canned data?
by Andrew Bovingdon
30 Interactive Advertising Bureau – How to buy media on mobile
72 Why carrier­based billing makes sense
36 Dairy Queen launches RFID­based mobile loyalty progra by Jay Emmet
by Dan Butcher
73 How to track and measure a mobile ad campaig
I N T E R M E D I AT E by Bruce Braun

37 Forbes on mobile: the new capitalist tool 75 Time to flip the script for mobile
by Jeff Bauer by Josh Webb

39 Why a mobile ad network matters to publishers 77 Calling for a trusted third party to manage mobile consumer data
by Eric Holmen by Patrick Seymour

41 The potential of SMS advertising 79 The mobile advertising bazaar
by Alan Pascoe by Jamie Wells

42 Making a case for mobile video advertising 83 Overcoming mobile advertising ecosystem hurdles
by Thomas N. Ellsworth by Scott Cotter

43 Reaching the fragmented mobile audience 84 Hachette Filipacchi monetizes magazine titles with mobile ads
by Faraz A. Syed by Dan Butcher

44 7 ways to make your idle screen campaign delivery 85 ESPN: Mobile lucrative channel for publisher
by Jon Jackson by Dan Butcher

45 MMS advertising as a utility for advertisers 86 What are the requirements for a mobile marketing executive
by Richard Eicher by Heather Baker

46 Tips on branded mobile apps beyond the iPhone 87 Mobile advertisers continue to face legal challenges
by Ken Singer by Gonzalo E. Mon

47 How to ensure that the brand’s iPhone app isn’t deleted 88 Audience engagement more important than clic
by Maya Mikhailov by Paran Johar

MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 3


Mo b ile a dv er tis in g’s ap pe al g ro ws. S o s h ou ld it s bu d ge ts
s
By Mickey Alam Khan
W
elcome to the second edition of Mobile Marketer’s Classic Guide
to Mobile Advertising.
A one­stop source for everything related to the workings of mobile
advertising, this Classic Guide targets executives from brands, ad agen­
cies, media planning and buying shops, publishers, mobile marketing
firms and other marketers interested in reaching out to busy consumers
on the go.
While the nation is weathering this downturn, the mobile advertis­
ing and marketing sector has proved the one bright spot for marketing
growth, albeit on a smaller base than most channels.
Fueling that positive trend is a reality: more consumers are taking
their daily lives with them on the road, including talking, texting, ex­
changing email, accessing work documents, searching, shopping,
checking weather, playing games and consuming news and content.
What fertile ground then for marketers to interact with mobile consumers.
This guide comprises 56 articles authored by some of the top exec­
utives in mobile advertising and marketing. The topics graduate from
basic level to intermediate and then advanced, following Mobile Mar­
keter’s established pattern with its Classic Guide series.
While the mix may seem eclectic, the guide is chock­full with ad­
vice, best practice and how­to tips on everything, from a lay of the land
and an Interactive Advertising Bureau primer on how to buy media on
mobile to structuring and deploying mobile advertising campaigns and
programs as well as their issues, analysis and measurement.
Must­read articles include viewpoints on mobile advertising and
publishing from key executives at Microsoft Mobile Advertising, The
New York Times, Forbes and The Associated Press.
Banner year
This guide will have succeeded in its mission if it convinces readers
to begin a dialogue on mobile advertising or extends the commitment
of those already in the field.
A lot is at stake here. Mass media are rapidly fragmenting, making
the task of advertising to consumers more difficult. This is an issue not
just for advertisers. Publishers also recognize that they need to be where
the consumers are – on mobile devices and on the wired Web.
However, as SmartReply president Eric Holmen points out in his ar­
ticle, “only the top 50 [publishers] account for 91 percent of all mobile
advertising revenue.”
What Mr. Holmen’s observation implies is that smaller publishers
Mickey Alam Khan Chris Harnick
Editor in Chief Editorial Assistant
mickey@ chris@
mobilemarketer.com mobilemarketer.com
Giselle Abramovich Dan Butcher
Associate Editor Staff Reporter
giselle@ dan@
mobilemarketer.com mobilemarketer.com
Mobile Marketer covers news and analysis of mobile marketing, media and commerce.
The franchise comprises Mobile Marketer, MobileMarketer.com, the Mobile Marketer Daily
newsletter and MobileMarketingDaily.com 2009 Napean LLC. All rights reserved.
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
EDITOR’S NOTE
are missing an opportunity to engage with their audiences on mobile
and pretty much leaving money on the table for bigger competitors. Or
maybe they are not putting up a better fight for mobile ad dollars.
Equally, advertisers will also benefit by offering mobile consumers
an opportunity to view timely offers on the go, but they need the plat­
form and trusted media brands to make their case.
So it is in the vital interest of advertisers, publishers, agencies and
mobile marketing firms to get mobile advertising right and not just treat
it like a stripped­down version of the wired Web.
Luckily for all, there are voices of reason working to get mobile
right, if this Classic Guide is any indication. The key players in the mo­
bile advertising and marketing ecosystem – the ad networks, publishers,
SMS firms, mobile marketing shops and ad agencies – contributed
heavily their time and effort to produce this work.
To all executives and their marketing communications specialists
who helped make this edition a reality – a big thank­you for your pa­
tience and hard work.
It is only through collaboration with all the key players in mobile
advertising can a work like this become effective in its aims: to inform
and educate marketers on the value of mobile advertising and perhaps
entice those sitting on the sidelines to jump in – now.
Many thanks also to Mobile Marketer’s Giselle Tsirulnik and Dan
Butcher for their reporting, Jordan Crook for her help with images and
Jodie Solomon for convincing others to invest in this Classic Guide
and others before it. Chris Harnick is new here, but he will participate
in future efforts.
And then there’s Rob DiGioia, art director on this effort. As many
will notice, this is Mobile Marketer’s largest Classic Guide to date – 88
pages at 16 megabytes – so try sending a link before emailing the entire
PDF to friends, colleagues, prospects or clients.
Rob worked many hours on getting the pages and images right, no
easy task with a finicky yours truly. Thank­you to him as well, although
his mutter in the newsroom was within earshot: “It passed being a guide
at 40 pages. You mean the Old Testament.” ■
Mickey Alam Khan mickey@mobilemarketer.com
Please subscribe to Mobile Marketer for the latest news and analysis
of mobile marketing, media and commerce. Click here.
Jordan Crook Rob DiGioia
Editorial Assistant Director, Editorial
jordan@ Development
mobilemarketer.com rob@
mobilemarketer.com
401 Broadway, Suite 1408
Jodie Solomon New York, NY 10013
Director, Ad Sales Tel: 212-334-6305
ads@ Fax: 212-334-6339
mobilemarketer.com Email: editor@mobilemarketer.com
Web site: www.MobileMarketer.com
For advertising: For newsletter subscriptions:
http://www.mobilemarketer.com/ http://www.mobilemarketer.com/
cms/general/1.html newsletter.php
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 4
M
Mobile is critic al component of Microsoft Adve rtising’s strategyy
icrosoft Corp. has stepped up its commitment to mobile with
an aggressive push to promote new mobile services and en­
courage clients to run campaigns across online, gaming and
mobile channels.
Charles Johnson, general manager of Microsoft Mobile Advertis­
ing and a former brand executive at Procter & Gamble Co. and Coca­
Cola Co., is charged with ensuring his company’s place on the mobile
advertising map. In this interview with Mobile Marketer’s Mickey
Alam Khan, the Redmond, WA­based Mr. Johnson explains Mi­
crosoft’s take on mobile and its strategy going forward. Excerpts:
What does mobile advertising
mean to Microsoft?
Mobile is a critical component of
Microsoft Advertising’s strategy and
vision to offer smarter, simpler and
more cost­effective digital advertising
solutions that span multiple screens,
platforms and devices.
We have made, and will continue to
make, significant investments and part­
nerships to develop an agnostic plat­
form that works on any device, so advertisers and publishers can
provide their target audiences with empowering, engaging and entertaining
mobile experiences on­the­go.
Microsoft has a multi­screen strategy – computer, gaming and
mobile, excluding its MSNBC cable channel with NBC. How does
that play out for an advertiser?
The ability to bridge multiple screens, platforms and devices is crit­
ical if you are going to follow your audience throughout their digital day.
At Microsoft, our goal is to drive greater reach and impact with tai­
lored ad experiences that are empowering, engaging and entertaining,
optimized for the three accepted media channels – TV, PC and mobile.
What strides has the industry made this year that makes mobile
advertising more acceptable to brands and agencies?
The industry has made significant strides in improving the value of
mobile effectiveness for advertisers and consumers. That said, I believe
we still have a long way to go.
While the technology is in place to drive digital to the phone, the
mobile industry now needs to turn its focus on the end­to­end experi­
ence to help audiences become aware of and consider the purchase
cycle throughout the day.
Advertising, mobile apps and search must focus on the consumer.
For example, the Microsoft Mobile Advertising platform supports lo­
cation­basedadvertisingofBingwithourexclusiveYellowPages.compartnership.
Together with YellowPages.com we’re able to improve a con­
sumer’s search experience, i.e., finding a store, restaurant or place of
interest nearby.
Location­based advertising is a strong component of mobile search
and we are already generating strong ecosystem interest in that space.
Marketers who advertise on Bing can target a high­quality, search­
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
savvy audience which is in “decision mode” from anywhere on the Mi­
crosoft network.
The goal is meaningful experiences that keep the consumer em­
powered, engaged and entertained.
You’re in a room with a brand marketer. What would you say
to him or her about mobile advertising?
As a former brand marketer for Procter & Gamble, Coca­Cola and
Yum Brands, I have a unique perspective when it comes to developing
and launching convenience and on­the­go consumer products for advertisers.
With mobile adoption increasing around the world and mobile de­
vices becoming more sophisticated, there is a prime opportunity for ad­
vertisers to connect with consumers who no longer use their mobile to
simply place calls.
Mobile advertising allows companies to connect their brands with
audiences when they’re on the move and away from the computer, and
do so in a way that is empowering, engaging, entertaining and meaningful.
Incorporating a mobile element into a digital campaign comple­
ments other avenues for engaging today’s in­
creasingly fragmented audiences.
In fact, we recently completed a re­
search study with Toyota in France in
preparation for the launch of its IQ car that
found a synergy between mobile and
online campaigns.
Our findings indicated that incorporat­
ing mobile advertising into the online dis­
play campaign provided a 200 percent
incremental lift in ad recall and a 40 percent
lift in brand recall of Toyota’s online presence.
Have you seen any mobile advertising
campaigns recently that you really liked? What was the
standout quality?
I am really proud of the mobile portion of the “Deadliest Catch”
campaign we ran for the Discovery Channel.
Not only did we execute a homepage takeover of the MSN mobile
site, but also with the help of Microsoft subsidiary ScreenTonic, we
created a dedicated WAP site where viewers could interact by entering
their cell phone numbers to receive tune­in reminders for the show via
text message.
The Deadliest Catch campaign was the first time Microsoft Adver­
tising had led a simultaneous launch that utilized our full breadth of
Microsoft assets including the PC, mobile and TV gaming via Xbox
and Massive, and featured the first ever MSN homepage and MSN mo­
bile homepage conjunction takeover.
So what’s the mandate that Microsoft has given you for this
year and next?
We’re committed to partnering with the carriers, like Verizon, and
the OEMs to provide these experiences we all want our customers to
have today, and continue to evolve our platform and services in the
coming years. ■
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 6
 e
T h e N e w Yo r k Ti m es o n m o b i l e
W
A l l t h e n ew s t h a t ’s f i t t o pi nc h
By Mickey Alam Khan and Jordan Crook
hile The New York Times is not immune from the advertis­
ing and circulation woes afflicting newspapers nationwide,
there is no doubt that the brand has a finger on the pulse of
news consumption trends.
In addition to its status as one of the top­circulating broadsheets,
the Times is also admired for its comprehensive wired Web site at
http://www.nytimes.com – one of the most trafficked English­language
news sites online. Now, the publisher is intent on planting a stake in
mobile ground with its iPhone site and application as well as a site op­
timized for other mobile devices.
Aware that consumption of news is rapidly moving to Web­enabled
phones, the Times has developed a mobile presence that is evolving
into the richness offered on its wired Web site but adapted to on­the­go,
content consumption behavior.
Such attention to detail is paying off: The Times’iPhone application
has been downloaded 2 million times and the iPhone site approached
nearly 1 million unique visitors in June 2009. Overall, the publication’s
mobile Web presence is around 40 million page views per month.
Not surprisingly, the mobile New York Times has attracted adver­
tisements from noted brands such as Polo Ralph Lauren, Starwood,
Land Rover, Hewlett­Packard, Continental Airlines and Cartier.
However, mobile publishing requires special attention given the
limitations of screen size, mobile device and data plans, as well as ad­
vertiser attitudes and consumer expectations.
In this interview, Robert Z. Samuels, director of mobile product
“Nobody underestimates the future of the mobile Web. The challenge is
that up until now content publishers haven’t provided a robust mobile
experience. They relegated the mobile Web experience to partial feeds
to third­party WAP site providers.”
development for the New York Times, offers his take on the state of
mobile publishing and advertising, as well as insights into his publica­
tion’s mobile strategy and tactics. Here is what Mr. Samuels had to say.
Where do you see mobile publishing today, especially given
print’s predicament?
I think print has a long life ahead of it and mobile can make it more
useful in the long run to tie print and mobile together. I’m not con­
cerned with print going anywhere but mobile is a big part of the future.
A lot of people have spoken about the year of mobile and I think it’s
a little artificial to say what the year of mobile is because for the past
five years mobile has been on a tear.
I’ve been a firm believer even when people weren’t believers of the
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
mobile Web. The [New York Times]
iPhone app and mobile Web site
have grown tremendously over the
past year.
There have been a number of
great campaigns, and we have future
campaigns booked. The real value of
it is the great demographic they are
reaching. Our team is really deliver­
ing on the mobile ads.
I think nobody underestimates
the future of the mobile Web. The product development, NY Times
Robert Z. Samuels, director of mobile
challenge is that up until now con­
tent publishers haven’t provided a robust mobile experience. They rel­
egated the mobile Web experience to partial feeds to third­party WAP
site providers – they don’t have the same robust experience as we do
on the Times.
The mobile Web isn’t known for a robust experience. As content
publishers update their content publishing systems, regular site content
publishing systems work on more capabilities so they have the database
that allows a dynamic CMS.
Hopefully they are thinking about mobile so they can ensure they
have the capability of producing a great mobile site internally.
As you go to site XYZ it will automatically create a single­column,
mobile­friendly view that has navigation scaled to produce videos or
slideshows so users won’t have to pinch or scan or scroll or download
an app for everything. The Internet should work like it does on PC screens.
Do you see news consumption migrating to mobile like it is from
print to online?
In large part, the snacking behavior is growing but news is news.
The same rankings that appear on nytimes.com and within the app is all
a common CMS, common ranking. Features like real estate, show­
times, Timeswire – they’re all available on the mobile Web site.
News is news. I get feedback asking to see science to tech to sports
to obituaries. It is largely snacking­oriented, but there are some users
that do want to read the full article on a better device, BlackBerry or LG
Voyager, Palm Pre or iPhone.
Many people want to read full articles. But for those who are wait­
ing for the bus or in a café, there is a large amount of the snacking behavior.
But there is the utility aspect of it as well. People can log in on the
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 8
mobile site the way they log in on nytimes.com, check stocks, check
My Alerts, check weather by ZIP code, check movie times through ZIP
code. They can search through the same real estate listings as on the
[wired] Web site.
Getting back to paper, it is a valuable experience.
People like sitting and reading it. But maybe they want to see the
large, glossy pictures of real estate, they can bring up the article on
their iPhone and see video in addition to reading the business blog.
They can see images associated with the real estate listing. They can
send links in SMS to whoever is looking.
Is this established behavior or is this hoped­for behavior?
It is absolutely established behavior. Our page views are growing.
This is established behavior. Much of it is really an extension. A natural
extension of what occurs on the Web.
People love our content and now [that] it’s much more available if
they have downtime, they can click on the news or read an interesting
story without being tethered to their desk at home or the office.
Not every second of a kid’s soccer game is compelling, so maybe
they’re scanning articles at a soccer game. Some of it is otherwise.
Maybe they’d be off reading a novel, and now they can be reading the
Times content more than they otherwise would be because not everyone
is able to carry around a newspaper everywhere.
But with their must­have BlackBerry, maybe it’s because they’re
always checking in at work or personal email, they also have the ability
to consume our content all around the world.
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
Do advertisers get mobile?
It’s been a little bit of a labor of love over the past couple years. We
have a few key members on the team who are educating the folks. I go
on some of these meetings, whether external or internal.
People are taking notice. They are getting to understand the value
of the click to call offer in an ad, being able to click right to a destina­
tion site and purchase goods like it’s on the regular Web.
It’s a unique demographic that are likely to click on ads and trans­
act. With a new campaign launch of new books and from the ad we’ve
helped facilitate the creation of a destination site when advertisers
didn’t have a formatted destination site.
We’ve helped for a modest cost to create the destination site, help­
ing the ad buy, read about author, read an excerpt from the book, and
you could click off to a mobile version of Barnes & Noble or
Amazon.com and it would be a link right in to buy that book on either
of those commerce sites.
We have a lot of campaigns that are booked. Some of our recent
advertisers on mobile include Starwood, Polo Ralph Lauren, Land
Rover, Hewlett Packard, Continental Airlines and Cartier.
So right now your mobile presence is the iPhone app and site
mobile.nytimes.com. But on the BlackBerry all you have to type is
nytimes.com.
Right now we aren’t redirecting Android, Palm Pre and the iPhone,
but that may occur in the future.
How do you make the decision on which to redirect?
Not redirecting the other phones has been held off until I’m happy
with the experience we have for the higher­end phones, robustness that
those browsers can support. We’ll be doing a redirect for those devices
as well.
We also do have a Palm Pre app. We are one of two news apps to
be there at the launch of the Palm Pre. We worked with them prior to
launch to develop our app for the Pre. We’ve been very pleased working
with Palm.
How do you make the case to advertisers and, specific to the
New York Times itself, how do you make the case for mobile? Are
you selling it as a single channel buy or a buy across all properties,
as you typically do with online?
Some of the media planners look and suggest it as part of a larger
cross­platform sell. Many times it is sold that way with larger advertis­
ers. Sometimes it’s only the app or the mobile Web. Really it’s sold in
multiple ways.
Obviously we think there is great value in reaching our audience
across different channels. But if there’s somebody who is really inter­
ested in only being on the iPhone app, we’re content working with that.
What about the ad rates for mobile?
CPMs for mobile are still very high. People are happy with the
click­through rate. We have fairly elevated CPMs. The pricing of it
hasn’t been a point of discussion lately.
What do publishers need to do to get more acceptance from
media planners, agencies and advertisers?
Need to ensure they have a good product. Forgetting about content
is not good. We are very happy we have the Times’ content.
By a good product I mean if you have a good iPhone app or mobile
Web site, you have to have a good product. From there, do you have the
team that can provide the packaging of the Web site, if that’s relevant
to the advertiser? Is it portrayed in such a way that it’s a compelling plat­
form reaching a great demographic, and not an afterthought of some other site?
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 9
 It’s a premium product, just like our print product has been a pre­
mium product for over 100 years. We are creating the same premium
experiences in mobile. They need to treat mobile as a serious platform,
create good ad units and portray it as such.
Explain to advertisers that many of their great customers are con­
suming content in this new manner. It’s here to stay and it enables great
consumer behavior like buying immediately or click to call.
We can tell advertisers that “x” percent are coming from this phone
or that phone and it’s a great story all around about the move to con­
sume content in the mobile environment.
Keep portraying it as the future and as a premium experience. In
terms of an ad buy it’s a great way to reach our readers.
What kind of traffic are you seeing on your mobile properties?
Our app has been downloaded coming up on 2 million times. Our
mobile Web site is approaching 1 million unique on the iPhone in June.
Our mobile Web presence is right around 40 million page views
a month.
That’s bigger than most wired Web sites.
Yes, it’s bigger than most wired Web sites. [But] you have to mon­
etize your mobile channel. This is what I’ve been losing my hair over
the past couple of years.
Which device sends you the most traffic?
We’re dominated by usage in smartphones. If you combine the
BlackBerry, iPhone and Palm Pre, the iPhone and BlackBerrys con­
sume the most amount [of New York Times content].
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
It’s unfair to compare the BlackBerry and the iPhone because there
is only one iPhone and many BlackBerry models. All of our Palm views
are holding strong. A lot of the higher­end Verizon phones consume
quite a bit of page views.
What is the average time spent on the Times’ mobile properties?
No, we don’t have that data [across the board]. It’s pretty hard from
a browser and we don’t have reporting from a browser on a mobile de­
vice. We aren’t ready to give out our iPhone app reporting. We do have
time spent there.
What’s your most popular content across all devices?
Latest news, most emailed, business, tech – really people read
everything. I mean it, I get feedback. If somebody doesn’t understand
mobile navigation and can’t find dining and wine or obituaries, I hear
it from the readers. Everything is read on mobile. Opinion obviously is
huge for the Times.
Your site is optimized for every device.
We have a database with hundreds of phones. We had an issue with
the weather icon displaying for touch phones. We use numbered bullets
that accelerate things on the phone.
For touch phones we remove the number bullets on the first eight
articles so we just have regular dot bullets instead of the number bullets,
because the number bullets are largely allowing the user to rank.
We don’t do that on the regular Web – the numbers imply some nu­
meric ranking. The benefit of that is many phones have accelerator
keys. When there is a 2 there and it jumps and opens the link, rather
than scrolling to the track ball.
With a touch device there is no need to scroll to it – you can just
click it on the screen. It looks cleaner and follows form on the regular site.
Is the audience the same as online and in print?
It’s a lot of crossover, fair amount of international – people who
have never had a free press where they are and people from South
America, Africa, all over Asia.
Feedback comes back on the mobile Web site on how they’re so
happy they have something formatted for their phone and clearly didn’t
have home delivery [of the New York Times print edition] or a PC, but
now they’re able to consume our award­winning journalism. We’re
happy to be able to bring it to these people.
How does the Times position its print product versus its online
product versus its mobile product?
There’s two angles. Positioning towards the readers and then there
is our place in the advertising agency ecosystem.
From the advertising side, we keep on with the theme of “We’re a
multichannel, multiplatform company,” whether it’s video podcast, mo­
bile Times reader, [Amazon] Kindle, we want to provide content to our
readers however they want to read it.
We work with carriers and manufacturers directly to make sure
we’re on their roadmap and give the best experience on mobile. It’s
about creating more value for print by being able to read the article in
print but maybe then see the video [and] you want to email the story.
Then from the advertising side, really we have a single sales team
that is well­versed in all our content. We are thinking to the next gen­
eration of products, whether it be netbooks, whether the Crunchpad
comes to market.
There is no place that we don’t want to be and it creates more value
for both our readers and our advertisers. ■
Reach Robert Z. Samuels at robert.samuels@nytimes.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 10
W hat is mobile a dve rtising ?

?
W
By Michael Becker SMS message and banner place­
ment within mobile Web sites
e live in a mobile world. We live in a world where the ma­ and applications.
jority of the global population carries with them a mobile However, there are many other
phone or wirelessly enabled mobile terminal. paths that can be leverage for ad­
It is estimated that nearly 60 percent of the world population – vertising within the mobile
around 4 billion people – now have a mobile phone. In the United channel, including:
States, mobile phone penetration has reached roughly 75 percent of the • Voice and messaging paths,
country’s population, or 232 million individual mobile subscribers. short message service, multi­mes­
The mobile phone is considered by many to be the most effective saging service, automated interac­
channel for direct and indirect marketing and advertising. tive voice response channels
Advertising is a critical activity within the practice of marketing. As • Local frequency proximity Michael Becker, VP of mobile
marketers it is our job to communicate, deliver and exchange value paths, specifically Bluetooth
strategies, iLoop Mobile

with our audience and advertising. Including mobile advertising is a and Wi­Fi
key tool that marketers can leverage to fulfill this mandate. • Data paths, carrier portals, mobile Web sites, content (for example.
Many marketers, however, consider mobile marketing and mobile radio, mobile television and games), downloaded and device­resident
advertising as being the same thing. They are not. applications, and the idle screen of the phone
This article provides a definition for mobile advertising and em­ • Organic and paid search as integrated within mobile Web, appli­
phasizes the need to create a persistent and lasting mobile strategy cation and related services
alongside mobile advertising experiences to enhance the possibility of Each of the above paths is illustrated in the mobile advertising
long­term, sustainable, value exchange between marketers and ecosystem figure below:
their audience.
Mobile marketing is practice of communicat­
ing, delivering and exchanging value through and
with the mobile channel. It encompasses all mar­
keting to mobile subscriber engagement activities,
including direct, proactive, permission­based voice
and messaging engagements, mobile enhancement
of tradition and new media, as well as mobile advertising.
Mobile advertising, simply stated, refers to the
practice of placing a marketing message or a call­
to­action within any of the many media paths of
the mobile channel.

Calling out benefits

Marketers benefit from mobile advertising
through the generation of brand awareness,
prospecting for new customers and leads, genera­
tion of new sales and the stimulation of community.
Publishers – the owners of mobile media prop­
erties such as SMS groups and mobile Web sites –

and content owners employ mobile advertising as a means of revenue

The figure also highlights a number of key industry players and
generation or cost abatement.
channels that are worthy of note.
Finally, consumers benefit from mobile advertising by being able to Marketers and their agencies leverage and partner with these play­
access content for free simply by being willing to receive the ad, rather ers, since without them mobile advertising would not be possible. These
than having to pay for the content. players include:
Advertising may also provide consumers with the benefit of being • Wireless carriers, the providers of wireless infrastructure and serv­
exposed to valued products and services of which they otherwise may ices, such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T­Mobile and Sprint, as well as
not have had the opportunity to become aware. mobile virtual network operators such as Boost Mobile and
The two most common methods of mobile advertising for most peo­ Virgin Mobile
ple when they think about it includes the insertion of an ad within an • Mobile ad networks such as Jumptap, Millennial Media, AdMob,

MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 12

Third Screen Media, Yahoo and Google, to name a few, which enable
the mobile ad marketplace and bring publishers – The Weather Channel

Worth

being one of the most successful in the market – and marketers together
in order to support the buying, selling and serving of ads to the mobile
phone. This process is limited not just through the carrier networks, but

repeating.

also over Wi­Fi. Many new Wi­Fi­enabled phones, such as the iPhone
or Palm Pre, and dedicated devices including the Sony PlayStation and
the Apple iPod touch generate a significant amount of mobile advertis­
ing traffic and consumer engagements via Wi­Fi connections
• Mobile ad aggregators play the important role of aggregating mo­
bile ad inventory from multiple ad networks in order to amass ad inven­
tory to fulfill demand. Aggregators provide the message traffic
connections between the other players and the carriers
• Mobile search providers. These players enable organic and Reprints and

e­prints of your

paid search
• Application service providers. These players provide all the appli­
cation services such as text messaging, mobile Internet site develop­
ment and management, content delivery, voice and related services favorite articles

Experience the mobile Web

appearing in
Mobile advertising is a powerful consumer engagement tool. How­
ever, marketers are often missing out on a tremendous opportunity.
Mobile Marketer Daily
The majority of leading brands and marketers have not considered and on
MobileMarketer.com.
or executed on the development and maintenance of a persistent mobile
presence, or they may think that enough consumers have phones that
can visit a regular wired Web site.
This is evidenced by the fact that most company Web sites, for ex­
ample, are not ready for the mobile Internet. Yet few consumers – less
than 10 percent – have phones that have any chance of providing a rea­
Perfect for media kits,

sonable experience with an untailored site.

Company Web sites that are not tailored to provide a compelling
trade shows, hand­outs,

and lasting consumer experience when visited by a mobile phone leave sales presentations

and mailings.

consumers with a bad experience. Consumers see garbled pages, non­

functioning menus and poor navigation. They are left wanting.
These companies are missing a huge opportunity by not having a
persistent mobile presence as a foundation for any and all mobile ad­
vertising campaigns they may run. Please contact
For example, when marketers run mobile Web banner advertising
campaigns they will drive traffic to a landing page that provides the reprints@mobilemarketer.com
details surrounding a specific promotion or program such as a brand for pricing and details.
awareness generating sweepstakes program.
In this context, marketers will often run the program for a limited
period of time. Once the campaign is over, they will turn off the site and
shutdown the campaign.
What these marketers may neglect to consider, however, is that if
the campaign was successful, consumers will want to come back and
engage the brand via mobile.
For instance, the consumer may try going to the brand’s Web site on
its mobile phone. But if the brand’s Web site is not mobile­ready, the
consumer will be left wanting and with a poor experience.
This poor experience may drive the consumer away. At best it may
minimize the effect that the campaign may have made and at worst have
a negative and lasting impression on the consumer’s take on the brand.
To this end, successful mobile marketing and long­term consumer
engagements through mobile require more than simply running mobile
advertising programs. They require a long­term strategy and approach,
an organized commitment to customer­relationship­building and a fo­
cused approach toward the communication, delivery and exchange of Mobile Marketer

lasting value with one’s audience. ■

Michael Becker is vice president of mobile strategies at iLoop Mobile,

San Jose, CA. Reach him at michael.becker@iloopmobile.com
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 13
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How to pla n f or a m obil e m ar ke ti ng pr ogra m
m
By Ben Gaddis
obile is much like the Wild West right now, plagued with
many of the same issues that we faced in the early days of the
Internet: little to no standardization of operating systems,
browsers, ad unit sizes and formats, and CPMs.
Add to that the fact that in most organizations there is no “mobile
lead,” and mobile initiatives end up in a virtual no man’s land. Mar­
keters have more questions than answers.
In this article, we will navigate the mobile badlands and tackle the
three most common questions we hear from our clients: When do we
plan? How do we plan? How much does mobile cost?
Start thinking about mobile as early as possible. The biggest issue
that we see marketers encounter in the mobile space is a lack of plan­
ning. So if you are asking that question, you are ahead of the pack. The
more important question is “How do we plan?”
Commit to a lasting dialogue
As you begin to plan, look at mobile the same way you look at all
your marketing communications: as part of a long­range plan. Then re­
alize that it is more than a series of campaigns – it is an ongoing dia­
logue with your consumer.
The cost of acquiring a mobile contact is high and so are customer
expectations once you have acquired them, so it is critical that you de­
liver – for the life of the relationship.
Many marketers fall short by missing that long­term view and in­
stead look at mobile in terms of campaigns or flights.
Much the way a goldfish continually rediscovers the castle in its
bowl, marketers tend to lack object permanence when it comes to mobile.
Marketers start fresh with every new campaign (“Oh, look, a chance
to talk to customers via mobile!”), yet the customer has been there since
the moment they opted in, expecting valuable communication from the
brand. Show your customers you remember them by picking up where
you left off.
Find a way to create a conversation that delivers value and moves
the consumer farther down the funnel with every interaction. This
means planning for what happens before, during and after big campaigns.
If a customer texts in to get more information or a reminder about
a product, what happens when that product is released? Do they get an­
other text message with a link containing directions to the stores where
they can buy that product? Great. But then what?
If you set up your campaign correctly and can track purchases, you
now have the mobile number of a loyal customer. Engage them. Ask
them what they think about the product. Can it be improved? Do they
need an accessory? And by the way, here is a coupon for that accessory.
This kind of long­term planning turns mobile into a powerful CRM
tool that can drive repeat purchase.
We know that yearly planning can be daunting, especially when
marketers do not have a clear picture of how they will be using mobile
throughout the year.
The goal is to approach mobile with the same long­term commit­
ment as any other channel – we do not know exactly how we are going
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
to use it yet, but we have planned for it.
We cannot tell you how many
marketers we have talked to re­
cently who have run a “mobile test”
and cannot answer the question,
“How did it perform?”
That is because more often than
not, success metrics and analytics
are not defined upfront. First of all,
what is the goal? Is it brand lift?
Engagement? Conversion?
All of those things can be meas­
ured, as long as you plan for them Ben Gaddis, director of mobile and
upfront.
The frequent failure to get measurable results often comes from
emerging media strategy, T3
poor planning. Set the goals, and make sure that what you are bench­
marking against yields a clear, actionable view of success or failure.
Budget for ongoing conversations, not just campaigns
The No. 1 question we get is how much to spend on mobile. It is
kind of like asking, “How long is a piece of string?” or “What’s Twit­
ter’s monetization strategy?” There is no good answer.
A simple SMS campaign may cost $20,000 whereas a yearlong mo­
bile initiative may cost $500,000. During the planning phase the best
question to ask is, “With the available budget, how do we make the
greatest impact on our customers?”
Before you start looking at mobile campaigns, analyze your current
consumer touch points. Is your Web site optimized for mobile devices?
If not, that cost may need to be included in your mobile budget.
Buying a banner ad on weather.com’s mobile site is not going to be
very successful if the click­through takes you to a site that is not opti­
mized for mobile.
Next, look at individual campaigns. How do you thread campaigns
together to create an ongoing conversation with your consumer instead
of a series of one­offs? Allocate resources during the down times to
keep your consumer engaged.
Now look at how you are going to drive traffic and interaction with
those campaigns. Use mobile advertising, traditional media, your Web
site, retail signage and other vehicles.
Any first mobile effort will need to do some heavy lifting to acquire
customers, so frontload your budget accordingly. Once you have con­
sumers who have opted into your mobile list, the cost of subsequent
campaign efforts goes down.
Determine where the budget comes from. Some organizations pull
all mobile costs from a media budget, regardless of whether it is truly
a media expense or not. Others budget specifically for mobile. Some
look at mobile as a part of the “digital” budget.
None of these options is wrong, as long as mobile has a strategic
and early seat at the planning table. ■
Ben Gaddis is director of mobile and emerging media strategy at T3,
Austin, TX. Reach him at ben.gaddis@t­3.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 15
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The ABC s of SMS advert ising

g
I
By Philippe Poutonnet • Click to video: One SMS with
a link pointing to a video at the bottom
n August 2008, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign made either • Click to listen to a personal
history or political spectacle when it attempted to announce Joe message: One SMS with an IVR at
Biden as the vice presidential candidate over SMS text message. the bottom pointing to either a call
SinglePoint and Distributive Networks handled this campaign. center or voicemail
Before the campaign could send the text message announcement to • Click to capture personal in­
supporters, mass media scooped the news and broke the story, but the formation: One SMS with either a
magnitude of the campaign’s mobile efforts is noteworthy. WAP Web address at the bottom
Nielsen estimates that the Biden text was received by 2.9 million pointing to a WAP site or an IVR
mobile phone users nationwide over the course of that weekend last number or a SMS response, where
August, making it one of the biggest, broadest mobile marketing stunts the user will be asked to enter Philippe Poutonnet, director of

to date. personal information.
marketing, SinglePoint

Why make such an important announcement over a text message, though?

It is no new insight that the media landscape exploded in the past Benefits of SMS advertising
decade to yield dozens of new marketing channels. Why tap text mes­
saging as the outlet for one of the campaign’s most important mes­
sages? Surely not for buzz alone?
This is why: SMS is currently the most widely used medium for
mobile advertising
largely due to:
1. Its popularity:
80 percent adoption
among mobile users,
according to comScore
2. Attractive pric­
ing options: Bucket
plans pricing models
3. Simple device
requirements: 160­
character message
SMS­based mes­
saging campaigns re­ Short code SMS
main the most popular Short codes have played a central role in messaging­based mobile
form of mobile adver­ advertising campaigns.
tising today, with con­ They are four­to six­digit­long numbers assigned by the wireless
siderable interest levels carriers to a mobile marketing application. 
among brands and  Short codes, issued by short code registry NeuStar on behalf of the
advertisers.  carriers, allow mobile subscribers to send SMS to a short and easy­to­
How do consumers feel about talking to
brands in the same way they talk to
remember number rather than the full ten­digit number used in person­
their friends and family?

How does SMS work? to­person messaging. This increases the probability of users responding

The process of executing a common short code marketing campaign
is actually very easy thanks to a number of firms that have emerged as
valued partners and simplified the process.  For example, a brand such as Apple could have a short code of
This leaves a marketer to focus on the best way to engage their cus­
tomers 40, 60 or 160 characters at a time, which is the current length
limitation on each text message.
Multiple ad mechanisms have been created by SMS advertising
firms such as:
• Click to WAP: One SMS with content and a WAP Web address
at the bottom
• Click to call: One SMS with content and a phone number at the bottom
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
to the campaign and interacting with the mobile marketing application.
Short codes can also relate well with the brand being marketed.
27753 (which translates into APPLE on the mobile phone keypad) for
its particular application. This introduces a fun element also and makes
it easy for the mobile subscribers to remember the numbers, provided
they know the brand being marketed.
The initial SMS­based campaigns were restricted to subscribers of
the carrier launching the mobile marketing application. 
For example, AT&T Wireless’ short­code SMS­based “American
Idol” campaign was previously restricted to its own subscribers. 
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM P AGE 17
 Moreover, an application
provider had to negotiate sep­

White paper,

arately with each carrier to
persuade them to launch
the campaign on its net­

right crowd.

work, which led to as­
signment of different
short codes for the
same mobile market­
ing application
across carriers. 
This created is­
sues for brand mar­
keters that could not Make sure your case

studies, best practices

advertise a single short

code in their “call­to­action”
advertisements. 
To address these issues, the Cel­ and research are seen by

lular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) reserved a
set of five­and six­digit numbers that can be assigned as short codes in
the right audience. 

a mobile advertising campaign. 
Referred to also as common short codes, they range from 20000 to
99999 and 222222 to 899999 for five­and six­digit codes, respectively. Our white paper 

e­blast is an effective and

Content providers or application providers can reserve a short code

for a particular campaign and then interact with each individual carrier
to reserve that number on the network. Reserving a common number
ensures consistent brand representation. affordable channel in

While content providers include brands or advertisers that sponsor
programming or interactive short­code SMS promotions, application
reaching the entire Mobile

providers develop the actual software application. 
Connection aggregators have authorized links to carriers and con­
Marketer Daily e­letter

nect the messaging application to the carriers.  subscriber base.

In some cases, an application provider may also choose to establish

the connection with the carrier itself, especially when more than one
campaign is being handled. Carriers can launch campaigns on 
their networks. Please contact 

Is SMS advertising effective?
ads@mobilemarketer.com

For all this texting, it is fair to wonder what effect SMS advertising
could have on consumers. For that matter, how do consumers feel about
for pricing and details.

talking to brands in the same way they talk to their friends and family?
According to Nielsen’s second­quarter 2008 Mobile Advertising
Report, 16 percent of text messagers nationwide see some form of text
message advertising every month. 
Teens, in their endless texting, are the most likely to engage with
some form of SMS advertising —35 percent of teen texters say they see
some form of text message advertising every month. 
African­American and Hispanic mobile subscribers are also more
likely than the typical texter to engage with some form of text message
advertising in a month – 24 percent and 23 percent, respectively. 
Of those text messagers who recall seeing some form of advertising
while using text messaging, 45 percent say they have responded. 
Furthermore, the most popular response action to any type of mo­
bile advertising – text, mobile Web or video – in the second quarter of
2008 was actually to send a text message. 
Among mobile subscribers who saw any form of mobile advertising
in the quarter, 25 percent say they responded at least once by sending
another text message – emphasizing the interactivity and engagement
Mobile Marketer

this medium presents. ■

Philippe Poutonnet is director of marketing at SinglePoint, Bellevue,
WA. Reach him at ppoutonnet@singlepoint.com
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 18
S MS is key to adv ertising mix

x
N
By Gregory J. Dunn The operator takes the appliance serial number and asks the cus­
tomer to send the item to a specific address for repair. The customer
o matter which country you call home, your favorite television sends it, then calls to see if it was received. Then the customer calls
show to watch, or which Internet news site greets you in the again to see if it is being fixed, then
morning, the story hits us all the same: The economy is in pain. calls again to ask when it will be
How does this current state of affairs affect our daily way of com­ shipped back to the firm.
municating? Do you still call your business customers? Still check the By using SMS, the customer
status of your recent bank transactions? And most importantly, do you sends a text message to the repair
still send that text message asking: “R U ready to do business?” group with the appliance serial
I would say the answer is a resounding yes. number. The customer gets a return
According to a Portio Research report entitled “Mobile Messaging SMS message that gives the the ad­
Futures 2009­2013,” SMS traffic is expected to increase to levels of dress to which the item must
5.471 billion by 2013, and worldwide revenues to$124.2 billion. be sent.
Closer to the reality of times and looking into the rear view mirror When the item is received, the
at 2008, Sybase 365 has seen another banner year in the number of repair center confirms via an SMS Gregory J. Dunn, VP of product
SMS and MMS traffic processed through our platform. alert to the customer. And when the management, Sybase
For the year, approximately 210 billion messages traversed the in­ item is repaired, the customer receives an SMS alert with the tracking
frastructure, which is 135 percent more than 2007 numbers. number for the return shipment.
In the U.S. marketplace during fourth­quarter 2008, greater than What is the difference?

160 million users reportedly used text messaging. This was a 16 percent A minimum of five phone calls at the cost of $6 per minute versus

increase over 2007. five SMS messages with a total cost of about 25 cents – a differential
that cannot
be ignored.
Other benefits
to the firm and the
customer include
reduction in call
wait times and in­
crease in
customer
satisfaction.
SMS is new to
the advertising
mix as a means to
get the message
across.
Advertisers
like the flexibility
More marketers are embracing SMS as a new and effective medium to reach their customers that mobile offers
and are set to cap­
Enterprises turn to SMS italize on the broad base of users that may not be sitting in front of the
The unrivalled global usage of mobile messaging is becoming in­ television when their ads run.
creasingly attractive to enterprises as a generator for new revenue SMS provides a targeted and secure means of delivering informa­
streams as well as providing value­added services for end­users. More tion to users who can take action to call a number, click­through to a
marketers are embracing SMS as a new and effective medium to reach Web site or even make purchases.
their customers. Indeed, SMS provides all of that in one solution. It allows sub­
Here’s an example of how SMS can lead to cost­reduction and in­ scribers to not only view a piece of information, but to be totally inter­
creased customer satisfaction: An electronics manufacturer uses SMS active with it, as we see with location­based services, mobile
to lessen the burden on their call center for returned and warranty goods. advertising and mobile banking. ■
This company has a single return center and a single phone number
that customers can call. When an appliance breaks down, the customer Gregory J. Dunn is vice president of product management at Sybase,
calls the 800 number. Reston, VA. Reach him at greg.dunn@sybase.com
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 20
H
Ho w br an ds can st ru ctu re an SM S c am pa ign
n
By Shira Simmonds
ow do brands best structure an SMS campaign from beginning
to end? Our clients are constantly voicing concerns on how to
put all the pieces of the mobile puzzle together.
Here is what I typically advise.
First and foremost, make sure mobile is integrated into the plan­
ning phase and not after the advertising and media campaigns have al­
ready been structured.
The mobile component is highly dependent on the various factors
of the ad campaign. What media channels will advertise the mobile call
to action? How many impressions are anticipated? What markets will
Make sure mobile is integrated into the planning phase and not after
the advertising and media campaigns have already been structured.
the campaign launch in? These and other critical issues must be visited
during the planning stage.
Second, understand the client’s challenges just as much as you
understand the client’s goals.
If this is a mobile coupon campaign, what are the limitations at the
point­of­sale? Does the client have scanners that can read mobile bar
codes? Can they easily upload codes into their cash register system?
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
Do all stores have the same point­
of­sales system?
Third is the call to action. Put
yourself in the shoes of the brands’
target audience. What would incen­
tivize you to pick up the phone and
text in?
Use this opportunity to research
the brand’s successful and unsuc­
cessful campaigns, as well as any
mobile campaigns that have per­
formed well in the same vertical. Shira Simmins, president,
Here is where the
Ping Mobile
benefits of a mobile campaign transcend traditional cam­
paigns. Figure out the best way to take advantage of the
trackability and viral aspect of the mobile campaign.
For example, if the brand is selling a product, use the
mobile channel as a way to incentivize clients to make a
purchase and create mass exposure – for example, “Send
this to four friends and enter the UPC code of the product
for 4 additional entries into the mobile sweep”.
Fourth, make sure the legal components are all in
place and the campaign is fully compliant with the carri­
ers and Mobile Marketing Association’s rules, regulations
and policies.
If your common short code is not provisioned, make
sure you give yourself a good four months before the
launch date to complete the provisioning process.
For campaigns that require a quicker launch date,
partner with a mobile company that has provisioned and
pre­approved short codes.
Fifth, build a database. Make sure to ask consumers
to double­opt­in to receive future messages from the
brand. What makes mobile marketing unique and power­
ful is segmenting and profiling this database.
Sixth is content. Ensure that the content is written so
that the call­to­action is easy to understand.
For example, I strongly recommend against the key­
word being a number. This will lead to many errors on
the consumer’s end. Make it easy and make it clear. Take
out your phone and text this WORD to this
SHORT CODE.
Moreover, make sure that the mobile call­to­action is
clearly outlined in the ad and is present for the duration of
the ad, not quickly flashing on and off a banner or
television spot.
Seventh, define success metrics prior to the start of the cam­
paign and make sure your client is looking at the same metrics you are.
This will be critical when discussions of renewals take place. ■
Shira Simmonds is cofounder and president of Ping Mobile, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ. Reach her at shira.simmonds@pingmobile.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 21
W
Wor k ing w it h a n agg r eg at or o n th e lif ecycl e o f a s h or t cod e

e
By Ben Tannenbaum how ambitious and complex you plan to make the user experience.
Your aggregator will help you adapt your proposed campaign to fit
elcome to the world of mobile marketing. So you have de­ within the confines of what carriers allow. Once that is accomplished,
cided to run an SMS marketing campaign, which is the most your service will be submitted to each carrier, individually, for review.
ubiquitous form of mobile media. Smart move. Your goals 2. Commercial approval: The carrier will acknowledge that the
and objectives have been defined and you have come up with a creative program meets all Mobile Marketing Association and wireless­carrier­
concept. Now what? specific guidelines.
Allow me to introduce you to the aggregator, also known as the 3. Technical provisioning: A connection, enabled on the carrier
connectivity provider – the company with the connections you need. network, will be formed between the carrier and aggregator for your
As defined by the Common Short Code Administration, mobile ag­ specific short code.
gregators have authorized connections to multiple wireless networks. 4. Testing: Once those steps are completed, it is time to test the
They maintain the security­, technical­ and service­level requirements campaign. You will want to test all aspects of your service, ensuring the
of each wireless network. best possible user experience.
Aggregators act as a bridge enabling content providers who wish to Next, your aggregator will confirm that your service is functioning
use short codes to connect to wireless carriers and, ultimately, con­ correctly and is operating within
sumers. They also function as your guide to the mobile ecosystem. the confines of carrier guidelines.
Because of their location directly in the center of the mobile value Some carriers will also conduct
chain, aggregators have unique insight into mobile marketing issues their own tests to validate your
from a carrier, application provider and content provider perspective. service. If everything behaves as
The aggregator is an essential partner for anyone wanting to run an expected, you will receive official
SMS­based marketing campaign. notification that your service has
Now that you under­ been certified.
stand an aggregator’s place 5. Certification: The final ap­
in the mobile value chain, proval required before a program
let us concentrate on the can accept live traffic. Your cam­
lifecycle of a short code, paign is ready to launch.
otherwise known as the 6. Post­production: Maintain­
Ben Tannenbaum, business devel­
opment associate, MX Telecom

process of taking your SMS
campaign from concept to a
implementation.
Timing is everything
when launching an inte­
grated marketing initiative.
Prepare for the ride of your
life as we embark on the
six­step process comprising
the lifecycle of a short code.
To be fair, this is not ex­
actly thrilling, but the knowl­
edge of how to launch a short
Devote sufficient lead time to SMS
ing a live campaign is reasonably simple. Carriers revise their guide­
lines from time to time, so you will want to make sure your program
reflects any changes in policy.
Carriers may potentially audit your service for carrier compliance.
As long as you are running the campaign you submitted, there is noth­
ing to worry about.
While the terminology discussed above may sound somewhat for­
eign, do not let this process overwhelm you. Your aggregator will guide
you through each stage in the lifecycle of a short code.
Your ultimate takeaway should be a clear understanding of the
process such that you can effectively integrate it into your project time­
line during the planning stages of a marketing campaign.
As mentioned earlier, timing is everything when launching a mobile

code is a prerequisite for suc­ marketing campaign.

programs, as this process may take

cess in this industry. By understanding the stages and timing associated with the lifecycle
upwards of six to eight weeks. The last
thing you want is promotional material

While it may seem te­ of a short code, you will easily be able to integrate SMS into your cam­
going to print before the service is live.

dious now, you will be thankful that you took the time to learn it as you
outmaneuver your competitors in the mobile space.
1. Carrier application: Once you have chosen an aggregation part­
ner, it is time to get down to business. You will need to work with your
aggregator to complete an application for the carriers.
All carriers have campaign guidelines, generally emulating the Mo­
bile Marketing Association’s Consumer Best Practices. But it is impor­
tant to be aware of additional carrier­specific guidelines to which you
must adhere.
While these applications are usually simple, it really depends on
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
paign instead of adding it as a disconnected afterthought.
Be sure to devote sufficient lead time to SMS programs, as this
process may take upwards of six to eight weeks. The last thing you
want is promotional material going to print before the service is live.
Navigating the mobile ecosystem should not be complicated. As
long as you know the players and processes, you are well on your way
towards launching an SMS campaign. ■
Ben Tannenbaum is business development associate at MX Telecom,
New York. Reach him at benjamint@mxtelecom.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 22
M
Ho w to make a va lu ab le ad i mp ressi o n

n
By Steven Rosenblatt CPM each for a total of $60 for the
“advertising attention” on the page.
obile is defined by the Merriam­Webster dictionary as “capa­ Thus, your one ad on the page gets
ble of moving or being moved.” By advertising on the mobile you 17 percent of that attention for
Web or in a mobile application, you are not only making your your $10 CPM.
brand message “capable of moving” with the consumer, but you are On the other hand, the average
also providing them the opportunity to “be moved” by the experience. mobile publisher sells one display
This opportunity is often measured by an advertising currency banner ad on a page. If that ad is
known as an “impression.” According to the Mobile Marketing Asso­ also at a $10 CPM, you now have
ciation, an ad impression “transpires each time a consumer is exposed 100 percent of the “advertising at­
to an advertisement.” The Interactive Advertising Bureau notes that an tention” for one­sixth of what that
ad impression is “measured as a load in a Web user’s browser.” would cost you online.
What these definitions do not include is a method for determining This, of course, does not ac­
Steven Rosenblatt, SVP of ad
sales, Quattro Wireless

the value that each impression brings to the brand. count for the effect of the ad on the consumer. Research has demon­
Many advertisers are asking today strated that mobile ads actually drive
how they can determine where best to in­ higher engagement.
vest their budget to make that impression
count the most, particularly across the Engagement
Internet and mobile. There are many ways to measure en­
In questioning, many advertisers are gagement, but the most common and
finding that a mobile impression universal one in digital media is the
“moves” consumers more than those in “click” on an ad unit.
other media, and also works as a great The unique properties of the mobile
activator for cross­media campaigns. experience drive more consumers to
So why is that the case? A mobile ad­ click on ads than do on the wired Inter­
vertising impression appears in a differ­ net. What does this mean in regards to
ent environment and engages the the value of the impression? Let us take
consumer in a different manner. a look at a little more media math:
Let us dive into these two key differ­ For a $10,000 media buy at a $10
ences by comparing two digital media, CPM, you are buying 1 million impres­
mobile and the wired Internet. sions. Based on the average click­
through rate (CTR) for online ads (as
Environment reported by comScore), 0.01 percent of
The mobile Web page or application consumers will click on your ad for a
is, due to the nature of mobile screens – total of 1,000 engaged consumers.
whether a smartphone, basic mobile For the same 1 million impressions
phone, gaming device or netbook – a in mobile, accounting for a CTR of .05
Many advertisers are finding that a mobile impression

smaller piece of real estate than an percent – actually on the low end of what
“moves” consumers more than those in other media, and

Internet page. our clients experience – you have now en­

also works as a great activator for cross­media campaigns

One consequence of this is the limited room for advertisements.
Most pages and applications have one or two ads on each screen.
Compare this to the typical wired Web page, which has six ads, al­
though many have much more, particularly in the highly­coveted niche
areas such as automotive and women’s interests.
This disparity in ad clutter affects not only engagement but also the
absolute dollar value of the impression.
On the Internet, the true cost of an impression, when bought on a
cost­per­thousand (CPM) basis, is actually higher than what advertisers
see on their bill due to the dilution of the value of that impression be­
cause of the clutter on the page.
To illustrate this in a very simplified example, looking at the aver­
age wired Web page, a publisher sells six display banner ads for a $10
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
gaged 4,000 more consumers.
However, mobile engagement does not stop there. Not only do you
have more engagement with your brand, but the quality of engagement
is also higher.
One illustration is the results seen in one client’s integrated cross­
media campaign, where sample requests from mobile consumers ex­
posed to an offer were double that of those exposed to print.
Smart marketers are including mobile advertising – on the mobile
Web and in applications – in their media plans to make a “valuable im­
pression” and engage consumers. ■
Steven Rosenblatt is New York­based senior vice president of ad sales
at Quattro Wireless. Reach him at srosenblatt@quattrowireless.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 23
M o b i le v i de o b e lo n g s in t h e
e
m u lt i c h a n n e l m a r k e t i n g m i x
T
By Frank Barbieri
here is no arguing the evidence: Audiences are changing the way
they consume media. The proliferation of video­capable mobile
devices and the availability of Apple’s iPhone and other sophis­
ticated smartphones mean consumers are doing more while on the go,
including watching video.
Nielsen’s recent A2/M2 Three Screen Report reports that mobile­
video­viewing has grown a significant 52 percent in the first quarter of
2009 from the previous year, up to 13.4 million U.S. consumers who
watch an average of 3 ½ hours of mobile video each month.
In the fourth quarter of 2008, the number of mobile video sub­
scribers grew overall as well to 18.6 million, a jump of 13 percent from
the previous quarter, according to Nielsen Mobile in February 2009.
Mobile users expect an experience similar to what they can do on­
line, and are getting it. Those spoiled media­sponges. We love them. We
are them.
In answer to consumer­demand, mobile video ad inventory is grow­
ing at unprecedented rates and offers brand advertisers new, innovative
options beyond just the banner.
The addressable market is large enough to move the needle and the
quality of the content now mobile is safe for Fortune 200 advertising.
The time to act and get involved is now. Here’s why.
The audience for mobile video may be smaller than online right now, but the engagement and
efficiency of the medium is hands­down the best of any digital media
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
Mobile video advertising works
In our recent campaign effec­
tiveness studies, mobile video ads
beat online video ads in every
measure.
We have seen as much as eight
times higher increase in purchase
intent than what is seen from typi­
cal online video campaigns, three
times higher increase in unaided
awareness, and nineteen times
higher increase in aided awareness, Frank Barbieri, CEO of Transpera
compared to online video norms.
The audience for mobile video may be smaller than online right
now, but the engagement and efficiency of the medium is hands­down
the best of any digital media.
That coupled with the fact that the mobile video viewer demo­
graphic is a highly attractive one for marketers makes it a must­have in
the digital toolkit today.
Switch
Campaigns combining mobile video and banners together outper­
formed more traditional mobile display campaign norms as well.
We have seen mobile ad awareness increases.
For example, mobile video outperforms mobile dis­
play norms by almost 8 percentage points – that’s
46 percent higher than the mobile norm.
Further, mobile video viewers have the highest
recall rate of any mobile data users, at 55 percent.
Cisco Systems is forecasting mobile traffic will
grow 66 times during 2008­2013 to 2.5 million tera­
bytes per month.
The primary driver of that growth is video,
which it believes will account for 64 percent of mo­
bile traffic in 2013, more than triple data’s 19 percent share.
Cisco believes that most of the mobile video
consumed will be on demand, not streamed live.
Apple, to offer even more astounding figures,
has more than 45 million iPhone and iPod devices
in market worldwide and has recorded more than 1
billion downloads of the 65,000­plus applications
in a year since the Apple App Store opened.
There is no denying the sizeable addressable
market that is now capable of consuming elegantly
delivered, on­demand video content. And it is a
great place for marketers to be today and in the future. ■
Frank Barbieri is chairman/CEO of Transpera, San
Francisco. Reach him at fbarbieri@transpera.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 24
Mobile will enable brands to align with

T
consumption patterns
By Alexandros Moukas lived without the Internet – see their mobile phones as devices for con­
suming all their media, the mobile phone will look to incorporate all
he idea of sitting down in the evening to watch an hour of sched­ forms of their fragmented media consumption from music, TV and
uled television is quickly becoming archaic with consumers now video, right through to social media applications.
deciding how and when they want to consume media. The capabilities for media creation are also increasingly apparent,
Everything is on the consumer’s terms. With services such as TiVo as the wealth of user­generated content – from citizen journalism to
and Sky+ in Britain and Web sites including BBC iPlayer, Joost, Veoh mini documentaries – means the mobile device is being used as a plat­
and Hulu globally, audiences are now in control of their media con­ form for self­expression through outlets such as Twitter and various
sumption schedules. applications to send video and images.
According to a recent report by The Future Laboratory, roughly half Many recognize the need for mobile companies to develop into a
of consumers ages 16­35 now watch TV online. social media network.
We now have so many time­saving devices that society goes Predicting that in five years
through tasks in 24 hours that would have taken 31 hours a decade ago, phone users will create 25 percent
according to U.S. think tank OTX. of the entertainment they consume
To address today’s always­connected consumer, content providers on their mobile devices, Nokia aims
are now offering short­form entertainment and lifestyle programming to provide a platform on which its
on mobile devices. Brand marketers need to take notice. users can create and share music,
Nokia recently announced the launch of its new mobile TV channel, photos and other media in much the
Capsule 96, where each program on the channel is 96 seconds long. same way MySpace does now.
Previously, brands Therefore, the ability to create
and marketers considered content that instantly appears on the
7 minutes to be an ideal Internet via users’ mobile devices
“content snack” in media means people increasingly see them­ Alexandros Moukas, CEO 0f Velti
terms, but now 7 minutes selves as editors, directors and creators of media, rather than
is considered too long if it simply consumers.
is viewed online or on a Globally, citizen journalism sites such as OhmyNews (South
mobile device. Korea), Avisen (Denmark) and Spot.Us (United States) present news
There is an increased content from the public.
demand for shorter pro­ In fact, five of the top 10 books sold in Japan in 2007 began as mo­
gramming to the point bile phone novels, or keitai shosetsu. These novels are incredibly pop­
where we see TV compa­ ular, with Japan’s largest keitai shosetsu site, Maho i­Land, containing
nies asking, “Do pro­ more than 1 million titles and achieving more than 3.5 billion hits
grams need to be per month.
half­an­hour long?” Today, the amount of time spent consuming media is not actually in­
To this end, broadcast creasing, but new technology means people are smarter about how
TV network CBS has they consume.
begun offering mini ver­ Audiences are now able to watch TV or other video content when
sions of shows, including they want, on any device they want. With the growth of user­generated
“CSI” and “Survivor,” content, people will increasingly expect to provide input on the creation
The ability to create content that instantly

perfectly formatted for and development of their media as well.

appears on the Internet via users’ mobile
devices means people increasingly see them­

mobile devices to cater to Creating, editing and integrating advertising into shows tailored to
selves as editors, directors and creators of

this audience. consumers’ personal tastes means we will see the growth of more tar­
media, rather than simply consumers.

As more people use their mobile devices and other channels to
watch their favorite shows, we will see a shift from scheduled program­
ming to on­demand services that fit in with consumers’
on­the­go lifestyles.
People want to be switched on and have everything in one place.
Creating, editing, consuming and sharing media will all happen simul­
taneously – and the demand is for devices that allow this.
As the digital natives – generations of consumers who have never
geted micro­media production companies.
These niche companies and the highly personalized content that
consumers create will open opportunities for brands and marketers to
align their offerings more closely with the media that consumers actu­
ally want and to better reach them when they tune in. ■
Alexandros Moukas is CEO of Velti, London. Reach him at
alex.moukas@velti.com

MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 25

T
The ric h i n ri ch medi a – g oals, de sign and resu ltss

By Jon Altschuler and Eswar Priyadarshan How do the various mobile

platforms and developers sup­
he introduction of the Apple iPhone in 2007 and the T­Mobile port rich media ad units?
G1 in 2008 has fostered an explosion of creativity in the mobile The iPhone, Android, Black­
advertising space. Berry Storm and Palm Pre devices
The full browser capabilities of these devices, combined with the use a Web kit or equivalent browser
touch­screen user experience, have moved mobile display advertising which has advanced CSS and
to the forefront of ad innovation. JavaScript support.
For increased effectiveness, mobile advertising units combine sig­ What all this technical language
nificantly higher share­of­voice on smaller screen real estate with means is that software developers
demonstrably higher user engagement due to an optimal user experience. can create dynamic ad units that
We will explore the “rich” in rich media by exploring the creative leverage video, audio, 2D anima­ Jon Altschuler, chief creative
options and designs of innovative new rich media ad unit types as well tion and location­based services
architect, Quattro Wireless

as valuable insights into their performance. (LBS). The actual device hardware
enables the interactive ca­

pability such as tapping

into the accelerometer

(shake) and 3D animation.

Also, you also need to

work with a partner which

provides sophisticated de­

velopment and ad serving

solutions to ensure proper

ad performance, optimiza­

tion and conversion tracking.

Eswar Priyadarshan, chief

technical officer, Quattro Wireless

How effective is the rich media ad unit?

As with any mobile ad unit, usability, performance and en­
gagement are crucial to an ad’s success.
The rich media ad unit redefines these metrics and criteria
by creating an integrated ad viewing experience in an opti­
mized, expandable environment without leaving the
current browser.
Mobile rich media ad campaigns have yielded significantly
better results than their corresponding wired Web equivalents.
Not only does the unit generate 10 percent to 20 percent
more traffic on a fraction of the overall Internet media spend,
they command 25 percent to 35 percent better click­through
rates compared to their wired Web equivalents.
The impressive metrics showcase the effectiveness and high
engagement of rich media in an overall campaign.
The advent of innovative user experience capabilities and
full browser functionality on modern mobile devices provides
fertile ground for advertiser creativity and the creation of
Mobile rich media ad units break down the classic barrier
between the display banner ad and the landing page.

What is a rich media ad unit? unique experiences.

Mobile rich media ad units break down the classic barrier between
the display banner ad and the landing page, whereby a banner click
causes the browser to switch to a new advertiser page.
In contrast, rich media includes the advertiser destination within
the static banner. With a single banner tap, the ad units expands or col­
lapses to reveal or close an entire destination site within it, including in­
teractive images and video content.
Advertisers looking to engage more consumers with their brand
should integrate rich media executions into their mobile campaigns. ■
Jon Altschuler is chief creative architect and Eswar Priyadarshan is
chief technical officer at Quattro Wireless, Waltham, MA. Reach them
at jaltschuler@quattrowireless.com and
epriyadarshan@quattrowireless.com

MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 26

F
Role of branded apps in mobile advertis ing
g

By Ken Willner This experience meets the Mobile Marketing Association’s Con­
sumer Best Practices Guidelines for enabling a user to opt­in to the
orward­thinking advertisers are turning to mobile applications as show’s application, and gives these
a viable marketing tool to reach targeted audiences with brand­ broadcast shows a way to stay con­
building content, offer special promotions and drive customer­ nected to their current users as well
loyalty programs. as attract new online and
Mobile applications for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry, offline viewers.
Windows Mobile, Google Android and Palm Pre devices enable the The dynamic flexibility of the
delivery of content and experiences to their customers, providing a application also offers a significant
unique opportunity for consumer connection, brand awareness and ac­ opportunity for brands to work with
cess to information. other advertising partners to adver­
Significantly more compelling than banner advertising, branded tise to a pre­screened audience that
mobile applications can offer a deeper level of sustained engagement aligns with the brand’s content.
with customers. In the Zumobi application for
A year after it opened in July 2008, the Apple App Store contained Sporting News Baseball, the popu­
Ken Willner, CEO of Zumobi

more than 65,000 mobile applications, and that number is growing lar sports site SportingNews.com has provided trusted professional
every day. baseball content combined with a utility application to track fantasy
While some applications are more of a novelty, many others offer leagues, scores and
useful or entertaining features and provide iPhone and iPod touch users top news.
with genuine value­add interaction as part of everyday life. This new applica­
As a result, brands are recognizing the effect that mobile applica­ tion presented con­
tions deliver. They are beginning to integrate them into their compre­ sumer brand foot­
hensive marketing campaigns. wear and apparel
For example, several television shows, including “American Idol” brand adidas with a
and “The Today Show,” have developed their own applications to give unique opportunity to
their viewers both a more interactive show experience and highlight directly connect
the show’s brand messaging. with sports­
loving enthusiasts.
By becoming an
in­application adver­
tiser and partnering
with SportingNews,
adidas created an ad
featuring video con­
tent, a contest, and
other ways to engage
end­users, creating what brands have been seeking since the dawn of
advertising – a way to reach only the audience they want.
This co­branding opportunity is a perfect example of how in­appli­
cation advertising can go beyond the standard banner ad, fit into a
broader integrated marketing campaign, engage a targeted audience
and offer it an experience that is interesting to them.
As more feature­rich and interactive applications come to market,
brands will want to capitalize on the online communities that they are
developing through their mobile applications and generate new revenue
streams through consumer purchases, co­branding relationships and
sponsorships, and advertising and promotional activities.
To this end, mobile advertising and, more specifically, in­applica­
tion advertising, will be one of the biggest opportunities for generating
revenue as the mobile marketing industry continues to develop. ■

Ken Willner is CEO of Zumobi, Seattle. Reach him at

ken.willner@zumobi.com
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 27
I
Mo bil e d eli ver s m om e nt o f t ru t h at r et ai l

l
By David Spear Think about other vertical markets where mobile is successful –
foodservice (particularly pizza), real estate, electronics, healthcare, au­
n a past life while working in marketing at Coca­Cola Co., we de­ tomotive and broadcast television content.
ployed an extremely effective strategy based on the company’s vi­ In all of these industries, companies are using mobile to deliver
sion to put a Coke “within an arm’s reach of desire” for everyone unique points of access, engagement and relevancy in true best practice form.
in the world.
This strategy proved to be highly successful in expanding distribu­ No question about it
tion to the far reaches of the world and providing special moments If you are still skeptical of mobile, you are not alone. But let me
of refreshment. pose a few rhetorical questions that may change your current perspective.
Today, mobile is a wonderful medium that also creates a special 1. How is it that a simple mobile SMS texting game draws 10,000
“moment,” one that puts interactive value right in the palm of a con­ to 20,000 opt­in users per day?
sumer’s hand. And now that consumers can interact with content any­ 2. How is it that a mobile pollen counter can provide a health­con­
where, anytime, mobile delivers the ultimate “moment of truth” in scious consumer with detailed pollen counts down to the ZIP code, in­
milliseconds well before anyone walks into a retail location. stantly, anytime, anywhere?
No doubt, there will always be that MOT at the retail shelf and point 3. How is it that an interested
of trial. But mobile now jumpstarts the process by delivering the initial home buyer can now view and vi­
brand message to a consumer well ahead of the point of retail interaction. rally send all content for a listed
Importantly, for those mobile campaigns that add highly relevant home to a friend or spouse across
and compelling content, mobile becomes a medium of influential proportion. town or 2,000 miles away?
The good news is that mobile is so pervasively entrenched in all 4. How is it that select TV
our lives that retail is just one major vertical where mobile creates broadcast stations’ mobile page­
intrinsic value. views dwarf their online
page views?
5. How is that Hispanic click­
through rates average three to 10
times higher than English­language
campaigns on most mobile
David Spear, EVP, sales and
marketing, LSN Mobile
advertising networks?
The answer is simple. Mobile is the forward access point delivering
these unique moments of truth and doing so in fun, engaging, and high
payoff ways.

Mobile’s the real thing

Fact is, the power of these mobile moments is incredible. By its
very nature, mobile is personal, intimate and quickly initiates a one­to­
one, trusting relationship with the user.
I ask you, which other device gives an advertiser these sets of
human dynamics – ready to be leveraged for the advertiser’s benefit –
all in the palm of a consumer’s hand?
I think you know the answer – zip, nada, nothing else. And this is
why we see the momentum with mobile marketing campaigns across
the land.
Look around and take note of the many organizations that have the
brands, properties and audiences to develop unique moments upon
which mobile marketing can deliver.
I submit to you that the landscape is full of opportunities right in
front of our eyes. All it takes is the fusion of creativity and the unique
properties of the technology behind mobile advertising and marketing
to deliver the right moment. ■

David Spear is executive vice president of sales and marketing at LSN

Now that consumers can interact with content anywhere, anytime, mobile

Mobile, Atlanta. Reach him at dspear@lsnmobile.com

delivers the ultimate “moment of truth” in milliseconds well before anyone
walks into a retail location.

MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 28

A ro adm ap t o m ob ile marketin g

g
T
By Jose Villa Also, if you look carefully, you can usually determine if consumers
are already trying to access your Web site via mobile devices.
here are numerous paths on the road to a mobile marketing strat­ Armed with this information
egy – SMS, MMS, LBS, email, mobile Internet, mobile adver­ you can determine what to priori­
tisements, mobile games and applications. tize in your mobile strategy. If you
There are also multiple devices to deliver your strategy directly into use personas, think about modeling
the hands of your target consumers. With so many paths and means for your personas’ mobile behavior and
delivery, you need a roadmap before getting started to reach your ulti­ add that texture to their descriptions.
mate marketing destination. For example, if most of your
According to comScore, the number of people using their mobile product catalog is your most popu­
device to access news and information on the Internet more than dou­ lar page, and some of that traffic is
bled from January 2008 to January 2009. coming from mobile devices, do
Among the 63.2 million people who accessed news and information not create a mobile application that
on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35 percent) did sends users to your entire site. Op­
so daily. timize your online catalog for the
Jose Villa, CEO of Sensis

The good news is that your target customers are probably already appropriate devices and make it easy to browse and purchase.
out there and reachable via mobile marketing. Develop new programs such as SMS campaigns and mobile ads
The bad news is that marketers may be tempted to make the mistake once you are further down the road.
of implementing the latest buzz tactic – such as creating an iPhone ap­ The next step is to truly understand your digital marketing objec­
plication or simply porting over a Web application to fit a 3G device tives –Web or mobile – vis­à­vis your audience’s goals. Are you look­
browser – and calling it a day. But a ing to increase sales? Is your goal to
lack of strategy comes at a high price increase online traffic?
and can lead nowhere. Knowing your businesses’ digital
direction will help determine what
The three­year roadmap route to take and where and how to in­
Do not think of mobile marketing corporate mobile in your plan.
as a standalone world of marketing After figuring out your goals, put
and communications. yourself in your consumers’ shoes:
Mobile is effective when it is part What do they want, what are they
of your integrated marketing commu­ looking for, what type of experience
nications and you must plan and take or relationship do they want to have
the time to ensure all parts work with you?
well together. If your research reveals that your
You also need to look ahead to consumers’ needs and goals differ
where evolving mobile technology is from your own, meet them in the mid­
heading and be ready for it. Three dle. Use the roadmap to help find
years is a good timeframe to accom­ points of intersection where mobile
plish this. Any less time would not can facilitate the connection between
allow you to plan, implement, monitor, your current strategy and what your
measure, revise or make predictions customers want.
about the quick­changing technology Mobile makes it possible to make
to which mobile is subject. your brand truly on­demand and ac­
The first leg of the trip is to under­ cessible at all times, but such an op­
stand everything you can about mem­ portunity must be handled with care
Make sure you do not just hop on a bandwagon or
hitchhike your way to mobile space.
bers of your target audience. How old are they? Where are they from? and a clear sense of direction.
How do they purchase? Are they Web­ and tech­savvy? Which social Make sure you do not just hop on a bandwagon or hitchhike your
networks do they belong to? What do they want from you? How do way to mobile space. It is easier to get lost than to make plans for travel,
they get to you? but the time you invest in the latter can make a big difference in im­
If you do not have access to reams of customer data, looking at Web proving the overall experience for you and those traveling with you. ■
analytics information from your Web site is a great place to start. Web
analytics will reveal a great deal of about the people who visit your Jose Villa is CEO of Sensis, Los Angeles. Reach him at
site, what content they view and which browsers and devices they use. jrvilla@sensisagency.com
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 29
W
e
H o w t o b uy m e di a o n mo b i l e
AN INTERACTIVE ADVERTISING BUREAU PRESENTATION
hile mobile appears to be a complex ecosystem with its own
vernacular, the buying process itself is very similar to other
familiar platforms including the Internet.
This article will guide you through the process in plain English, and
get you started as a first time mobile advertiser.
The key to tackling your first mobile assignment is to remember
that mobile advertising is much like advertising on any other medium.
It is about finding the right places to connect your client with the right
audience to deliver the right message. In fact, mobile is an execution
point on your current advertising strategy.
Simply put, mobile is another medium to add to your arsenal to tar­
get the right consumer. We will provide a few straightforward steps to
get you started.
Before you begin reaching for solutions, answer a few questions to
understand the marketer’s advertising goals to determine what role mo­
bile will play in their media mix.
The most important of these questions being, is the objective to in­
crease brand favorability, launch a new product, direct response or a
customer retention initiative?
Once your core media objectives have been answered, the route to
take with mobile becomes much clearer.
When creating a mobile campaign it is important to remember that
there are multiple channels for reaching mobile eyeballs. They include
mobile Web sites, downloadable applications, mobile messaging and
mobile video, all of which can be used individually or as a unified cam­
paign across not just these mobile channels but across your more tra­
ditional channels to create a complete 360­degree campaign.
Recommended planning process
Figure 1: Mobile ecosystem advertising opportunities
As a general rule of thumb, the less budget and less time you have
the more you should focus on the mobile Web­display ads. As budgets
increase and your time allocation to put towards mobile grows you can
expand into messaging, traditional media integration and out­of­home
mobile campaigns.
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
But for simplicity we will cover mobile Web and messaging in de­
tail, spending less time on mobile activation and less common mobile
channels.
In the beginning of the planning process, it is important to gather
basic information that is vital to any successful advertising campaign.
Since mobile is a newer platform, this step can be overlooked due to the
misconception that the basic rules of advertising do not apply. Ask
yourself the following questions before launching any campaign:
Key questions
This article will give you the background information to help an­
swer these questions, as well as provide an overview of the market­
place, definitions, and practical examples to gain a greater
understanding of mobile as an advertising platform. The best cam­
paigns keep the user experience in mind. For consumers, mobile offers
convenient information, entertainment, and exclusivity.
Tailoring campaigns that deliver marketing messages that are also
convenient, entertaining and offer exclusive content or discounts is the
key to success.
Overview of the U.S. mobile marketplace
Audience composition
Because of the interest in mobile, many reports have been issued
around the demographics and profiles of users. Although the absolute
numbers will change, there are certain key themes and trends that
will continue.1
• Mobile phone penetration is upwards of four out of five people in
the United States and more people now have a mobile phone than have
PC­based Internet access. This is especially true for older adults and
lower­income individuals.
• Mobile Internet usage continues to grow. Over the last three years
usage has grown approximately 25 percent per year. With smartphones
becoming more affordable, advanced and widely adopted, we will
likely see a greater increase in 2009. Currently, 40­45 million mobile
subscribers use the mobile Internet regularly.
• Minorities are significant mobile data users across all features
and applications.
• Mobile is not just youth­focused – texting behavior may skew a
bit younger, but the bulk of the mobile Internet usage comes from 25­
44­year­olds.
Data from: InsightExpress Mobile Research (Waves 1 ­ 5, October 2007 ­ March 2009);
1
Pew Internet & American Life Project; Nielsen Mobile; comScore
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 30

Magna, a unit of Mediabrands, projects U.S. mobile ad spending
to grow from $169 million in 2008 to $409 million in 2011. Other in­
dustry forecasts indicate that the average campaign budget will triple
over a similar time period.
There are currently three main categories of buys:
• Test buys: $15,000 ­ $50,000
• Expanded buys: $50,000 ­ $150,000
• Scaled buys: $150,000­plus
Buys in the expanded and scaled ranges have recently grown in
popularity, but the process of determining the buy size is very similar
to the way advertisers decide on budgets for the Internet campaigns. It
is simply a matter of first identifying the goals and success metrics for
the campaign and setting spend relative to expected returns.
Mobile advertising options
Mobile advertising actually comprises a number of different spe­
cific inventory types and creative options. Brief descriptions of these
follow. However, a main point to take away is that different mobile ad­
vertising venues work best for different campaign goals, whether brand
building, or driving some kind of direct response. The chart above of­
fers some insights as to which kinds of mobile placement work best to
deliver a given campaign goal.
Inventory types
Mobile Web/display – Just like PC­based Web ad inventory, there
are banners that display on a mobile Web page. Typically, a brand or
agency buys mobile display ads for increased exposure of a product or
service. Banner inventory is purchased based on impressions (e.g.,
CPM) or direct response (e.g., cost per click). Typical formats include
graphic banners, graphic banners with text link, text­based banners.
Some important differences to keep in mind are: Typically, a mobile
page has one banner at the top and may also have one banner at the
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
bottom. This leads to less
clutter and potentially
higher response rates.
However, if you are pay­
ing on an impression
basis, be sure to under­
stand how many of your
impressions may appear
“below the fold” on mo­
bile screens. Remember
that a mobile user is less
likely to see a banner ad
at the bottom of the page.
Note: You can meas­
ure impressions accu­
rately below the fold on
smartphones, specifically with some applications that run on the Black­
Berry and iPhone.
Low­end phones will have smaller screens on which to display a
mobile Web page, so corresponding size limits exist for the banner ads.
This means the media buy may require different creative for different
sizes of ad, because content that works well on a larger banner may not
work when compressed into a smaller space. But companies now offer
technology that allows for all the images to be sized (transcoded) on the
fly to the specific handset.
Rich media is currently more limited on mobile than on the PC­
based Web, with generally only the higher end phones capable of dis­
playing rich media. Also, there are limitations on creative complexity.
Nonetheless, there have been key developments over the past twelve
months. Several leaders from the online rich media space and mobile
ad networks have rolled out rich media ad units, especially focusing
on the iPhone.
Additionally, some solutions allow advertisers to execute rich media
experiences across any device (iPhone or otherwise), requiring adver­
tisers to submit only a single set of creative assets. As more advanced
phones come into the market, this ad format will become more widely
accepted.
Messaging – Some publishers offer a brief text ad inserted at the
end of a text message. Users can reply to text messages to take action
on the ad and (when possible) click on links to a mobile Web page.
These ads are limited to 40 characters but they have the advantage of
reaching a large base of handsets. Just about any mobile phone can re­
ceive text messages.
Paid search – Similar to the PC­based Web, buyers can bid on key­
words for paid search ads that appear as sponsored links above natural
search results. These same ads can also appear when the keyword bid
matches the content of a mobile Web page.
Today, the mobile Web has more browsing pages than search results
pages, so this matching of keywords to mobile Web page content gives
advertisers additional reach for their performance­based
keyword bidding.
Keep in mind that a number of factors affect mobile paid search:
• Shorter ad titles – typically, 15, 20, or 25 words at most.
• Mobile relevancy of landing page – your landing page should ren­
der a mobile­appropriate page on as many devices as possible.
• Search buys may differ due to differences in search­term popular­
ity: mobile content, local search, news/sports/entertainment and
social networking.
• Queries are seeking actionable results and less likely to be looking
for reference information: if it is a travel­related query, it is more likely
that the user is on the go, rather than researching a trip.
Video – Mobile video ad opportunities are still developing as
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 31
mobile devices increasingly have the ability to display video clips.
While mobile video today has more limitations than PC­based video
formats, it continues to mature.
Voice – Audio ads can play before or after a voice­based conversa­
tion, voicemail, or voice­enabled information (e.g., 411.) Aside from
highly specific applications, mobile audio or voice ads remain rare in
the U.S. today.
In­app – Ad inventory that can exist inside of applications and
games in various formats. Application and game developers increas­
ingly offer this format since they can leverage ad revenue to offset the
consumer’s purchase price and increase the application/game’s adoption.
Location­based advertising within non­connected devices – This
type of advertising is primarily seen on devices that use radio data sys­
tems (RDS) and GPS technology to serve advertising based on a con­
sumer’s location or intended location.
Portable navigation devices that are advertising­enabled are a
unique medium to reach consumers when they are on the go and mak­
ing purchase decisions. The advertisements are text­based and some
are audio­enabled. Several calls to action exist to engage the consumer
with your brand: click to route to the nearest retail location, click to
coupon, and click to call (if the device is enabled).
Location­based advertising within connected devices – This type
of advertising is primarily seen on wireless devices that use GPS tech­
nology to serve advertising based on a consumer’s exact location in re­
lation to a merchant’s retail location.
The ads are served within applications, include robust campaign re­
porting metrics, and support full graphic capabilities. Several calls to
action exist to engage the consumer with your brand: Click to route to
the nearest retail location, click to coupon, click to call and click to
mobile site.
Point of interest placement services – Ensure that your retail lo­
cations are accurately included within navigation and mapping appli­
cations so that your customer can easily find you. The advertiser will
provide a list of locations. The service provider will verify the accuracy
of the locations and include them within the core mapping product that
is distributed for the use of mapping and navigation devices and applications.
Cross­platform digital buys including mobile
Today there are two parallel interactive inventory buys: online and
mobile. When buying online and mobile inventory the key is not to
simply try and implement the same creative execution into online and
mobile media types but extend the idea to the mobile space with mobile
specific execution of the idea.
Three things to consider:
• Try and tailor the idea to the platform, not just the creative execution
• The size of the mobile site, Web site and TV audience matters if
you want to track campaign success across platforms
• Make sure the campaign is long enough to recruit a healthy sample
of unduplicated users (three months or more) and strong enough (3 to
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
5 million impressions) to generate statistically sound sample sizes
At this nascent point in the market, CPM rates online and mobile
from the same publisher vary and some publishers are bundling mobile
into the online buy.
Measurement across online and mobile is not seamless. The IAB is
presently working with the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) to
extend online ad measurement standards to mobile recognizing many
of the similarities but also the unique challenges and advantages of
mobile inventory.
As the consumer’s starting point and end point are often different
in the mobile world, cross­platform parallels and insights are trickier to
obtain. Some of the largest publishers are just now beginning to figure
out how to accomplish this with statistically reliable datasets.
Mobile messaging services such as SMS and MMS allow “interac­
tive buy” associated with traditional media like digital out­of­home,
TV and retail. Now the buyer can see the mobile phone as a “mobile
mouse” to “click” on the push media whether this is in Times Square,
at a baseball game or over coffee at the local diner.
This opens up a world of interactive convergence and creative buy­
ing opportunities. Expanding the definition the interactive buy allows
the buyer to move the consumer out of the silos of digital­out­of­home,
TV and print more effectively.
Advertising on the mobile Web
Getting started
Buying advertising on the mobile Web is similar to buying display
advertising on the Internet. Graphical, interactive display ads are the
predominant ad unit. Although, in most cases, mobile Web banner ad
impressions can be purchased on a cost per thousand (CPM) or a cost­
per­click (CPC) basis, mobile offers the potential for targeting capa­
bilities beyond that of traditional media.
As this develops further, we would expect to see a range of targeting
options made available covering context, demographic, and behavioral
attributes, as well as location. Any targeting options made available
will comply with existing national level, legal and regulatory frame­
works governing privacy and personal data.
Some operators and publishers that have mobile Web sites sell mo­
bile ads directly, while others allow their inventory to be sold by a third
party, either as premium inventory or as part of a mobile ad network.
As with the PC­based Internet, planning a buy depends on setting
goals around audience size and desired demographics. Measurement
firms such as Nielsen Online and comScore offer audience data for mo­
bile Web sites.
The biggest difference between buying mobile Web display ads and
Internet display ads is that mobile Web ads are not sold by unit size. Be­
cause the sizes and resolutions of mobile phone screens vary, the way
the ad creative looks on those mobile phones will also vary.
The sizes of mobile Web banners as defined in the MMA Mobile
Advertising Guidelines ( http://www.mmaglobal.com/
mobileadvertising.pdf ) are optimized to best fit the mobile phone on
which the ad is being viewed. This improves the user experience, ad
readability, creative flexibility and effectiveness. This is why many
publishers and ad networks may ask you to provide multiple versions
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 32
of your banner creative with your mobile Web campaign.
Mobile landing pages
So what happens after the user clicks on the mobile display ad you
have developed? Where do they go? This is an important part of your
mobile campaign and needs the same degree of attention that you ap­
plied in developing the earlier creative.
These landing pages (i.e., the page that appears when a user clicks
on an advertisement) need to be customized and formatted specifically
for the mobile environment.
The page should be designed to reduce the amount of scrolling
needed and should be formatted to the specific phone experience –
which may mean developing multiple versions of the landing page for
the different phone types (smartphones such as the iPhone) versus fea­
ture phones (Razr phone). By way of example, experiences customized
to the iPhone can be either portrait or landscape in orientation.
It is not recommended that you direct users to the Web page you use
for PC­based interactive campaigns. Rather, direct users to a mobile­
specific landing page to further engage them. The landing page is your
chance to convert users into customers or leads. A good mobile landing
page will not only be formatted for the mobile screen and browser but
will also have the following qualities:
• Clear call to action
• Not too wordy
• Visually appealing with images, where possible
• Load quickly
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
FOUR KEYS TO CREATIVE EXECUTION
Mobile display campaign metrics
The success of a mobile advertising campaign can be measured in
a variety of ways but generally fall into two buckets: direct response
metrics and ad effectiveness metrics.
Direct response metrics – Direct response metrics are commonly
tracked in other forms of digital media. The simplest measurements are
ad impressions rendered and click­through rates obtained. Additional
measurements include any number of conversion rates, such as click­
to­call, data opt­in, and other forms of interactive measurement.
These performance results will vary by campaign type, messaging
and calls to action. However, most mobile campaigns today generate
significantly higher click­through rates than computer­based
Internet campaigns.
Ad effectiveness metrics (branding) – Ad effectiveness metrics pro­
vided by companies such as Dynamic Logic or InsightExpress measure
how advertising exposure affects key metrics distributed across the pur­
chase funnel of a product or service. They deliver metrics that can be
compared and benchmarked against similar studies conducted with tra­
ditional and other digital media.
Upper funnel metrics such as brand recall and message association
measure overall awareness of your ad message. Lower funnel metrics
such as brand favorability and purchase intent measure to what degree
the audience was persuaded by your message. In short, such metrics
allow you gauge the degree that your ad and brand have been recalled
and will increase consumer action.
Below is an example of metrics you can expect from these studies,
along with normative data comparing mobile to online performance.
Advertising via mobile messaging
The key plus to text messaging alert campaigns is reach. Nearly
every mobile handset in the U.S. can receive text messages, and media
companies offering opt­in messaging are in some cases delivering up­
wards of 20 million or more messages in the U.S. per month.
How to buy mobile messaging campaigns
Various publishers, particularly those offering time­sensitive infor­
mation (e.g., news, sports, weather) offer their customers alerts via text
messaging. These text alerts reserve the available space in the alert (ap­
proximately 40 characters) for a brief message, link to a mobile landing
page, or short code­based call to action.
Because many publishers offering mobile messaging campaigns re­
quest or require registration, it may be possible to sponsor messages
based on target demographics or at the very least location (based on
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 33
the handset’s area code). More common today is simply to buy a certain
number of messages, and target contextually based on the content.
Mobile messaging campaign metrics
Absent messages with a call to action, it can be difficult to track
metrics related to SMS campaigns – there is no automated upstream
path. Most U.S. carriers can offer a “reject receipt” (blacklisted, handset
cannot accept SMS, etc.) and “delivery receipt” to confirm that the mes­
sage got to the network and in most cases to the user phone.
As the phone is a very personal device and short code message sub­
scriptions should follow a requirement of an opt­in by the consumer, it
can be inferred that consumers want, and generally read, the sponsored
messages they receive.
However the only 100 percent confirmation of the message being
opened is:
• The user replied to the text call to action
• The user clicked on an embedded mobile link
When a text message ad includes a call to action, the success of a
mobile advertising campaign can be measured in the same way as dis­
play advertising: via direct response metrics and advertising
effectiveness metrics.
Direct response metrics – Direct response metrics are commonly
tracked in other forms of digital media. The simplest measurements are
ad impressions delivered and response rates obtained, such as click­to­
call, click­to­WAP, keyword response, data opt­in, and other forms of
interactive measurement. These performance results will vary by cam­
paign type, messaging and calls to action.
Ad effectiveness metrics (branding) – Ad effectiveness metrics pro­
vided by companies such as Dynamic Logic or InsightExpress measure
how advertising exposure affects key metrics distributed across the pur­
chase funnel of a product or service. They deliver metrics that can be
compared and benchmarked against similar studies conducted with tra­
ditional and other digital media.
Upper funnel metrics such as brand recall and message association
measure overall awareness of your ad message. Lower funnel metrics
such as brand favorability and purchase intent measure to what degree
the audience was persuaded by your message. In short, to what degree
your ad and brand have been recalled and to what degree will they in­
crease consumer action.
Creative recommendation for mobile messaging campaigns
The overarching advice for sponsored­by messages in text messag­
ing (or multimedia messaging) is not surprising: keep it short.
Advertisers must weigh the tradeoff between using an interesting,
but perhaps vague message, which triggers a “curiosity” response, and
opportunity for further communication, and a more targeted call to ac­
tion or branding message.
The text message portion of a campaign is like a haiku. Advertisers
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
with well known or ubiquitous slogans can leverage them to great effect
in a text ad. However, it is clearly a challenging venue for a
complex message.
Activating mobile from traditional media
One of the great opportunities that mobile messaging provides is
that it can act as a digital gateway that can be entered from traditional
media. Print, outdoor and even packaging will always deliver the reach
that is needed for a strong media plan. However, it can often lack in its
ability to be engaging and encourage immediate action from the target
audience. Mobile activation permits you to:
• Leverage traditional media that you are already using
• Drive incremental traffic to your mobile content
• Promote immediate and targeted action
The following two methods can be activated today and do not re­
quire incremental capital spending. Both
methods drive traffic to your digital content and
should be considered when doing anything in mo­
bile.
Common short codes
Common short codes (CSCs) are a string
of five or six digits (depending on the coun­
try) that a mobile user can send a text mes­
sage to and receive information or content in
return. Remember that 53 percent of mobile
subscribers use SMS to communicate every
day (Nielsen Mobile) and for many it is a
function that has become second only to mak­
ing a phone call.
CSCs offer brands and organizations an efficient and easy way to
take advantage of text messaging as a way to connect and communicate
with consumers. SMS keywords can be used to trigger service updates,
enter sweepstakes and even receive coupons or discounts.
Today, CSCs are the most widely available and carrier­accepted
way of activating cross media to mobile campaigns.
Shortcode services need to be approved by each participating carrier
network. Once the service is provisioned on a short code the carriers
may allow for the owner of the short code to run “keyword” differen­
tiated services off this code. However these services need to be com­
pliant with MMA guidelines and not diverge from the original
application.
The owner of the code needs to manage the Terms & Conditions,
help screen, info screen, customer service, and any opt­in and opt­out
(STOP message) centrally.
Activating short codes
There are two different methods that can be used when activating
short codes, each with their own benefits:
Shared short code – This method allows a marketer to activate a
code very quickly (1­2 days) while maintaining ownership via the key
word (text “brand name” to xxxx). This might be a better option for
one­off or short term projects.
Dedicated short code – This method takes significantly longer (4­
12 weeks) and is typically more expensive, but it is the only way to
guarantee ownership and performance for those that plan to use SMS
for multiple projects.
A dedicated code can be purchased through the Common Short
Code Administration ( http://www.usshortcodes.com/ ). Once the code
is purchased, you can use any number of approved aggregators to help
you through the carrier approval process.
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 34
 2D bar codes
A newer way of allowing for WAP
and mobile Web discovery on the hori­
zon uses another nearly universal mobile
phone function – the camera. 2D (or two­
dimensional) bar codes are a more ad­
vanced version of the traditional UPC bar
code designed to work with common
camera phones (representing 80 percent
of new phones sold in the United States).
With a 2D bar code application on the
phone, a user can “scan” a bar code and
automatically link to a specific mobile
Web site, save an event to the phone’s
calendar, dial customer service and more.
This article was reproduced with permission from the Interactive Ad­
vertising Bureau, New York. It has been edited for style and clarity.
The IAB Mobile Buyer’s Guide was developed by the IAB Mobile Ad­
vertising Committee with significant contributions from the following
member companies: The Associated Press, comScore, CPX Interactive,
Impact Mobile, InsightExpress, Jumptap, Polar Mobile, Quattro Wire­
less, Scanbuy, Third Screen Media, Verve Wireless, Weather Channel
Interactive and Whitepages.com.
This document can be found on the IAB Web site at
http://www.iab.net/mobile_buyers_guide

Custom

This removes the need to type in WAP URLs, search for content by
keywords or send a message via short code. While this is still very new
technology, some U.S. carriers are now offering it to their subscribers
as a free download and handsets will be soon be pre­loaded with bar

party.

code readers around the world.

Activating 2D bar codes

A bar code can be created, downloaded, and placed into any media
in a matter of minutes. The best 2D bar code technologies provide a
complete and integrated solution that offers both a barcode reader (mo­
bile application) and a platform to create and manage 2D codes.
• The client application should be available to the greatest number
of handsets possible – either through download or pre­load. The Mobile Marketer

• Some platforms can collect analytic data like number of scans,

unique users, date/time of scan and even user demographics.
team can help you craft

Choosing placements for short codes and 2D codes

your very own white

A great benefit of both SMS and 2D bar codes is that they can be paper, co­branded with

Mobile Marketer.

placed on virtually any printed or digital surface. So, it’s key to think
about the context of the environment and the mobile user within
that environment.
• Users are more likely to interact with this call to action when they Mail it out to

have a specific need, and/or the time to consume mobile information.

For example, placing a code in a newspaper or at an event may prove­
Mobile Marketer’s

more user­friendly than a billboard on the freeway.

• It is recommended to use these methods across media touch points
entire e­letter

so they become more visible to your audience. This also provides a subscriber base.

way to understand what media generates the best response so you can
refine your campaign.

Choosing the end­mobile experience Please contact

Mobile technologies are extremely flexible in what they can deliver.

A mobile ad can send the user to product information, provide a pro­
ads@mobilemarketer.com

motional code or coupon, dial customer service and more. It is critical

to evaluate your campaign goals, consider the target audience and ex­
for details.

plore some of these key factors:

• Convenience: Information is power – especially for someone who
is on the go and needs a helping hand. Whether it is an e­ticket with
real­time flight updates or a can of soup with recipe ideas at the super­
market ­ if it is relevant, it has value.
• Entertainment: Being on the go sometimes means standing still.
Easy access to news, photos or a quick game of trivia can be a
real lifesaver.
• Exclusivity: Everyone wants to feel special. A unique feature of
Mobile Marketer

these methods is that the consumer has to do something to get some­

thing. Discounts, access to events or insider information – it is all worth
something. Especially if your customer cannot get it any other way. ■
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 35
D
Da ir y Q ue en la unc he s RFI D­bas e d m obil e loy a lty pr ogra m
m
By Dan Butcher
airy Queen is running a mobile rewards loyalty program using
radio­frequency identification—RFID tags—to send coupons
and offers to consumers’ handsets.
The quick­serve restaurant giant tapped NFC specialist Vivotech
Inc. and Tetherball's new RFID­based mobile marketing platform to
deliver targeted offers to mobile consumers. The RFID service is opt­
in at the point of sale and Dairy Queen markets the program with in­
store signage encouraging consumers to join the
DQ mobile rewards program.
“We have a national agreement with Dairy
Queen International, which sees this mobile loy­
alty program as a competitive advantage,” said
Jay Highley, president and chief operating offi­
cer of Tetherball, Indianapolis.
“We have been working with Dairy Queen
for 20 months and we found that you lose 90
percent of the U.S. market when you tell them to
download an app, and MMS is not consistently
applied and it is expensive,” he said.
Vivotech specializes in Near Field Commu­
nications, mobile payments and promotions. Its
platform lets consumers make contactless pay­
ments with RF­enabled and NFC­enabled
mobile phones.
Mobile marketing applications service Sweet deals are made of this
provider Tetherball specializes in mobile loyalty and rewards services.
Tetherball’s programs are designed to drive customer loyalty
through mobile coupons, mobile rewards programs, mobile sweep­
stakes and mobile notifications.
Talk is chip
Mr. Highley expects to see this service soon expand across the
Dairy Queen system and to other national retailers.
Dairy Queen is a quick­service restaurant chain with 5,600 stores in
the United States, Canada and foreign countries. It offers dairy desserts,
hamburgers, hot dogs and beverages.
The chain will start promoting the mobile rewards program on its
Web site, and there will also be some direct email and Web advertising
support to make customers aware of the mobile initiative.
Dairy Queen’s call­to­action at the point of sale offers consumers a
coupon for a free Blizzard if they join the mobile rewards program.
The consumer is asked to go to the counter and get a Tetherball
RFID tag to place on their handset.
Information on the card instructs consumers to text in a unique code
on the tag to activate their membership. Once they join, Dairy Queen
typically sends out a new offer on a weekly basis.
“Once you’ve done that, you’re tethered, and that same user can go
to other retail clients as this continues to expand,” Mr. Highley said.
“That one Tetherball tag can be their loyalty card for a number of dif­
ferent retailers, as we can tether the RFID tags to a different short code
for each client.”
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
Mass adoption of mobile marketing using bar code coupons has not
happened because it is too complicated, with a plethora of technical
and user issues at the point of redemption, according to Tetherball.
Tetherball does not use mobile coupons with bar codes or require
any type of mobile screen visuals to redeem offers.
The RFID­based platform, which works on any mobile phone, elim­
inates fraud and lets retail clients measure the performance of their
campaigns via real time validation and reporting, according
to Tetherball.
Tetherball’s approach helps clients—in­
cluding Dairy Queen—"tether" their brand to
target audiences by identifying what their cus­
tomers want and delivering mobile campaigns
that interact with the call­to­action through per­
mission­based mobile coupons, mobile re­
wards, mobile sweepstakes and
mobile notifications.
Integrating traditional marketing methods
such as in­store advertising, customers are en­
couraged to sign up for mobile loyalty rewards
programs offering promotional discounts.
Queen’s leash
Dairy Queen’s in­store signage at the point
of sale urges consumers to opt in to its mobile
loyalty club to receive a free Blizzard then re­
ceive more­or­less weekly coupons thereafter.
Upon joining, customers are given a Tetherball Tag, a tiny RFID
chip that is affixed to their mobile phones, which uniquely identifies
them through Tetherball’s technology platform.
Dairy Queen is then able to send offers to their customers via stan­
dard text messaging.
Offers are redeemed electronically using existing in­store RFID
point­of­sale terminals or stand­alone RFID kiosks provided by Tetherball.
“Our RFID mobile loyalty platform is easy to use on any phone and
there are no downloadable apps required,” Mr. Highley said. “Every­
body’s got their phone with them all the time, so it’s convenient solu­
tion for the member, and it resonates well with a younger
demographic—there’s a high cool factor.
“It also helps retailers eliminate fraud, because you can’t create fake
codes, and it eliminates employee theft, plus we offer real­time valida­
tion and reporting,” he said.
Dave Reasoner, an International Dairy Queen franchisee, has been
working with Tetherball for nearly two years to refine the mobile loy­
alty program for his stores. His stores now average more than 900
members per store and continue to see growth in membership and re­
demption rates, which is making a measurable difference in his year­
over­year traffic and revenue.
“This is a significant opportunity for retailers to start mobile loyalty
and mobile couponing initiatives, as well as mobile advertising,” Mr.
Highley said. “We see an appetite from the consumer side to engage in
mobile couponing and loyalty programs, especially in the
current economy.” ■
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 36
M
For be s o n mo bile : t he ne w ca pit alist to ol
l
By Jeff Bauer
obile today is about where the Web was in 1998. Bandwidth
levels are low, the browsers are limited, and animation for­
mats are primitive. Flash support is far from ubiquitous.
Before the iPhone, mobile meant getting your email wherever you
were, but post the success of the iPhone, audiences are looking at mo­
bile as a venue for media consumption.
BlackBerry Web browsers were slow to mature, but they are now
quite good and we are seeing increased engagement from the business
decision makers on mobile devices.
The Palm Pre is also an excellent platform for news and applica­
tions, and with the HTML/CSS­based WebOS there are a lot of Web de­
velopers who have the applicable skills to develop for the Palm.
Mobile will bring a boost to news consumption as users will con­
sume more news now that they can have access more frequently. There
Advertisers are being cautious with spending overall, and so investments
in emerging media are not where they should be based on audience.
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
will naturally be some reduction in
frequency of Web visits but overall
the mobile Web and applications
will help to increase news and
media consumption.
The availability of an increased
frequency of high­quality content
will fuel higher rates of consump­
tion. The bigger shift will be as
users continue to migrate from
television to the Web and to
mobile devices. Jeff Bauer, product and creative
However, advertisers are being
director, Forbes Media
cautious with spending overall, and so investments in emerging media
are not where they should be based on audience.
The other factor is that many advertisers do not yet have sites opti­
mized for mobile, so that advertising in the mobile space gives a bad
user experience.
Home screen for business leaders
Mobile is one of the great values in marketing right now because
you can reach a highly desirable target while they are responsive to
media and highly engaged, and share of voice is very high.
Mobile is a natural extension of the Forbes brand. As business de­
cision makers and affluent individuals have moved into new mediums,
Forbes has made it a priority to serve them wherever, whenever and
however they wish to be reached.
Now that a significant audience is consuming media on mobile, we
are providing a comprehensive – while still keeping it lightweight –
content browsing experience on the mobile Web.
We have also launched two mobile applications. One is the
Forbes.com Mobile Reader for BlackBerry that helps users to get fast
access to all of our news, stock quotes, features and opinions as soon
as it is available on the Web, and it stores the full stories locally so that
you can read them whether you have a connection or not.
The Intelligent Investing application for iPhone features personal
interviews between [Forbes chairman] Steve Forbes and investing lu­
minaries, as well as investing panels and quick tips for how to navigate
today’s tumultuous investing landscape.
What do publishers need to do to get mobile right, both in terms of
audience and revenue? That is really the billion­dollar question, is it
not? Truth be told, most publishers are experimenting and struggling
with this one, and it will be some time before the true leaders emerge.
We know that we need to be where the audience is, and we need to
provide content and applications that they value and come back to.
Start by learning more about your audience and carefully crafting
the mobile experience to their needs, and then serving more relevant
ads in more engaging formats. And, of course, the advertisers have to
see the efficacy of mobile campaigns. ■
Jeff Bauer is product and creative director at Forbes Media, New York.
Reach him at jbauer@forbes.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 37
A
W hy a mobi le a d n etwo rk matt ers to pu bli shers

s
By Eric Holmen similar strategies that take advantage of the iPhone and BlackBerry’s
browsing capabilities.
s the mobile ecosystem continues to grow and thrive, even in Other networks go further,
adverse economic conditions, more attention is being paid to bridging not only the content­view­
the growing phenomenon of mobile advertising networks. ing gap between smartphones and
Mobile ad networks are crucial to the continued growth of the mo­ traditional handsets but also the gap
bile economy, and are contingent to the sustainability of the existing between consumer touch points by
mobile revenue structure. offering partnerships with other
These networks are evolving and expanding as rapidly as the mobile media channels, including broad­
industry itself, and they are serving an ever­widening range of channel cast channels such as radio, print
partners – advertisers, marketers, publishers and content providers. Oh, and television.
and do not forget about the other benefactors – consumers. These comprehensive networks
Mobile ad networks function as a critical intermediary between represent the future of mobile ad­
businesses looking to reach consumers and publishers seeking revenues vertising. By being highly accessi­
for their mobile content. They provide an often full­service means for ble by both advertisers and
Eric Holmen, president,
SmartReply

advertisers to enter the mobile market without dedicating outsized re­ publishers and highly visible to consumers, these networks can deliver
sources to developing contact lists, messaging and outreach tactics. as many as 200 million unique impressions per week.
The networks are vital in assisting publishers by placing their con­
tent inventory, from premium sales to remnant distribution, and can Channeling energies
provide a visible platform for smaller and newer content providers. Perhaps the most important reason mobile networks seem to be
The determined and continuing rise in mobile usage, combined with gaining prominence at such a rapid rate is the way in which they reduce
an increase in content developers and publishers, has pushed the rev­ the barriers to entry into the mobile advertising market for companies
new to the channel.
Put simply, mo­
bile networks allow
advertisers without
direct contact lists to
take advantage of
SMS and other mo­
bile marketing initia­
tives without undue
pre­campaign
buildup.
Networks, partic­
ularly those with
comprehensive dis­
tribution models,
with their marketing
capabilities and
cross­channel part­
nerships, offer ad­
vertisers a one­stop
shop for mobile ad­
vertising solutions,
reducing or eliminat­
ing the need for
Ad networks link advertisers and publishers in ways that a market free of intermediaries could never achieve.
costly infrastructural
enue generation potential of mobile advertising through the roof. This investment on the part of the advertiser.
is undeniable. Why would a company invest scarce capital into an in­house mobile
The proliferation of smartphones has also expanded the emerging initiative when a mobile ad network can provide unique touches, pen­
channel’s prospects. etration and a sizable return at a fraction of the cost?
Where once mobile advertising networks had to be tailored specif­ Conversely, mobile ad networks are also expanding to include mul­
ically to WAP and SMS, next­generation networks are employing Web­ tiple channels, including broadcast channels, and can often be an
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 39
avenue for an advertiser with a strictly mobile strategy to take advan­
tage of a multichannel campaign.
Though there are few but an increasing number of advertisers that

Check your inbox.

engage solely in mobile campaigns, participation in an ad network can

allow them to reap the benefits of an initiative that reaches across media
channels. This trend is illustrative of the power of mobile when com­
bined with other mediums.
Advertisers and publishers alike are realizing that mobile advertis­
ing, while effective on its own, is truly resonant when used in conjunc­
tion with other, more traditional mediums or as part of a
comprehensive, cross­media marketing strategy.
Cases in point: In­store point of sale advertisement coupled with
mobile couponing or mobile ads reinforced by radio spots.
These kinetic couplings represent the way forward for advertisers
seeking to reach their constituencies in relevant, actionable ways, and
the path to these is being forged by leading mobile ad networks.
On the other end of the mobile advertising equation are the pub­
Are you receiving

lisher, the content provider and the ultimate platform by which mobile
advertisements reach the consumer.
Mobile Marketer Daily,

For them, these ad networks are a vital method by which to sell your first­thing­in­the­

morning Monday through

their remnant inventory – that content not purchased at a premium.

It should be noted, however, that an increasing number of ad net­
works offer a full range of solutions from premium content sales to
lower­CPM remnant dispersal. Friday intelligence report

Remnant inventory sales are an important part of the mobile ad net­

work business model, and are particularly crucial to top publishers
on mobile newsmakers?

seeking to distribute the bottom third of their content inventory. But, ul­
timately, these are only part of the story.

Middleman, not middling man

There is also the nobler publishing aspect: Networks provide a valu­
able platform for smaller and newer publishers.
There is a long tail of independent content providers. While the
open source revolution has essentially enabled an unlimited number of
publishers, only the top 50 account for 91 percent of all mobile
If not, click HERE.

advertising revenue.
The rest – and for the mobile channel, the rest signifies hundreds of
thousands of publishers – fight for visibility and the remaining 9 per­
cent of advertising revenue.
An incoming publisher, new to the market, inherits a support struc­
ture and a distribution capability by engaging a mobile ad network that
it would be hard­pressed to achieve trying to sell content on its own.
Ad networks, in situations such as this, serve to expand the avail­
ability of content throughout the mobile sphere, and help raise the level
of publishing quality by fostering competition.
Indeed, ad networks link advertisers and publishers in ways that a
market free of intermediaries could never achieve.
Networks also provide crucial services to advertisers both new to
the market and unwilling to assume the burden of in­house mobile
marketing implementation.
On the other side, mobile ad networks are key to distributing and
selling all tiers of content inventory, and can help showcase emerging publishers.
As the number of mobile subscribers continues to increase, and con­
sumer comfort level with mobile capabilities continues to grow, mobile
advertising can only become more important to the industry. And as
advertising becomes more central, these ad networks become ever
more relevant.
Relevant and vital to the growth of our industry, the mobile ad net­
work is here to stay. ■
Mobile Marketer

Eric Holmen is president of SmartReply, Irvine, CA. Reach him at

eholmen@smartreply.com
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING PAGE 40
The potential of SMS advertising

S
By Alan Pascoe Opportunities of in­message SMS ads
In­message SMS advertising provides the widest reach of any mo­
hort message service (SMS) dominates the mobile message space bile messaging channel.
and presents an untapped opportunity for the next generation of This approach allows carriers to insert advertising content such as
mobile advertising. sponsored commercial text or voicemail enrichment into the unused
According to Juniper Research’s “Mobile Messaging & IP Evolu­ portion of text messages.
tion: Players, Strategies & Forecasts 2009­2014” report, person­to­ The typical text message comprises about 80 characters of the 160­
person (P2P) SMS is forecasted to generate global revenues of nearly character allotment, leaving sufficient space for additional material. To
$70 billion in 2009. illustrate, this sentence, including spaces, comprises exactly
P2P mobile email, mobile instant messaging (MIM) and multimedia 80 characters.
messaging service (MMS), in comparison, are estimated to generate As Juniper said in its mobile messaging report, “The ubiquity of
about $22 billion combined. SMS in terms of being supported by almost every mobile phone model
While newer forms of messaging are capturing consumer attention, creates a large addressable market for SMS­based advertising campaigns.”
subscribers by and large are communicating with the simple text message. Carriers’ benefits from in­mes­
The wireless carriers’ problem is that this revenue growth overshad­ sage SMS include:
ows profitability predictions.
A 2008 Frost & Sullivan report projects that the number of text mes­ • Increased revenue. Carriers
sages – including P2P, application­to­person (A2P) and person­to­ provide advertisers with real­time
application (P2A) – will grow at a compound annual growth rate demographic and behavioral data,
(CAGR) of 15.6 percent from 2007 to 2011, while SMS revenues are coupled with presence and
only on pace to grow at a CAGR of 5.9 percent over that same period. location awareness.
In turn, carriers need new ways to bolster the bottom line. This in turn enables personal­
ized and relevant communication
that advertisers covet and sub­
scribers notice. The outcomes are
higher open rates and granular suc­
Alan Pascoe, senior product

cess metrics, providing measurable means to create pricing models and

marketing manager, Teletek

improve future programs’ success.

• Increased customer loyalty. Ad­funded SMS business models

enable subscribers to opt in to receive commercial content in exchange
for reduced rates. The result: all sides win. Advertisers expand their au­
diences. Consumers receive content of their choosing. Carriers better
serve and retain their subscribers.

• Lower subscriber costs. Carriers can offer reduced­priced text

messaging plans in exchange for SMS advertisements. This incents
subscribers to opt in to receive messages and lowers their monthly bills
– without decreasing overall revenues.

SMS hit
Mobile advertising offers an unprecedented ability for brands to
build highly targeted, personal relationships with consumers. The sheer
number of devices, matched with the carriers’ control over their net­
works and knowledge of subscribers, is fertile ground for brand adver­
tisers and marketers.
The characteristics that make SMS a great tool for personal commu­
nication – pervasiveness, immediacy and relevance – make it an ideal
tool for advertisers and a great potential revenue source for carriers. ■

Alan Pascoe is senior manager for product marketing at Tekelec, Mor­

risville, NC. Reach him at alan.pascoe@tekelec.com
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 41
M
Making a cas e for mobile video adve rtising
g
By Thomas N. Ellsworth
obile video programming that goes beyond live television
broadcast has been developing for a while. As this content
continues to mature into a mainstream medium, video adver­
tising forms and business models are coming into focus as well.
To be clear, I am not referencing the ads and pods of ads present in
popular live TV programming that can be viewed on video­capable
phones available from select wireless carriers.
Those ads were placed by media or channel owners and distributed
to homes via broadcast, cable and satellite. That stream was, in turn,
merely converted and distributed to mobile devices. In this case, the
ads on cable are now the same ads on mobile.
Beyond live TV, there is a growing and diverse world of program­
ming available to mobile phone users. This made­for­mobile content in­
cludes episodical series, special events and custom programs that
augment movies and live TV shows.
With this programming comes the obvious need to monetize it
through various business models, including mobile video advertising.
Content type and implied demographics remain the main
targeting elements used for mobile video ads
Rolling with business models
Today, monetizing methods include micropayments for individual
viewing, monthly subscriptions and broader monthly rate plans that
grant access to bundled programming.
Mobile video advertising allows consumers to access content with­
out incurring any of the aforementioned costs and, therefore, greater
viewership. It remains the most attractive business model.
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
Video ad forms currently include pre­roll, post­roll and interstitials
designed to appear within the mobile content. The number and length
of ads typically is monitored by wireless carriers so as not to interfere
with the consumer’s access to, and enjoyment of, the content.
Today, a number of mobile advertising companies – not established
agencies or advertising conglomerates – have built the systems and re­
lationships that comprise much of the mobile advertising ecosystem.
This ecosystem includes banner advertising, aggregation of mobile
content inventory, ad scheduling and insertion, mediation processes
and reporting systems.
While banner advertising is well established, only a few of the mo­
bile advertising companies have built the systems required to manage
and deliver video ads.
These early players pitch mobile inventory to agencies and adver­
tisers through the established ad­
vertising sales process. Agencies
and their clients typically incorpo­
rate mobile video advertising into
wider campaigns and garner
additional reach into select
consumer segments.
Spots will call shots
Mobile video ads are mainly
targeted based on programming
genre. User information is difficult
to obtain and today there is a dearth
Thomas N. Ellsworth, CEO,
GoTV Networks
of it. Thus, content type and implied demographics remain the main
targeting elements used for mobile video ads.
As carriers open information flows, while not breaching consumer
privacy requirements, targeting methods and associated algorithms will
improve accordingly.
Mobile advertising offers a benefit that is particularly appealing to
wireless carriers: increased average revenue per user.
The carrier networks are key members of the ecosystem and in­
creasing the revenue and margin per subscriber is a key business
metric. As mobile rate plans increasingly offer bundles to consumers,
carriers are hard­pressed to find incremental revenue and profit
per user.
Furthers, consumers who spend $70 to $100 per month on a bun­
dled rate plan have very little propensity, and even less disposable in­
come, to buy additional products – including video programming. By
collecting a percentage of mobile advertising revenues, carriers can in­
crease the revenue per user.
Mobile video services will become mainstream over the course of
the next few years. Bundles rate plans, additional video­capable phones
and exciting content will expand the audience from the early adopters
of today to crowds of core consumers. Mobile advertising will be a
key enabler. ■
Thomas N. Ellsworth is CEO of GoTV Networks, Sherman Oaks, CA.
Reach him at ellsworth@gotvnetworks.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 42
T
Reaching the f ragmented mobile audience

e
By Faraz A. Syed with a Web page completely different to that of a BlackBerry user.
However, both may be inclusive of your target market.
he extent of the world’s love affair with their mobile phones was As a result, developers are
recently revealed in a United Nations report which showed that forced to create a myriad of ver­
more than half of the global population now pays to use one. sions to ensure the optimal end­
The survey, by the International Telecommunications Union, an user experience, or risk minimal
agency of the U.N., also found that nearly one­quarter of the world’s 6.7 engagement – an expensive and
billion people now surf the Internet using their handsets. time­consuming process.
It is therefore no surprise that mobile marketers are keen to leverage This diversity is also found in
the mobile opportunity and engage with their target audiences via the the software running on these mo­
fourth screen. bile phones, with an abundance of
The explosive growth of smartphone handsets in the marketplace mobile operating system platforms
and the increased use of data services such as mobile search and content such as Java, Android, Symbian
downloads have both acted as catalysts for this new advertising opportunity. and BREW, all requiring consider­
However, despite the attractive offering of the current mobile cli­ ation when developing campaigns.
Faraz A. Syed, CEO,

mate, consumers are now demanding that mobile marketing campaigns

DeviceAnywhere

deliver a quality of experience that matches the technology available or Billions and billions served
risk minimal uptake. The issue of fragmentation is likely to become increasingly appar­
ent in the year ahead as mo­
bile advertisers look to take
advantage and monetize the
explosion in mobile
applications.
With Apple recently an­
nouncing more than 1 billion
application downloads and
rival stores from almost all
the leading carriers and
handset manufacturers being
announced, the opportunity
for reaching the mobile au­
dience is clearly apparent.
Some brands have al­
ready made the decision to
launch branded applications,
such as Carling with “Fill &
Drink.” However, this was
exclusively available on the
The issue of fragmentation is likely to become increasingly apparent in the year ahead as mobile
iPhone and given that reach
is almost always a key ob­
advertisers look to take advantage and monetize the explosion in mobile applications.

E pluribus and numb
The aim for today’s marketer is therefore to move away from re­
liance on SMS and MMS campaigns and fully exploit the mobile op­
portunity. Yet this is not as easy as it sounds.
The diversity of the ecosystem, in terms of both the hardware and
software currently in the mobile wilderness, represents a significant
stumbling block to any mobile marketing campaign for the mass mar­
ket, be it using the idle screen, social networking sites or even mobile
banner ads on a mobile­friendly Web site.
From a hardware perspective, mobile marketers are faced with a
plethora of screen sizes, resolutions and processing power for which
to take into consideration.
For example, the owner of an Apple iPhone would view and interact
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
jective for marketing and advertising, this illustrates the challenge fac­
ing the industry.
With an abundance of application stores on the horizon and the dra­
matic growth in the use of the mobile Internet, the opportunity for mo­
bile advertising is finally coming of age.
Marketers have an opportunity to reach audiences in new and ex­
citing ways. But key to the success of such campaigns will be deliver­
ing a compelling end­user experience.
This element will rely not just on the content created, but ensuring
that it delivers the same experience across a variety of handsets. ■
Faraz A. Syed is CEO of DeviceAnywhere, San Mateo, CA. Reach him
at faraz@deviceanywhere.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 43
M
7 wa ys to m ak e y ou r id le sc re en c a mp ai gn d e liv er
r
By Jon Jackson
obile Web. SMS. In­application. Mobile video. Mobile
search. Active idle. Marketers have more ways than ever be­
fore to reach consumers on the mobile device.
Yet, with more options available come more questions from adver­
tisers who want to avoid missteps and make their mobile advertising
campaigns successful from the start:
“Where do I begin with mobile advertising?”
“What about my existing advertising plans?”
“How do I do this, exactly?”
Each marketing medium has its own set of rules – no two are alike.
Marketers can improve their chances of success by taking the time to
learn the best practice associated with each.
While there’s no substitute for first­hand experience, here are a few
tips and tricks to help make your next idle screen mobile advertising
campaign really shine.
1. Be creative. Creative for the small screen does not need to be
boring. Give them something to remember with an eye­catching ad­
vertisement. Full­color, multi­screen creative helps to capture the user’s
attention and ensure a great response.
You have invested tremendous resources in your brand, so be sure
that your mobile creative showcases it in the best light.
2. Make a point. Mobile phone displays are still pretty small, and
half of the U.S. population has less­than­perfect vision. Virtually every­
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
one owns a mobile phone nation­
wide, so make sure that your mes­
sage works whether your audience
is 17 or 70.
Pithy, to­the­point copy keeps
your message large and legible on
any device.
One more benefit: concise copy
makes your message that much
easier to remember.
3. Bring value. The mobile
phone is a personal device, so per­
sonalize your offer and target, tar­
Jon Jackson, founder/CEO,
Mobile Posse
get, target. Deliver one ad to women, another to men. Serve one offer
at noon on Tuesdays, and a second at 3 p.m. on Saturdays. Send one
message to users in Los Angeles, and another to New Yorkers.
Targeting keeps your offer relevant to the recipient, and helps to
optimize user response. The idle screen brings you an engaged audi­
ence. Make the most of it with an offer that is the perfect fit.
4. Interact. Mobile is an interactive medium, so take that opportu­
nity to build a relationship with your customers. Ask a question, deliver
a poll or promote a contest.
You will find that consumer response to interactive messages often
exceeds that for traditional standalone ads.
Consumers love to give their opinions, so get your message across
by giving them a reason to respond. You may even learn a few things
about your customers in the process.
5. Take action. Now that you have got their attention, do not miss
your chance to seal the deal.
The call to action is an essential element of any mobile idle screen
campaign. Encourage users to take immediate action on your advertis­
ing message with a phone call, mobile Web visit or SMS.
The easier that you make it for mobile consumers to take advantage
of your offer, the more likely they are to do so.
6. Keep it fresh. After a few weeks of great initial response, you do
not want to run the risk of compromising that great engagement.
The prominence of the mobile idle screen warrants keeping the ex­
perience fresh. Get your money’s worth by mixing it up with refreshed
creative, a new offer or revised messaging.
Small changes, released every few weeks, will keep your campaign
working for you.
7. Be complementary. Consumers still interact with television,
radio, Web and outdoor – do not be afraid to extend your traditional
advertising campaigns to the mobile device.
If you already have a mobile Web site or SMS promotion in the
works, that is great, too. Make the most of your current campaign by
adding a mobile idle screen component to your plans.
Mobile really is at its best when used as just one element of a com­
prehensive multimedia advertising strategy. ■
Jon Jackson is founder/CEO of Mobile Posse, McLean, VA. Reach him
at jon@mobileposse.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 44
M
MMS adver tising as a utilit y for advertis ers

s
By Richard Eicher MMS advertising as a utility: The Holy Grail
The capability for online advertising to be tracked and linked di­
MS marketing has a pretty obvious and well known use case rectly to online transactions is a significant contributor to the success
– to deliver a rich media communication to an end user that of Web advertising and commerce.
is engaging, personal, timely and relevant to the user. The enabling technology is a
MMS advertising for delivering ads within MMS content and com­ unique identifier called a “cookie”
munications is well known. But what is only recently coming to light which is automatically and seam­
is how MMS advertising can also be used as a utility for advertisers. lessly provided by the advertise­
ment, stays with you while you
MMS advertising: The basic form browse and is redeemed automati­
MMS advertising inserted within third­party MMS communications cally at the online point
or content can be in the form of images, pre/post­roll video, text and of purchase.
background audio. Unfortunately, most other ad­
Since most MMS­enabled handsets support the ability to “click­ vertising mediums do not have a
through” – just like an SMS does – this means that both cost­per­ “cookie” alternative to track an
thousand (CPM) and cost­per­click (CPC) business models can apply exact ROI from the advertisement.
Richard Eicher, founder/CEO
of Skycore

to MMS advertising.
It can either be inserted in people’s personal communication (P2P)
or within their content messages A2P (for example, messaging from
their social networks).
Inserting MMS ad content can be done rather easily without mod­
ifying any of the original content within the existing message. In fact,
manipulating the original content would be a mistake.
Also, inserting MMS advertising should be done simply by modi­
fying the SMIL presentation file of the MMS during the delivery process.
SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) is a pres­
entation format similar to HTML and is used for MMS slideshow presentation.
Until now. An identifier or “cookie” can be encoded into a 2D MMS
bar code image which we can call a “mobile coupon.” This image can
be requested from any advertisement through an SMS MO (message
originated) and delivered by an MMS MT (message terminated). That
mobile coupon remains in the recipient’s inbox or saved on her handset
wherever she goes and it can be scanned and redeemed at the point of sale.
With mobile bar code couponing, you can even offer a unique user
identifier – similar to Web cookies – for each individual phone number.
The same technology to insert a unique and relevant MMS adver­
tisement can be used to insert a unique and relevant 2D bar code image.
Suddenly the Web is no longer the only landscape with precise ROI
measurement capabilities.
The mobile device and multimedia objects
such as bar codes and eventually Near Field
Communication (NFC) will become the
“tracking cookie” of the offline world, telling
advertisers which real world ad influenced the
real­world purchase.
This type of metrics, once only available
through online analytics, will now be available
for print, radio, television and out­of­home
media. Cost­per­acquisition (CPA) advertising
models in the offline world would also
become possible.
MMS is the ideal way to deliver a mobile
2D bar code since it is delivered to a
consumer’s inbox in the same, familiar way
as SMS.
Importantly, MMS does not require any
software to be installed on the consumer’s mo­
bile phone. And it is immediately available
without having to access the Internet during the
redemption process. ■

Richard Eicher is founder/CEO of Skycore,

Boston. Reach him at reicher@skycore.com
MMS is the ideal way to deliver a mobile 2D bar code since it is
delivered to a consumer’s inbox in the same, familiar way as SMS.

MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 45

M
Tips on brand ed mobi le ap ps bey ond the iPh one

e
By Ken Singer If you are aiming toward a younger,
more urban demographic, less feature­
any said it could not be done, but Apple’s iPhone proved that rich handsets such as Motorola’s RAZR­
consumers will download and engage with a wide variety of sand KRZRs, and lower­end
branded mobile applications. smartphones are more appropriate.
The Zippo Lighter mobile application is a good example – it is the Once you know what handsets your
13th most downloaded free iPhone application, with more than 2.5 mil­ target demographic is using, you can
lion downloads, per Apple data. begin the key task of selecting a suitable
Other applications offered for everything from ski condition reports distribution channel.
to recipe finders to myriad branded mobile services for consumers have The OEM app store for the devices
generated substantial brand utility, Web site visits and even direct revenue. you are targeting is obvious, but you
However, fewer consumers use iPhones compared to the more than should add in the independent app
50 million BlackBerry users. There are also millions more smartphones stores such as Handmark, Handango
Ken Singer, CEO, Ondeego

on Windows Mobile and other proprietary operating systems. and GetJar, and a Web­to­SMS portal from a microsite.
In the United There are also
States alone, there carrier application
are more than 75 stores, but many of
million smartphone these require partic­
users. The vast ma­ ularly arduous ap­
jority are not Apple provals and testing.
iPhone users. Approval times
With the recent should be ac­
launch of Black­ counted since many
Berry App World, app stores have
Windows Mobile non­transparent ap­
Skymarket, the An­ proval processes –
droid Market and they can range from
countless other ap­ days to months.
plication stores, an Marketing your
easy­to­use distri­ application is also
bution channel now very important.
exists for these To be effective,
mobile phones. your mobile appli­
These app stores cation should be
represent the future part of a holistic
of mobile marketing strategy across mul­
and provide an ex­ tiple channels – not
traordinary opportu­ just an application.
nity for consumer You are launching a
brands to make an branded mobile
early mark in this service, and con­
emerging medium. sumers have to find
it to download it.
Appt advice Advertising on
Before you other mobile appli­
begin developing cations or Web sites
your killer market­ can be effective, but
App stores represent the future of mobile marketing and provide an extraordinary

ing app for the blogger outreach

opportunity for consumer brands to make an early mark in this emerging medium.

smartphones of the world, ask yourself who you are trying to reach. and social media is the most cost­effective way to market your
Your target demographic will determine your target handsets. mobile application. ■
Also, if you are aiming at a wealthy, educated, professional demo­
graphic, then targeting BlackBerry and Windows Mobile smartphones Ken Singer is CEO of Ondeego, Berkeley, CA. Reach him at
make sense. ken.singer@ondeego.com
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 46
B
Ho w to ens ur e t hat the b ra nd’s i Phone a pp is n’t de le te d
d
By Maya Mikhailov
uilding an iPhone application may be considered relatively easy
when compared to the effort in acquiring and retaining the at­
tention of the iPhone user.
As the iPhone App Store grows – 65,000 applications and counting
– iPhone users have become increasingly discerning. Larger brands
may leverage consumer familiarity for initial downloads, but now all
brands are finding that consumers are as fleeting as they were eager to
download the application to begin with.
No doubt industry insiders are familiar with the Pinch Media report
showing a steep drop in user application engagement after only 10 days.
So what is a brand marketer to do? They must decide if they are
building a one­off application or if they wish to establish a true
brand presence.
The former is fine for some brands, but consumers demand more of
others. This is doubly true for retailers looking to establish a lasting di­
alogue with their shoppers, which will ultimately lead to increased loy­
alty and in­store conversion.
The guidelines below are aimed at brands that wish to remain on a
consumer’s iPhone longer than a carton of milk remains drinkable in
the fridge.
If your application does not work, it is deleted
This begs the question, “Why would Apple pass an application that
doesn’t work?” Well, it did not.
Apple approved an application that worked in a predictable and nor­
mal way for a couple of testers. But real users come in volumes. And
they are not always using your application in a predictable way. That
means test, test, test. And not just on emulators but on actual devices –
iPhones and iPod touch.
Do not assume it works on all versions of the operating system.
Also, if there are promotions being organized around the application,
be prepared for traffic in waves, rather than a steady growth curve.
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
Without depth, there is only “Delete”
Nothing gets old faster than a one­trick application. Unless the point
of your application is one time use, such as a limited viral campaign,
without depth of content a user heads straight for the delete button.
In fall 2008, several major retailers launched Gift Finder applica­
tions in time for the holiday season. Although the idea was certainly an
inspired one, those applications lacked depth. Many contained a couple
of dozen gifts grouped in very pre­defined categories. After a couple of
shakes, the consumers moved on.
Simple features such as “Product Search” or “Store Finder” would
have increased the usefulness and shelf­life of these applications.
Stale content is tossed
The Gift Finder applications were
not updated to reflect post­holiday pro­
motions or changes in merchandise. So
what happens to the thousands of users
who downloaded those applications?
They were left with the equivalent of a
Christmas tree in February.
If a brand has decided to com­
mit the time and resources to
iPhone application development,
planning content and application
maintenance is vital. What would
happen if a brand never updated its Web site? It would lose favor with
Maya Mikhailov, VP, Slifter
their consumers.
The same rule applies on the iPhone. Sections such as “Events”
(from in­store to sporting event sponsorships), “Weekly Offers” or
“What’s New” will offer consumers a reason to keep accessing your
application and keeping your brand on their iPhone.
Consumers are mobile, your brand cannot be static
IPhone users are not sitting at a PC accessing a Web site. They are
out­and­about. So, when deciding what functionality to include in your
iPhone application, keep in mind what features are important when a
consumer is moving or away from their home or office. Examples of
that include a store or product locator feature which uses the iPhone’s
GPS system. Or tie into users’ Twitter account to let users share their
interactions with your brand on the fly.
Features such as the built­in camera and accelerometer can also be
leveraged by brands to create compelling and lasting experiences.
As the iPhone celebrates its second anniversary, users are demand­
ing better applications for their device.
As a brand marketer, making a lasting impression on this group is
no longer as simple as just being present in the App Store at the right
time. They must take into account some basic strategies. Looking at
the iPhone with considered planning will be the litmus test between
brands and their applications that have a lasting presence and those that
are thrown away. ■
Maya Mikhailov is vice president of Slifter, New York. Reach her at
maya@slifter.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 47
I
Th e a pp eal of in terac tive vo ic e re spo n se

e
By Charles Edwards

t is not sexy, it is not the latest technology, it is far from the bleeding
edge (or even the edge), nor does it conjure up thoughts of unbri­
dled marketing success at its mere mention, but IVR – interactive
voice response – is still the reigning king of mobile marketing.
It is, to say the least, the longest running mobile marketing tech­
nology and can boast full market penetration. What other technology
can make that claim and not invoke eye rolls? It was mobile marketing
before mobile phones were around.
IVR’s bad rap has come from the customer service phone trees that
seem to be everywhere. Weaving your way through the labyrinth of
questions and choices, you finally end up talking to a live person, but
it has taken so long to get to them, it is after­hours and you get their
voice mail.
IVR, not Ivy League
In my five­plus years of implementing mobile marketing campaigns
for major brands and agencies, I have seen glorious successes and
tragic failures.
What needs to be realized is that the new technology and the old can
complement each other in ways that are still fun, informative, useful
and engaging.
What also needs to be remembered is that IVR has the ability to ex­
tend the reach of a campaign. It can offer things no other technology
can offer and it can act as a seamless bridge to other technologies.
IVR does have its new technol­
ogy pieces such as voice recogni­
tion. We are increasingly seeing
iPhone, Android and even Microsoft
applications using IVR and
voice recognition.
An IVR with voice recognition
makes it easier to get content with­
out having to use the short code and
keyword to initiate the program.
Once users get their first text
IVR is familiar. You do not have to change a person’s behavior to use it.

Not to make light of the importance of these phone tree forests. message reply through IVR, it be­
Everyone knows how to dial a number.
Charles Edwards is a mobile
They have their place, but at the same time, they have done nothing to comes easier for them to interact
marketing consultant

lend a “techno­sheikh” moniker to IVR’s reputation in marketing.
Don’t just think outside the box – there are too many important
things in that box that should not be ignored, things that work and have
worked in the past. Expand the box. Think integration.
There are those brands and agencies that will want the wow factor,
the splashy headlines that say they have done something no one else has.
With new technology you can expect that people will read about
the campaign, but that opt­ins and ROI will be low. For the most part
brands are going to be about users, opt­ins, ROI and the continued one­
on­one dialogue that they can have with their customers.
The use of a keyword and a common short code can produce some
good numbers when integrated correctly with other advertising and
when targeting the more savvy groups of users. But a greater adoption
rate can be achieved by using IVR in conjunction with the short code.
with a campaign – they just need to reply to the message.
IVR is familiar. You do not have to change a person’s behavior to
use it. Everyone knows how to dial a number. And by using the added
attraction of a celebrity’s voice to convey the message, it becomes very
personal and exciting.
Your brand’s message now reaches people on a level that speaks
directly to them. It has the ability to create such excitement that the
consumer will tell others about the program and even send it to some­
one via IVR.
Beyond that it acts to bridge the technology gap to reach those oth­
erwise not inclined to participate in a text campaign. ■
Charles Edwards is a mobile marketing consultant in San Francisco.
Reach him at cpe@pacbell.net

MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 48

F lexibili ty is key for S MS coupons

O
By Jeff Brown and Ron Vetter

ne of the most common mobile marketing applications is an

SMS mobile coupon service. Consumers simply text a keyword
for a business to a common short code, and a text message
coupon is returned for that particular business.
Consumers can request coupons one at a time, or may register to
have them sent automatically each week. Ideally, the system should
support two types of SMS­based coupons: subscription and interactive.

Subscription coupons – automatically sent each week

Customers can text a keyword to a common short code or sign up
online to register to receive weekly subscription coupons from a
Jeff Brown, co­founder, Ron Vetter, co­founder,
Mobile Education LLC Mobile Education LLC

particular business.
These customers automatically get sent one subscription coupon described earlier is that businesses cannot control the number of
per week based on one of the following three tiers: high value, medium coupons that are sent offering free items or prizes.
value or low value. Customers prefer this kind of system because their coupons vary
The highest value coupons are sent first to a specific number of reg­ every week and they periodically receive better offers – for example,
istered users. After the high­value coupons have been sent, the high­ and medium­value coupons.
medium­ and low­value coupons are sent out to the remaining regis­
tered users based on percentages.
Example: Pat’s Pizza has 410 total subscribers to its keyword. The
following table shows how many of each types of coupons would be
sent for Pat’s. Each business can choose its coupon offers (column 2),
the number of high­value coupons and the percentages for medium­
and low­value coupons (column 3).
This example is to illustrate how the coupon system works:

Interactive – on demand with waiting period
The interactive coupon is a way for customers to get an on­demand
coupon from a business.
Once registered, customers simply text a company’s keyword to a
short code and they receive a coupon in a reply.
A waiting period can be placed on interactive coupons. This is the
time period the customer must wait between requesting additional in­
teractive or on­demand coupons. This period can be any length of time
desired, although most businesses will most likely use three, seven or
30 days as the waiting period.
Many businesses are willing to give away a limited number of items
or prizes each week. The flexibility in the mobile coupons system
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
In our experience, we have found that consumers are more likely to
stay registered to receive weekly mobile coupons even if they do not
plan to use every coupon because they are waiting to receive high­value
mobile coupons.
For example, a local hair salon might send weekly coupons even
though most people get their hair cut only once a month. By sending a
weekly text message, the hair salon can increase its branding opportu­
nities, thus ensuring eventual growth at a steady clip. ■
Jeff Brown and Ron Vetter are founders of Mobile Education LLC,
Wilmington, NC. Reach Mr. Brown at jeffbrown@mymobed.com
and Mr. Vetter at ronvetter@mymobed.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 49
A
Web a naly t ics and mob ile ana lyt ic s a re not sim ilar
r
By Jose Villa
s you prepare to take your marketing campaign into the mobile
space you should know that the analytics you are familiar with
to measure the effectiveness, reach and overall success and per­
formance of your Web site cannot simply be reapplied to measure the
success of your mobile marketing strategy.
Mobile analytics is a whole new ball game. Here are some of the
differences in the rules.
Web is to mobile as apples are to oranges
If Web analytics measure visits, impressions, page views, click­
through rate, conversion, referrals, bounce rates, browser type, time on
site, number of unique and first­time visitors and tracks users’ footsteps
as they navigate in, through and out of your site, what more information
could mobile analytics reveal?
The answer is a lot more.
Think of mobile devices as the keepers of your users’ DNA. In ad­
dition to traditional information, mobile analytics collects user­specific
data such as device, carrier, geographic location, language and unique
visitor identification.
This data can help you focus in on your user demographics to de­
velop an effective mobile strategy that shoots straight for your
marketing goals.
Data resulting from Web analytics tracking methods is incomplete or inaccurate on mobile devices into existing campaigns via a mobile roadmap but to
because mobile search optimizers do not pick up on keywords, search engines and conversions.
Web analytics methods do not work on mobile analytics
Traditional Web analytics use JavaScript page tagging, cookies or
log files to track users. Services such as Google Analytics aggregate
this data and provide snapshots that can help you see how well your
Web site content, design and marketing strategy resonates with users.
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
However, these services do not cut it when it comes to mobile an­
alytics. Data resulting from Web analytics tracking methods is incom­
plete or inaccurate on mobile
devices because mobile search op­
timizers do not pick up on key­
words, search engines and
conversions. Why?
Because JavaScript, HTTP
cookies, HTTP referrer and IP ad­
dress information are either not
supported by mobile browsers or
are misleading due to the location
of the wireless carrier’s
Internet gateway.
Jose Villa, CEO, Sensis
Approaches to mobile analytics
The right mobile analytics methods include image tags, link redirec­
tion in place of HTTP referrer information, HTTP header analysis to
collect data about the user’s device and browser, and IP address analysis
that can distinguish between the mobile device’s geographic location
and that of the network’s Internet gateway.
Web analytics expert Bryson Meunier assesses vendors such as
Bango and Mobilytics, which can collect this data, but the best ap­
proach is a combination of in­house agency and third­party services to
ensure that analytics are translated and stated in
terms of your business and marketing objectives.
Ultimately, you will be able to identify your site’s
key performance indicators (KPI) which may differ
from those of your traditional Web site and to know
exactly who your most important visitors are and
what content they access with their devices.
This information can help refine your campaign
goals, identify and implement the right solutions to
reach your market, improve ROI and establish
processes for continuous improvement.
Why you cannot ignore mobile analytics
Web analytics guru Jim Sterne states that “no
matter how much data is collected and no matter
what collection method is used, all of this is useless
unless it’s actionable.”
An ABI Research study estimates that the mobile
browser market will grow from 76 million in 2007 to
almost 700 million in 2013.
Hence, it is imperative for marketers to not only
develop mobile strategies that can be incorporated
know the difference Web and mobile analytics in
order to glean the right insights that can lead to actionable results and
therefore more effective mobile marketing. ■
Jose Villa is CEO of Sensis, Los Angeles. Reach him at
jrvilla@sensisagency.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 50
T
Local TV stations see mobile in the picture for advertisers

By Leon Spencer paign is the reach that TV has to go out and grab the consumer to tell
them that they can use their mobile device when ordering a pizza.
he world’s first television advertisement was broadcast on Another good example of how TV stations are using mobile is while
July 1, 1941. The watchmaker Bulova paid $4 for a placement consumers are checking out the weather forecast they see their local
on New York station WNBT before a baseball game between bank’s clickable logo. They can click on the logo, be taken to their
the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. bank’s mobile Web site and conduct a banking transaction.
The 10­second spot displayed a picture of a clock superimposed on Again, the advertiser, in this case a bank, has the power of TV be­
a map of the United States, accompanied by the voiceover “America hind its mobile marketing efforts.
runs on Bulova time.”
S i n c e TV will make news
then, TV sta­ Although the marketplace has not yet arrived at mass mobile video
tions have usage, TV stations can offer an incredible amount of video to mobile users.
grown signif­ As mobile TV and the acceptance of mobile video continue to grow,
icant revenue TV stations will be right there with a multitude of video files available
through ad for their site visitors.
sales and con­ Advertisers, too, can take ad­
tinue to do so. vantage of the video with pre­roll
The question commercial spots that air in front of
now is, how video content.
to continue SMS has been working well for
the growth TV station advertisers as well as
while assist­ banner campaigns. The reason,
ing our adver­ once again, is the strength of
tisers in TV’s reach.
reaching con­ Texting programs wherein TV
sumers. viewers are encouraged to text a
One most specific word to a specific common director, WVLT­TV/VolunteerTV.com
Leon Spencer, interactive sales

recent suc­ short code have been going on for a

cess for TV while, including shows such as “American Idol” and “Dancing with
stations is the Stars.”
mobile mar­ Local advertisers can run similar commercial announcements to
keting. TV build their marketing databases, introduce new products or offer
stations have mobile coupons.
built mobile With all of the mobile options available to advertisers, the decision
platforms that is not whether to have a mobile campaign but which of the mobile op­
are an exten­ tions will work best for their specific needs.
sion of their Consumers have made the shift to mobile, and now successful ad­
main Web vertisers will go where the customers are.
sites wherein TV viewers are opting to receive more information from the stations
consumers and their partners. Advertisers should take notice, build their own data­
can get their bases and design their campaigns around SMS and applications that
As mobile TV and the acceptance of mobile video continue

sports scores, will assist them in this process. TV stations can definitely help with
to grow, TV stations will be right there with a multitude of

weather up­ this effort.

video files available for their site visitors.

dates and news headlines but in a more personal manner – from their
mobile devices.
Branding with banner ads on a TV station’s mobile site is a popular
way to keep a brand in the forefront of the consumers’ minds.
A good example is that while consumers are searching their favorite
sports team’s scores they are confronted with a pizza chain logo. This
logo is clickable to all of the chain’s local restaurant locations as well
as their telephone numbers. The consumer can then click­to­call the lo­
cation where they would like to order a pizza.
The advantage to the pizza chain of using TV for this type of cam­
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
If an advertiser does not have a mobile element in its advertising
mix, then the competition is probably going to take some of its
market share.
It is a long way from that first TV commercial, but TV stations are
on the cutting edge of new media. TV stations are helping to design the
future of interactive advertising and mobile fits right into that picture. ■
Leon Spencer is interactive sales director at WVLT­
TV/Volunteertv.com, Knoxville, TN. Reach him at
leon.spencer@wvlt­tv.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 51
P
Va lu e b es t p ra ct ice i n m o bi le m a rk et in g

g
By Chris Brassington opt in to a brand’s mobile messaging program, relevancy is
absolutely critical.
ersonalized mobile interaction including text and picture mes­ If they choose to receive messages about weather, be sure to send
sages has become one of the most popular ways on the planet for them local forecasts. If sports scores are what you are offering, make
people to communicate. Its growth is staggering. sure the consumer’s favorite teams are included in the message.
According to a report from Tomi Ahonen Consulting, the number This does not mean a marketer cannot add on sponsor messages
of global mobile messaging users has climbed to more than 3 billion. and other promotions, but relevant and timely content should always
Seventy­six percent of all mobile phone subscribers actively send and take the lead.
receive SMS text messages. The same thing goes for subscriber fatigue.
Three billion messaging consumers translates to twice the number Send too many messages, and your opt­in friend will soon be your
of television sets in homes, two­and­a­half times the number of people opt­out enemy. Breaking news 15 times a day can be overwhelming, so
using email and three times the number of computers on the Internet. consider one or two messages a day instead.
This phenomenal growth represents an amazing opportunity for Leverage tie­ins to other media channels. To further add value
marketers. But what are some of the most important practices to keep for the consumer and promote your other marketing channels, prompt
in mind when developing mobile messaging campaigns? the user to tune in to your television
Gaining access to a consumer’s mobile device is an intimate in­ show or go online for more
vitation. Individuals store their contacts, check their email and visit information.
favorite mobile sites directly from their phones. 2ergo recently launched a pro­
Having a consumer opt in to receive updates or learn more about a gram with National Geographic
brand via mobile messaging is only the beginning of the marketer/con­ Channel for its Dog Whisperer tel­
sumer relationship. Treat it like gold and understand that each opt in is evision series that sent mobile mes­
a privilege and not sages with a dog­training tip and
a right. reminder to watch the show two
Get to know the hours before each week’s episode.
Mobile Marketing The program received kudos from
Association’s Mo­ its subscribers, and National Geo­
bile Advertising graphic continues to renew this
Chris Brassington, group

Guidelines. Follow program.

managing director, 2ergo

them to the letter or Learn from your subscriber base – immediately. O2, a leading
risk being banned. British wireless carrier with 18.4 million customers, implemented a
Mobile interac­ wide­reaching mobile messaging strategy with 2ergo that enabled the
tion is the gateway company to send regular SMS, MMS and email updates on special of­
to your brand. Let fers, new products and other relevant campaigns to its subscriber base.
us face it: There is Thanks to the immediate responses typical with mobile and other
very little that a detailed tracking metrics, O2 now understands that certain demograph­
brand can communi­ ics respond best to SMS and MMS between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., after fin­
cate in 160 charac­ ishing their work day.
ters, so marketers By leveraging this deep insight into customer behavior, O2 has seen
should use mobile response rates between 30 percent and 65 percent. Executives with the
messaging as a gate­ company believe that mobile messaging has led to lowered costs and
way that facilitates more informed customers, which ultimately is reducing churn.
access to the Mobile marketing offers great value. The current economic cli­
brand and to mate is driving smarter business, fueling the growth in mobile market­
more information. ing and mobile customer relationship marketing.
Include brief de­ Business is responding to market conditions by spending less on
tail on the reason for TV, outdoor and print in favor of the mobile as it is a less expensive,
Send too many messages, and your opt­in friend

the message – great offer, sports scores or the latest weather – and then highly targeted and more measurable marketing channel.
will soon be your opt­out enemy

leave room for a direct link to your mobile site.
This is the best way to further engage on­the­go consumers with
your brand while providing instant analytics on response rates to plan
future campaigns.
Relevancy is key and fatigue is ever­present. When consumers
Smart marketers will keep these best practices in mind with each
and every program they choose to deploy in this mobile world. ■
Chris Brassington is group managing director of 2ergo, Manchester,
England. Reach him at chris.brassington@2ergo.com

MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 52

C
Po rs c he m obile eff or t out per f or m s o nline dis play ads
s
By Giselle Tsirulnik
armaker Porsche used mobile as part of a bigger, multichannel­
campaign to promote its luxury vehicles as affordable. Porsche's
“I Can” campaign targeted mobile consumers on Weather.com
and Yahoo and encouraged consumers to click on banner ads that said,
“You can own one, click to see how” and “Can you afford a
Porsche? Just say “I can.” The four­month­long mobile initiative out­
performed Porsche's broader campaign.
“The overall strategy was to emphasize the affordability of Porsche
products to people who didn't think this car brand was in their reach,”
said David Katz, vice president of mobile advertising and publisher
services at Yahoo, Sunnyvale, CA. “Porsche was trying to touch buyers
on the go.”
When consumers clicked through, they arrived at campaign’s WAP
site at http://m.porscheusa.com . There they could view Porsche models
and prices and click­to­call a dealer.
Porsche found that consumers clicked most over the weekend,
while out shopping or test­driving vehicles.
The carmaker thought mobile would be a good fit because its buyers
can be classified as tech­savvy.
The campaign was inspired by company research that shows that­
majority of consumers believe that the car’s price tag and ownership
costs were higher than they really were.
The mobile initiative delivered 22 of the campaign’s overall digital
traffic and the click­through rate was six times better than Porsche’s
online display advertising.
Cramer­Krasselt is Porsche’s ad agency.
“We developed an engagement strategy from the perspective of the
active consumer, facilitating one­on­one dialogue through mobile,” said
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
Brian Mandelbaum, vice president and interactive group media director
at Cramer­Krasselt, Chicago.
“Not only are Porsche customers generally tech savvy and con­
nected, but from a lifestyle perspective, mobile is an ideal way to en­
gage them,” he said. “Porsche is all about front­of­foot engagement.
“The Porsche consumer is not someone who just plops on the couch
and watches TV or curls up with a magazine everyday. They are far
more active and demand more immediate access to information.”
Mobile generated three times the volume to Porsche’s call center
than online and twice as many dealer look­ups.
The mobile site’s number of visitors was 40 percent higher than
those to the online site.
Porsche used Yahoo behavioral targeting tools to serve ads to smart­
phone users whose Web­surfing behaviors implied they were looking
for coupes, SUVs or luxury cars.
The carmaker plans to relaunch the mobile campaign in the spring
to promote the March debut of the new Cayman and Boxster models.
Porsche is not the only big brand that has seen good results running
ads on Yahoo’s mobile properties.
Visa wanted a multi­screen approach to promote its tie­in with the
Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
Visa ran banner ads on Yahoo’s Mobile Olympic site. Ultimately,
the goal of the campaign was to drive traffic to Visa’s mobile site at
http://visa.mobi/goworld and engage users with a rich mobile experi­
ence through background stories on featured athletes.
“What I liked about this campaign is that Porsche came in with a
clear objective and was really pushing affordability,” Mr. Katz said.
“We thought they had simple, yet relevant mobile experiences.
“Porsche really took advantage of mobile in good ways and they
made use of our Yahoo behavioral targeting tools,” he said. ■
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 53
W
Bu ild ing a su cce ss fu l m ob ile bu sine ss mo de l

l
By Jay Neuman PCs, version 3 browsers and a dial­up connection.
But the iPhone is pointing the way to a more sophisticated browsing
e regularly hear from our clients and their media agencies experience and stronger branding through applications.
that the key missing link for mobile's growth is the absence There is a long long way to go, but giving consumers the ability to
of uniform metrics and barometers for success. have fun and engage with your brand directly through their phone is a
This lack of core business dynamics and modeling needs to be ad­ pre­requisite for mobile’s growth as a key channel in the
dressed quickly across the industry in order for mobile’s share of adver­ marketing mix.
tising revenues to grow and meet its future potential. The key metric of success is impressions.
Even without access to the subscriber data that carriers possess –
and rightly protect – the mobile channel offers a wealth of data which Customer relations
can act as a bedrock for developing ROI models, especially in facilitat­ One word sums up this dimension to the mobile business
ing direct response campaigns. model – loyalty.
The good news is that these mobile business models are within easy Just as people now expect to interact with businesses directly
reach for marketers. through wired Internet usage, they are also beginning to expect the
The trick is in identifying metrics that best measure success in terms same service through their mobile phones.
of the client’s larger marketing goals. This can be done by identifying The key metrics of success are
which of the following dimensions are key to meeting the clients’ larger service usage and customer retention.
marketing goals.
Cost saving
Business development Customers can use automated
Mobile marketing is, at its services through their phone that
heart, a direct response medium. It would otherwise require a more
is addressable and contains a built­ costly method of delivery.
in response capability. People In particular, the ability for mo­
could opt­in to mobile promotions bile to develop into a retailer’s
that lead to future follow­up sales. dream via text alerts and mobile
A mobile outreach could direct coupons will further augment the marketing & CRM, Telescope Inc.
Jay Neuman, director of database

people to a WAP page or Web site
where they fill in a survey.
The business development di­
mension is basically throwing out
a mobile fishing net to catch per­
mission­based opt­ins for future
sales promotions.
The key metrics of success are
responses and opt­ins.
The mobile channel offers a wealth
decline in paper and postage direct
marketing and provide a killer app which champions mobile’s qualities
above any other device.
The key metric of success is cost reduction.
Mobile commerce
This dimension is perhaps the most straightforward.
People are buying something through their mobile phone or mobile
device. They could be downloading ringtones, wallpapers or music.
They could be performing stock trades on their smartphone.

Lead generation
of data which can act as a bedrock
Whatever it is, the business objective is to sell more of it. However,
for developing ROI models,

Lead generation is one of the mobile commerce is still in its infancy. It is an important, but not the
especially in facilitating direct

most important business models on most prevalent, aspect of mobile marketing.

response campaigns.

the Internet. We all engage with it every time we click on a sponsored
search engine link. However, applying it to the mobile space is proving
a challenge. A mobile alerts club could include an opt­in or click­
through to a sponsor or advertiser.
With its ability to personalize and localize, lead generation through
mobile will emerge as a crucial way of engaging marketers.
The key metrics of success are number of leads and
revenue generated.
Brand development
Brand development could be downright fun when it really goes mo­
bile. Of course, there are mobile media buys, but currently it is a bit
like those far­off days when the Internet experience was based on 386
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
The key metrics of success are impressions and sales conversions.
Especially in the current economy, advertisers are looking to per­
formance­based media and this is an opportunity for mobile to take a
step out of the shadows and show that it can live alongside other more
established media.
These six dimensions of mobile business models can be used to cre­
ate a roadmap for your mobile campaigns and overall strategy. They
will help focus your mobile outreaches on those things most aligned
with your business objectives and provide a set of metrics to continually
improve as you achieve your goals. ■
Jay Neuman is director of database marketing and CRM at Telescope
Inc., Los Angeles. Reach him at jay.neuman@telescope.tv
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 54
O
He a r t ha t? Voi c e is k il le r a pp on mo bil e

e
By Stéphane Attal carriers and advertisers to build on
voice as the key application. It rep­
ur mobile phones are audio devices first and foremost, but you resents the most ubiquitous, rich
will be hard­pressed to believe that these days. Advertising by and accessible communication
wireless carriers and handset manufacturers would have you channel and provides an unrivalled
believe that everyone is busy searching and surfing the Internet on our opportunity for companies to com­
mobile phones as we receive relevant advertisements on them. municate with users.
In fact, there is no need to talk anymore now that Twitter, Facebook,
email and text messaging have replaced the art of conversation. Voicing appreciation
The reality is a bit different. A voice­activated user interface
Not everyone owns fancy phones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry offers commonality across most
Storm, Palm Pre or Google Android G1, all of which only represent 15 handsets, delivering a consistent Stéphane Attal, CEO, AskKinjo
percent of the total mobile phone installed base. user experience, which results in the opportunity to deliver value­added
Furthermore, recent surveys show the complexity of many handsets services that can be easily adopted.
leaves many users frustrated and angry. This then begs the question as In addition, two social factors are also stimulating the need for easy­
to­use voice­activated services.
The first is the wider adoption
of legislation mandating the use of
hands­free wireless technology
while driving. The second is the
increasing use of hosted
personal contacts.
Since carriers have failed to
build new voice services to en­
hance average revenue per user,
third parties have jumped in.
One company offers a voice­
activated audio service using the
mobile phone to deliver free loca­
tion­based content, supported by
paid contextual ads. These audio
advertisements cannot be skipped
and can reach 100 percent of the
mobile subscribers market.
In a recent study, participants
initially predicted voice search
would be the most difficult to use.
But in final usability tests, it per­
formed better than expected, with
participants enjoying voice search
Only 20 percent of mobile phone users like to use their handsets as an all­in­one multimedia device,
leaving the 80 percent “minority” to concentrate on what they think really matters – voice.
to who is left surfing the Web? much more than searching via their handsets keypad.
From the research that has been done, only 20 percent of mobile This finding may well have a bearing on the future success or fail­
phone users like to use their handsets as an all­in­one multimedia de­ ure of voice­in, display­out search applications released by some of the
vice, leaving the 80 percent “minority” to concentrate on what they best­known Internet search companies.
think really matters – voice. In the end, the majority of North American mobile users are still
When questioned about possible additional services, this huge “mi­ reliant on traditional voice features, despite their perceived willingness
nority” states time and time again that they prefer voice as their main to adopt newer, advanced applications.
communication channel. Carriers, content providers and advertisers just need to recognize
With the current economic downturn, this is having a disruptive ef­ that voice is still the killer application with mobile users. ■
fect as data services usage falls and consumers limit their monthly
spending to traditional voice and text services. Stéphane Attal is CEO of AskKinjo, Toronto, Ontario. Reach him at
This reliance on traditional voice presents a golden opportunity for stephane.attal@askkinjo.com

MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 55

M
AB Cs o f m ob ile ad ver t is in g op t im izat io n

n
By Harald Neidhardt Even on basic targeting criteria such as the geographical origin of
an impression on a country level, some mobile ad networks are not ca­
obile advertising is getting traction and is becoming an inte­ pable of delivering a fill rate above 25 percent.
gral part of today’s marketing mix. But it is still a very tough A new category of mobile ad optimizers has emerged. They fill and
job for mobile publishers and mobile developers to monetize optimize mobile advertising inventory by aggregating ad networks
their inventory, especially when it comes to non­direct­sold inventory. across different global regions and different pricing models.
The usual approach to overcome this crucial problem is to work with
several ad networks specializing in mobile advertising. Three­tier pricing model
Unfortunately, most mobile ad networks are not capable of mone­ Similar to the online advertising market, different tiers of moneti­
tizing each single page impression or tend to serve low eCPM run­of­ zation can be identified, which are dependent on the characteristics of
network advertisements. the inventory:
To react to this challenge, some publishers chain several ad net­ 1. Premium display inventory is mainly sold direct and guarantees
works together and form so­called daisy chains, which cause higher ad advertisers a specific placement
server latencies and might lower the overall user experience. and time frame for their media
Furthermore, the number of mobile ad networks is growing but their (high eCPMs greater $10).
performances differ significantly. These tier 1 ad budgets usually
It is a time­consuming have a low fill rate and tend to be
and expensive task to find CPM­based.
out which mobile ad net­ 2. Secondary premium inven­
works deliver the highest tory is sold automated via premium
eCPMs and fill rates for a ad networks with the same guaran­
specific inventory, especially tees as premium. Second­tier in­
when there are limited re­ ventory creates medium eCPMs
sources for a professional between $1 and $10 and the volume
ad­ops team. remains also limited.
Harald Neidhardt, co­founder
and CMO of Smaato

This trend towards lower eCPMs is even
worse when the supply of mobile inventory
This article describes es­
sential challenges for mobile
publishers and mobile devel­
opers to monetize their
whole inventory.
Steep increase of unsold
inventory
To monetize their whole
mobile inventory, most mo­
bile publishers and develop­
ers sell their unsold remnant
inventory via mobile ad net­
works. Mobile ad networks
3. Non­premium inventory is sold automated over ad networks (low
eCPMs of $1) and is mostly based on cost per click.
Premium inventory represents only a small amount of the overall in­
ventory – best ad spaces on the site. Therefore, premium publishers
such as well­known, branded Web sites connect to a premium ad net­
work to monetize their secondary inventory.
The inventory that is not filled by one of these channels is mone­
tized by non­premium ad networks.
Advent of ad network chains
Different ad networks generally offer publishers a trade­off between
a high eCPM and a good fill rate. Therefore, medium and large mobile
publishers are usually connected to several mobile ad networks.
A combination of premium ad networks monetizing their best ad

are intermediaries which ag­ spaces, specific regional­focused and horizontal ad networks connected
grows faster than the demand, as is the

gregate advertisers (buy to many advertisers is typical.

case at the moment

side) and publishers (sell side) on a shared revenue basis (about 40 per­
cent for buy side).
Especially in these economic times with decreasing marketing
budgets, mobile ad networks tend to optimize on behalf of their adver­
tisers goals (buy side), which results in decreasing eCPMs.
This trend towards lower eCPMs is even worse when the supply of
mobile inventory grows faster than the demand, as is the case at
the moment.
The percentage of served ads versus requested ads is the fill rate of
an ad network. The fill rates are dependent on the targeting criteria and
number of advertisers of an ad network.
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
To manage this set of mobile ad networks, publishers configure
their ad­server to send ad requests to different ad networks by guessing
their future eCPMs and fill rates.
So normally the first ad request goes out to a high eCPM network.
When the ad network defaults, the next highest­paying network is asked
for an advertisement and so forth until an ad is served.
This static sequence of ad request is called a daisy chain of ad net­
works. How good a daisy­chain actually performs can only be judged
after the ad networks provide performance data – sometimes with a
time delay of several days.
As a matter of fact, this static approach increases server latencies
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 56
 Our next

and is not capable of reacting to the dynamic pricing of the market and
may finally cause significant revenue losses.

Global monetization challenge

Classic

The management of ad networks gets even more complex for pub­

lishers with international traffic which needs to be connected to several
country­focused ad networks to monetize the whole inventory.

Guide...

These publishers need to create static daisy chains for different

countries and keep them updated, especially as ad networks perform
variably in different regions or on a country­by­country level.
Because of budgets restraints a lot of publishers cannot afford ad
ops specialists. As a result, they lose a significant amount of their po­
tential ad revenues.

Advantages of dynamic ad optimization

To solve the issues of static daisy chains and maximize advertising
yields, a dynamic ad network management technology is needed to ob­
serve the eCPM and fill rate of various ad networks or even the whole
market in real­time.
Such a solution is capable of aggregating and optimizing inventory
performance by reordering the chain of mobile ad networks upon spe­
cific inventory characteristics dynamically.
is all about

This process of dynamically optimizing ad revenues in real­time

can be referred to as dynamic ad network optimization.
mobile commerce,

and it’s coming this fall!

Value added by mobile ad optimization

Dynamic ad network optimization features these advantages for

Please inquire at
mobile publishers:
• Higher advertising yields by monetizing every single impression
on the best price
• Saving money and resources by dynamically reordering the chain
ads@mobilemarketer.com
based on performance data, inventory and user characteristics about sponsorship
opportunities.
• Lower server latencies by allocating the ad impressions to the
right network in real­time

Mobile ad optimization for publishers

Since ad network optimization is cumbersome and complex, com­
panies have emerged that give mobile publishers the opportunity to
outsource this process and make dynamic ad network optimization
available for every publisher.
Ad optimizers take an important role in aggregating different ad
networks and collect data on their performance based on different in­
ventory characteristics provided by the publisher.
This data is used to build dynamic daisy chains, which automati­
cally adapt to the changing performance of ad networks, securing the
highest ad revenues possible from tier 1 to tier 3 advertisers.
The expertise of an ad optimizer in allocating the impression to the
right ad networks in real time helps publishers to improve their ad rev­
enues without losing money by finding the best performing
ad networks.
Publishers also benefit from a scalable technology and the experi­
ence of optimizing billions of ad impressions each month.
Integrating with an ad optimizer is an easy way to maximize the
revenues without employing expensive ad ops, enabling publishers to
focus on direct sales efforts. ■

This article was adapted with permission from a white paper

published by Smaato.

Harald Neidhardt is cofounder and chief marketing officer of Smaato,

Mobile Marketer

Redwood Shores, CA, and Hamburg, Germany. Reach him at

harald@smaato.com
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 57
Maximizing mobile advertising potential requires

M
broad collaboration
By Guy Yaniv Preferring unity to division, key parties are pulling together to en­
sure wide­ranging mobile advertising success.
obile advertising presents intriguing opportunities for wire­ Two examples come from Britain, a market well positioned to be­
less carriers and other players in the value chain. However, come a huge mobile advertising success story.
mobile advertising success requires cooperation from a wide British carriers decided to put head­to­head competition aside for
range of parties, including: now and are cooperating to increase the inventory, reach and appeal of
• Advertisers: Major brands and smaller enterprises realize the high mobile advertising.
potential return on investment of reaching users on the mobile
• Ad agencies and media buyers: Aware of demand from adver­ GSMA mobile media metrics initiative
tisers, ad agencies and media buyers are investigating the mobile plat­ On the forefront of creating standards for mobile advertising,
form for delivery of campaigns GSMA recently launched a mobile media metrics program.
• Aggregators and ad networks: Aggregators and ad networks en­ The association for carriers assumes that measurements will drive
able mass audience, less targeted mobile advertising such as push SMS, the overall growth of mobile as an effective advertising platform by
and Web banners, playing an important role in testing the water in the enabling media and advertising
industry’s initial phases agencies, brands and publishers to
• Content providers: Increasing on­the­go content consumption is evaluate and deliver better mobile
a major driver for mobile advertising, both for display and content­ advertising campaigns.
based campaigns All five top British carriers are
• Carriers: Carriers can reach end­users through multiple channels: engaged in this initiative and will
voice, SMS, MMS, Web banners and interstitials. Additional unique submit mobile browsing data for
assets such as presence, impulse response capabilities, vast amounts of auditing and development of stan­
end­user information that can be used for targeting, metrics and the dard measurements, which they in­
trusted billing relationship position carriers to deliver the right ad to tend to comply with in the future.
the right person at the right time Groups such as the Interactive
• Technology Advertising Bureau and the Mobile and mobile advertising, Comverse
Guy Yaniv, VP and GM of messaging

vendors: Tech­ Marketing Association are also in­

nology vendors volved and plan to leverage the British experience in other markets.
enable profiling,
targeting, reach Mobile Advertising UK research project
and campaign Mobile Advertising UK is a research project commissioned by
management EverySingleOneOfUs, a collaborative communications movement and
capabilities — ÆNEAS Strategy Consulting & Management.
the backbone of The project documents the mobile advertising industry in Britain,
effective and identifying growth opportunities to benefit the value­chain worldwide.
efficient mobile The research is endorsed by the IAB Europe, IAB UK and the Mo­
advertising bile Marketing Association, and is supported by all five top British car­
activity riers, a variety of mobile companies and big­name brands. It will be
• End­users: expanded later to the rest of the world.
To convince end­ Cooperative effort creates beneficial synergies. Pooling and lever­
users to opt in to aging the expertise of the various value­chain players is a key success
receive adver­ factor for a prosperous mobile advertising industry.
To convince end­users to opt in to receive advertisements, tisements, the ex­ Industry players should focus on collaboration and market educa­
the experience must be centrally managed, with users perience must be tion. They should open discussions on business models and relevant
controlling the amounts of ads, context of ads and times centrally man­ industry issues.
of day the ads are received.
aged, with users Bridging gaps and working together will result in identifying the
controlling the amounts of ads, context of ads and times of day the ads best ways to implement mobile advertising. Success will bring greater
are received. Opt­in can be encouraged by incentives opportunities in a win­for­all environment. ■
• Standards bodies and associations: Standards organizations
such as the Mobile Marketing Association and the GSM Association Guy Yaniv is vice president and general manager of messaging and
can facilitate the creation of the value chain by promoting industry mobile advertising at Comverse, Tel Aviv, Israel. Reach him at
guidelines, standards and common language guy.yaniv@comverse.com
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 58
W
Mobile advertising and the African opportunity
By Alexander Gregori
hen it comes to opportunities in African markets the general
official attitude persistent among governments, corporations
and investors is one of doom and gloom.
Unstable political and economic situations, military coups, corrup­
tion and poverty, paired with vast country spaces and small populations
– compared to, for example, India or China – are often used as argu­
ments against taking Africa seriously.
However, the reality is that while many of the criticisms are based
on real challenges facing Africa, its markets do offer exciting opportu­
nities. This is especially true for an emerging industry such as mobile.
The presence of a few “traditional” companies such as Vodafone,
MTN and Zain, either as direct players or as majority shareholders in
various mobile ventures across Africa, as well as the push of new play­
ers including Obopay and AdMob, into the market attests to this claim.
Cashing in
Africa offers a number of attributes that are particularly conducive
to its attractiveness for the mobile industry.
Firstly, and maybe most importantly, African countries suffer from
a general lack in the number of
fixed telecommunication lines,
often controlled by monopolies.
This not only manifests itself
in a very small number of people
who actually own a fixed tele­
phone connection, it also results
in high fixed­line telecommuni­
cation costs, bad service and
slow connection speeds. This af­
fects business opportunities neg­
atively.
Moreover, the growth in the
number of computer Internet
users is slow and ecommerce has not taken off as it did in other conti­
nents, especially in North America and Europe.
Secondly, a large number of Africans are “unbankable” in terms of
internationally accepted banking standards. This is coupled with wide
open spaces inhabited by rural communities who do not even have ac­
cess to a bank because there are no branches or ATMs.
Consequently, business in Africa is done largely on a cash basis.
On the other hand, the mobile phone penetration among the African
populace is extremely high – in some countries more than 100 percent
of the actual population. This also translates into real numbers.
For example, in South Africa more than 40 million people own a
mobile phone. In Nigeria it is more than 60 million and even in Zim­
babwe, a country suffering from devastating socio­political and eco­
nomic conditions, every citizen owns at least one mobile phone.
Countries with “below par” mobile phone penetration such as
Kenya – 40 percent – are catching up fast and report exponential
growth in mobile phone ownership.
What’s more, more than 90 percent of these mobile phones are
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
WAP­enabled, and while this technical feature has not yet been widely
exploited commercially, most African countries stand ready with GPRS
and 3G technologies.
As so often is the case, it is not the forward thinking planning of ex­
ecutives that defines market developments, but rather the markets them­
selves in this day and age.
According to studies from Vodafone and Nielsen that were released
toward the end of 2008, twice as many South Africans access the Inter­
net via their mobile phone (10 million) than via their computer (5 mil­
lion), which is indicative of mobile’s growing clout.
It adds up
South African networks and mobile phone manufacturers have re­
sponded to this growing number of mobile Internet users with adver­
tising that focuses on offering easy­to­use, cheap data plans for both
prepaid and contract
mobile customers.
It is significant to note that the
antiquated billing of Internet con­
nections by the time spent online
from the early days of analog
modem dialups has never even
entered the African mobile
Internet market.
Rather, users pay for the actual
data transfer only. And with only
about 2 U.S. cents for 1MB of data Thinking Mobile and Rich Mobile
Alexander Gregori, owner,
traffic, the rates are much cheaper
compared to the United States.
Furthermore, wireless carriers are making their money mostly up­
front – one of the positive spinoffs of the cash­based business model.
Given the above scenario, it is not surprising to note that Africa is
not only ready for mobile, but ideally positioned to benefit from the
mobile technology explosion.
Mobile is simply the best available one­on­one communication tool
to reach African audiences on the widest possible scale.
This is true for companies who wish to enter the market to generate
profits as well as the African population, which can improve its lifestyle
by leapfrogging many developed countries with the use of mobile ap­
plications for work and personal use.
The stage is set. It now remains up to the entrepreneurial spirit to
create and offer the right services and applications. Forward­thinking
companies would be well advised to keep in mind Apple CEO Steve
Jobs’ advice that “you cannot always wait for the customer to tell you
what he wants.”
Interestingly, it is often smaller, agile service providers instead of
the slow­moving, established advertising agencies, who can help com­
panies to develop a sustainable, long­term mobile strategy that fits in
seamlessly with their existing marketing efforts. ■
Alexander Gregori is owner of Dawn Anna Investments (Pty) Ltd.’s my­
MobWorld, Rich Mobile, Mobile Marketing Winner$ and Thinking Mo­
bile in Gaborone, Botswana. Reach him at alex@mymobworld.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 59
D
AP M ob ile : t he ne w wir e le s s s e r vic e

e
By Jeffrey Litvack and Daniel Hodges transformed mobile from a device
to a consumer information hub.
o you see news consumption migrating to mobile like it is from AP today receives regular re­
print to online? This question, albeit substituting for the new ports from our mobile users on
technology of the day, has been asked for the last hundred breaking news in their localities via
years. History provides a clear answer. When radio became a mass our “Send to AP” feature on all of
medium in the 1930s, television in the 1950s, cable TV in the 1980s and our applications and on our mobile
the Internet in the 1990s, they all remained viable and increased the Web site. These firsthand accounts
overall consumption of media. have generated a number of stories
Each medium has taken initial share from the previous medium and that are then fed across the nation
each medium has responded to that shift with innovation. and worldwide via AP’s wire service.
Mobile is another consumer touch point. It fills that gap in the day Advertisers have already begun Jeffrey Litvack, GM of mobile and
where news consumption was not before viable – on the elevator, wait­ to understand and monitor con­
emerging products, AP Mobile

ing for a meeting to start, at the end of the day on the subway. sumer behavior on mobile. As in
Generation Y, X and boomers have all embraced mobile and smart any new market, the innovators in­
phones. If you go on iTunes today [August 2009], there are more than novate and this is no different.
1,300 iPhone applications available in the news section of the Apple Sprint was the first U.S. wire­
App Store. less carrier to innovate with adver­
With this new technology, the mobile device is becoming the first tisers and, when the book on
source for news and information – ahead of TV, radio and online. mobile advertising is written,
Sprint will be in Chapter One.
Mobile for the wired Procter & Gamble Co., under the
The Associated Press’ ability to send push notifications of breaking leadership of A.G. Lafley, now
news to the iPhone – and soon other devices – is also changing people’s chairman, encouraged the pack­
consumption habits. aged­goods marketer to innovate, Daniel Hodges, head of global sales,
On the day of singer with mobile as an important part of
mobile and emerging products, AP

Michael Jackson’s death, we that strategy.

saw a 350­percent­plus in­
crease in traffic moments
after we sent a push notifica­
tion to AP Mobile users. By
way of example, we heard
from AP Mobile users who
were on planes at the time of
Mr. Jackson’s death and who
received the push notification
as soon as they landed and
turned on their phones.
The competition and in­
novation in the mobile mar­
ketplace is accelerating the
rapid adoption of mobile.
Women have emerged as a
fast­growing segment for the
smartphone market, which is
significant for marketers be­
cause women make 80 per­
cent of the household purchases.
Mobile is another consumer touch point. The new mobile GUI, the
incorporation of email, pho­
It fills that gap in the day where news
Advertising and the media planning of advertising dollars is a ra­
tional data­driven art form. When explosive game­changing innovation
such as radio, TV, Internet and mobile emerges, it takes the industry
several years to understand, model and allocate dollars in a rational,
data­driven and scalable manner.
Most advertisers and brands understand this gap and have deployed
various mobile tests and campaign.
The history of innovation also shows that the adaption period from
innovation to massive scale becomes shorter with each innovation.
AP style
To understand AP’s view of mobile, it is important to know the AP.
Indeed, AP has embraced innovation since the early days of journalism.
We used the Pony Express to deliver news in the 1840s, the telegraph,
satellites in the 1970s, computers in the 1980s, and digital photography
in the 1990s – with each instance, years before the general market.
We embrace change, as do our member news organizations. Our
goal is to create the best product for each of the consumer platforms.
With AP Mobile, consumer adoption of our applications has far ex­
ceeded our estimates and continues to rise at an increasing rate. Users
are not only downloading our application but regularly using it, with as
much as 75 percent of our registered user base turning to AP Mobile to
get their news monthly.

the elevator, waiting for a meeting to start, tos, the rise of the applica­ Our success is measured in two ways – comprehensiveness and per­
consumption was not before viable – on

at the end of the day on the subway. tions, SMS and video have sonalization. Today, we have more than 1,000 newspapers and broad­
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 60
casters participating, creating the only hyper­local news application
in market.
Our national footprint to local news provides consumers with the
news they need and want, and advertisers with a highly targeted audience.
Equally important are the personalization features we continue to Are you onboard?

add. Mobile is a personal device, and our mission is to deliver tools “to
choose your news.” We have added customized front pages to all of
our applications and are building more customization and personaliza­
tion into the applications. Advertisers with Mobile
On a yearly basis, we are making a multimillion investment in mo­
bile and into becoming the news button for next­generation devices.
Marketer influence the
By the end of the year, we will have applications in market for every
major operating system and handset including Apple, Android, Black­
top purchase­empowered
Berry, Windows Mobile and Java­based phones such as LG, Nokia decision­makers at
Fortune 500 brands,
and Samsung.
To be successful, publishers need to get mobile right, both in terms
of audience and revenue. Many more of our AP member news publish­
ers are interested in having their own mobile news applications. agencies and marketing
AP is an early adopter of mobile, and we aim to create content for
each platform form factor. As one of the world’s largest content cre­
execs on the lookout for
ators, our content includes sports, entertainment, business, news, health,
travel and lifestyle. We launched a Spanish­language Latino mobile
market­leading products
portal in spring 2009. and services. Sponsoring
Mobile Marketer’s
newsletter and Web site
means smooth sailing for
your branding efforts.

Mobile is a medium for snacking versus a long, deep immersive

ads@mobilemarketer.com

experience. We organize our information based on consumer feedback 212­344­6366

and allow users to customize the AP content based on what is important

to them.
Customer feedback is key to our success. We received very good
feedback from a customer in Mexico City in Mexico. He was in his
hotel room when he experienced a sudden shift in the room. After re­
ceiving a mobile alert from AP reporting that there was a moderate size
earthquake and that damage was minimal, he wrote us a thank­you note
because the AP alert put him at ease.
Our goal is to provide the best content and consumer experience.
We get customer feedback every day and are using that feedback to im­
prove the customer experience.
AP mobile consumers are spending significantly more time with
AP Mobile and they are checking in multiple times throughout the day
versus this time last year. Our advertisers are returning after their first
experience with AP and increasing budgets on their repeat buys, which
we view as a very positive sign. ■ Mobile Marketer

Jeffrey Litvack is general manager of mobile and emerging products at

AP Mobile and Daniel Hodges is head of global sales, mobile and
emerging products at The Associated Press, both in New York. Reach
Mr. Litvack at jlitvack@ap.org and Mr. Hodges at dhodges@ap.org
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 61
O
Big br a nds tu rn to m ob ile adv er t is in g and m a rk et ing
g
By Dan Butcher
ne of the most important factors that has helped the mobile
channel build its credibility is that large, well­known brands
are using the marketing medium to extend their reach and for
branding purposes.
If it were not for brands such as McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, Burger
King, Subaru and Jaguar, it would probably be tough to make a case for
mobile as a marketing vehicle that works and delivers results – at least
on a large scale.
It is thanks to the big brands that smaller marketers are realizing
the potential of mobile. The following is a round­up of what some big
brands across various industries are doing in mobile. This is the proof
for the mobile pudding.
Fast­food chains digest mobile
Fast­food chains may be the industry sector investing the most in
mobile advertising.
The launch of the McDonald’s M Burger in France stood out for its
innovative use of mobile advertising.
The burger giant ran banner ads on the Microsoft Advertising Mo­
bile Media network. The brand used animated banner formats instead
of traditional mobile banners.
Also, a recent Dairy Queen mobile ad campaign saw a click­
through­rate of more than 22 percent, proving once again the effective­
ness of the mobile channel to engage consumers.
Mobile Posse Inc., a provider of idle­screen content and advertising
for mobile, helped Dairy Queen reach consumers on­the­go through
their mobile phones.
Dairy Queen and digital agency space150 piloted Mobile Posse’s
idle­screen advertising platform to promote its new Sweet Deals
value menu.
Dairy Queen’s “Sweet Deals” campaign is a brand campaign that
was designed to promote consumer awareness of its new Sweet Deals
value menu.
Mobile advertising was added as a component of the traditional
media mix, so the mobile ads complemented creative and messaging
used across other media.
Targeting via location
A hot topic in the world of advertising is adding consumers’ loca­
tion data to make mobile advertising more targeted.
Burger King and Subaru recently ran trial campaigns in cooperation
with a tier­one U.S. carrier to let consumers find the nearest quick­serve
restaurant or car dealership by clicking on a mobile banner ad.
The fast­food chain and automaker tapped the AdWhere platform
from Useful Networks, which published the results of the two large­
scale trials as demonstration of the effectiveness of location­based ad­
vertising over standard mobile advertising.
According to Useful Networks, location­based advertising increases
the value of mobile advertising by improving targeting and facilitating
deeper levels of consumer engagement.
The strategy of the Burger King and Subaru trials was simple: Get
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
customers into their stores.
The beauty of location­based advertising and, more specifically, the
Store Finder solution Useful Networks created in the trials, is that it
reduces the number of clicks a customer has to make to complete the
intended user experience.
Users no longer have to enter in the postal codes to find stores. They
can simply click a call­to­action banner ad and get the address, phone
number and map pinpointing the closest store location.
Also, proximity­based rewards, such as mobile couponing, will also
help brands drive traffic into their stores.
Automakers drive results with mobile
If fast­food chains are leading the pack in mobile spend, then au­
tomakers are not far behind, if at all.
Luxury automaker Jaguar Cars ran a multichannel marketing cam­
paign to drive traffic to its mobile sites and get consumers to opt in to
its SMS database.
Jaguar’s strategy was to integrate mobile into other media channels
by deploying short codes in several different media channels, including
print, television and outdoor.
Each channel uses unique keywords, and the communication flow
is focused towards driving foot traffic to dealerships by helping con­
sumers find their nearest dealer.
Jaguar’s mobile marketing strategy included individual WAP and
iPhone sites for various nameplates, as well as WAP and iPhone­based
advertising media –including rich media – driving traffic to the
specific sites.
Media loves mobile
Big traditional media companies, including television networks, are
benefitting from mobile, both as advertisers and publishers.
The Discovery Channel and Microsoft Advertising launched a
three­screen campaign spanning mobile, the Internet and gaming to
capture “The Deadliest Catch” fan base.
On April 14, the Discovery Channel executed an MSN Mobile
home page takeover in conjunction with the MSN home page takeover
to promote the season premiere of “The Deadliest Catch” television series.
In addition, Microsoft subsidiary ScreenTonic created a WAP site
that uses the Microsoft Advertising mobile platform.
The Discovery Channel’s strategy for this campaign was to create
a presence that surrounds its viewer throughout the day by owning mul­
tiple touch points within the Microsoft network.
The campaign included a breadth of Microsoft ad products running
across the Microsoft network of assets, all designed to reach viewers
throughout the day no matter which platform they are using.
Meanwhile, NBC Universal and MTV Networks are using mobile
interactivity and advertising provider SinglePoint’s SingleBrand Ad
Marketplace to monetize their mobile messaging inventory.
Campaigns for NBC Universal’s properties include NBC, USA Net­
work, Sci Fi Channel, Bravo, CNBC, MSNBC, Telemundo, NBC News
and NBC Sports, as well as Universal Studios and Universal Studios
Theme Parks. MTV Networks’ channels include CMT, Comedy Cen­
tral, MTV, MTV Tr3s and VH1.
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 62
 SinglePoint is empowering broadcasters and advertisers with inter­
action via mobile devices.
Even the beleaguered print media industry is reaping the rewards of
mobile, with giants such as The New York Times and Time Inc. launch­
ing ad­supported mobile Web sites and smartphone applications.
Free commuter daily newspaper brand Metro U.S. also imple­
mented an SMS program to get news readers interacting with its
print properties.
Metro readers in New York, Boston and Philadelphia can participate
in the daily Metro TXT Poll. Each day Metro will place a question on
the front page and encourage readers to text in an answer for the oppor­
tunity to win a $250 Visa gift card. Results are shown the following
day in the Voices section.
Similarly, magazine publisher Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. is
using the mobile channel to monetize seven of its magazine titles.
HFM is selling ad space on the mobile versions of
CarAndDriver.com, Elle.com, Ellegirl.com, Premiere.com, RoadAnd
Track.com, WomansDay.com and Ellegirl Latina. Quattro Wireless is
handling ad sales and serving for the titles.
Software and technology giants
Computer maker Dell turned to mobile to promote its Vostro mod­
els, targeting the entry­level laptop market in India to generate qualified
sales leads.
Dell tapped BuzzCity for the campaign, using WAP as a channel to
generate sales leads as a complement to print and outdoor media which
promoted brand awareness.
The three­week WAP­interaction­based text banner campaign is
claimed to have achieved daily exposure to an average of 71,308 con­
sumers, while the average click­through­rate was 0.55 percent. Em­
boldened, Dell quadrupled its initial mobile spend.
Dell’s print and outdoor campaign was running parallel to this WAP
campaign throughout India.
The print and outdoor was not restricted to the largest cities as such
but was also taken to smaller cities—a key target for the company
in India.
While the print and outdoor part of the campaign performed the
branding and top­of­mind recall function with the “Best Price Offer”
for Dell, the WAP campaign supplemented it to capture leads.
The WAP component supported the print and outdoor campaign by
allowing them to close the campaign loop by converting the awareness
generated into sales.
In­game mobile ads play well
Another hot topic in the advertising world is in­game and in­appli­
cation advertising, which has taken off due to the popularity of smart­
phone platforms such as the iPhone. Advertising within mobile games
is an especially popular niche.
Aside from the Apple App Store, some of the biggest players in mo­
bile gaming distribution include Greystripe, Didmo, Mpowerplayer’s
Mplayit, Handango and GetJar. Cellufun combines mobile gaming with
social networking.
In­game and in­application advertising has to be working for top­
notch brands such as Paramount’s Star Trek, Nestle’s Lean Pockets,
the U.S. Navy, Nikon, Kia, Sprint and Yahoo to rely on it.
These brands all turned to EA Mobile’s free Lemonade Tycoon
iPhone game to deploy ads. In addition to Lemonade Tycoon, EA Mo­
bile launched five other new gaming titles for the iPhone and iPod
touch, including Star Trek, American Idol, Trivial Pursuit, Pandemo­
nium and Anytime Pool, although those were pay­per­download.
EA is looking at both traditional business models to sell games
through the Apple App Store, as well as new ad­supported methods to
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
ensure that it offers consumers choices in how they wish to consume its
gaming content.
Promoting a product
Sunglasses giant Oakley ran an “AFA Snow” mobile advertising
campaign within the Ridertech Snow Reports iPhone application to
promote its ski/snowboard goggles.
Oakley tapped appssavvy for the campaign, which targeted male
snow sports enthusiasts ages 15­28. The objectives were to generate
awareness of Oakley AFA snowboard/ski gear and brand equity asso­
ciated with Oakley and the action sports lifestyle, send qualified traffic
to the AFA Snow landing page on Oakley.com and drive Oakley AFA
product sales.
Retail sees detail
Preppy retailer Polo Ralph Lauren Corp. launched an iPhone­opti­
mized site for Rugby.com, the site for its sporty line of Ralph Lauren
Rugby apparel.
Like the existing WAP site that is optimized for all other mobile de­
vices, the iPhone site lets consumers browse and buy all products that
are available on Rugby.com.
For its part, A|X Armani Exchange launched its first mobile adver­
tising campaign to promote its A|X Armani Exchange Spring
2009 collection.
Armani teamed up with The Media Kitchen and mobile ad network
AdMob to raise awareness of the new A|X spring line, drive opt­ins to
the brand’s text messaging program and to continue building the
brand’s relationship with its customers.
Not to be left behind, Amazon.com launched its latest mobile offer­
ing, the Amazon App for BlackBerry, which is now available as a free
download directly from its Web site.
Designed specifically for Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, the ap­
plication offers customers who use a BlackBerry device with a track
ball a way to find, discover and buy products from Amazon.com and
thousands of other retailers on its network. This release followed the
launch of Amazon’s iPhone shopping application in the month of
December 2008.
Coca­Cola finds mobile the real thing
Coca­Cola, which invested in the mobile channel early and often,
ran a mobile campaign to accompany the launch of Coca­Cola Zero
in Thailand.
The soft drink giant tapped Celltick to power the mobile initiative
at Coca­Cola's exclusive music festival, Coke Zaah. The campaign tar­
geted young adults and was meant to engage this audience in a fun way
to build hype and excitement around the launch event in Central
World, Bangkok.
The Coke Zero brand used a unique form of mobile marketing to re­
inforce its position as a leading low­calorie soft drink.
Coca­Cola worked with Nokia to create a Coke Zero­branded
Nokia 5310 device, putting the brand right into the hands of consumers.
Music content was bundled on Nokia 5310 devices and acted as an in­
centive for consumers to buy the handset that was designed by Nokia
with music in mind.
Church's Chicken and Coca­Cola have also launched interactive
promotional initiatives that target mature, multicultural, urban young­
adults with food, video games and mobile technology.
The fast­food brand is in collaboration with Coca­Cola on a pro­
motion called “Be Heard” that uses mobile technology to engage and
interact with a younger segment of the brand’s target audience.
Church’s Chicken and Coca­Cola set their sights on a mobile campaign
that leverages the power of text messaging. ■
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 63
T
M obi le adv erti si ng: S mart m oney on smart phoness

By Giselle Tsirulnik by the explosion of smartphones this past year, most featuring true
Web­browsing capabilities, as opposed to basic phones of the past few
he mobile advertising story is currently dominated by new years with limited rendering capabilities.
smartphones, new applications and app stores and new attitudes “This has, of course, seen many major portals and destination sites
to content and advertising consumption on handsets feeding into creating more robust mobile versions of their sites,” Mr.
evolving marketer attitudes toward advertising on the most ubiquitous Baughman said.
electronics device worldwide. “Although there has been a slew of standard static display ads on
The launch of Apple’s trendsetting iPhone in 2007 followed by the these platforms, we have also seen a great trend of advertisers and cre­
Apple App Store in 2008 sent ripples ative agencies willing to push the
throughout the industry, especially boundaries and explore within the
among manufacturers and carriers. smartphones’ browser limitations,
Pretty soon, the iPhone led to similar being that most don’t support Adobe’s
touchscreen, Web­friendly rival hand­ Flash player at the moment,” he said.
sets and the Apple App Store set a “The one thing holding back cre­
storm of copycat moves as evidenced ativity in mobile advertising is the K­
by Nokia’s Ovi, the Android Market weight limitation of 3­4 K, which
and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry makes for really poor image quality
App World. and poor user experience.”

“The application business is really

When it comes to trends around
not that new,” said Chris Baughman, consolidation in mobile advertising,
assistant vice president of creative over the last two years a large number
strategy at PointRoll. “As early as the of second­generation mobile advertis­
Palm, people have been creating and ing service providers—mobile ad net­
selling applications. But the technol­ works and ad platforms—have
ogy and centralization of the iTunes launched to join the initial five or six
store for app distribution have made first­generation companies.
them such a hit
“Amazon.com wasn’t the first to Economy stretches payout time
sell books online,” he said. “They were However, the mobile advertising
simply the ones that did it right.” market has not grown large enough to
Indeed, the iPhone was the first support the number of companies in
smartphone to have a Web browser the market, particularly given the un­
similar to the experience on the PC, but precedented economic environment
it was beaten to the Web by that has affected all media spending,
the BlackBerry. according to Brian Cowley, general
However, the Web­friendly nature manager of Velti North America.
of new phones has made mobile adver­ “This has resulted in longer time­
tising a new line item in brands’ adver­ frames being required for business
tising budgets. models to prove out and for companies
“Yet, the success of the iPhone is to become profitable, therefore requir­
not entirely what the phone offers, but ing more cash or for CEOs to seek a
also who the phone has attracted as its merger,” Mr. Cowley said. “There is
end­users,” Mr. Baughman said. “You very little, if any, venture capital being
can always find research that supports invested in new mobile
that iPhones are the most effective advertising companies.
channel in the mobile landscape. “Investments made have primarily
“Although what research doesn’t point out is the main cause of this consisted of inside rounds in the last nine months,” he said. “The finan­
phenomenon: Is it the device or the tech­savvy early adopters who all cial strains on this segment are more a function of the economic envi­
were attracted to buy iPhones?” he said. ronment right now, and less a function of the potential of
Marketing has changed recently with the integration of mobile el­ mobile advertising.
ements into ad campaigns via SMS and MMS, as well as an increased “Mobile advertising will be a large market—it is a question of
number of banner­ad campaigns running directly on mobile Web sites. when, not if.”
Advertising within mobile Web experiences has been helped along As a result, Mr. Cowley expects to see more companies
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 64
consolidating. An example is not far: Velti, a mobile marketing services
firm, recently acquired AdInfuse for its mobile personalization, ad rout­
ing and serving technology.
Paul Cheng, vice president of business development and strategy at
Velti, believes that many companies that were funded in the last few
years, particularly in the U.S. market, pursued strategies that viewed
mobile as a similar platform to wired Internet advertising and as a dis­
play medium in and of itself.
While there is a market for display advertising in mobile, it is not
nearly as big or useful as many thought, he said.
“This has contributed to flameouts, as companies have run out of
money pursuing a market that is smaller and more immature than they
thought and is a driving force behind the consolidation, as players who
have been more in engagement marketing and have stronger, longer­
term business models succeed,” Mr. Cheng said.
“Amazon.com wasn’t the first to sell books online. They were simply
the ones that did it right.” – Chris Baughman, PointRoll
Apple to Apple
The mobile advertising glass is either half­empty or half­full, de­
pending on what a marketer’s expectations are from previous aggres­
sive analyst projections, according toVelti’s Mr. Cowley.
To be able to measure and compare growth, the best way is to over­
lay some key metrics from the first three to four years of Internet ad­
vertising and compare that to a comparable period in mobile advertising
and marketing:
• The number of top 200 brands participating
• The frequency and volume of participation
• Campaign performance numbers (click­through rates,
bile will fundamentally alter the traditional call­to­action and that mo­
conversion rates)
bile CTAs will be the key to unlocking social network monetization
• Where the market is with adoption of high­speed devices
and that we will see new and very innovative forms of advertising and
compared to Web broadband (and the effect that has
marketing emerge over the next few years,” Mr. Cheng said. “Watch
on advertising)
this area more closely in the future.”
• Where the market is with education and awareness of the medium
• Where the market is with the development of advertising standards
“In all cases you are seeing a medium that is preparing for prime
time within the next year,” Mr. Cowley said. “As the economy begins
to strengthen you will see a dramatic acceleration in mobile advertising.
“For those that believed earlier forecasts of $5 billion in 2010, they
will feel this growth has been too slow, but for those that had more rea­
sonable expectations around timing, the comparison of where mobile
advertising is today to Web advertising in the same time frame is very
encouraging,” he said.
Significant shareholder returns will be generated for those compa­
nies that are well positioned with customers, success stories, proven
platforms and services.
Brands such as PepsiCo, MasterCard, Heineken, Hewlett Packard,
Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Wrigley’s, Nestle,
Ford, Kellogg and Victoria’s Secret have run mobile advertising in
2009. If the big players are turning to mobile, that is evidence of the
channel’s opportunities.
According to Velti’s Mr. Cheng, only big brands to date have been
able to afford true integrated campaigns across media. However, there
is a small and growing self­service market in the mobile space among
mobile application developers that is leveraging long­tail publishers.
The problem with the long tail is that there is not enough quality in­
ventory and money being spent to sustain companies, per Mr. Cheng.
Meanwhile, within the mobile browsing experience, PointRoll has
seen great success for clients such as moviemaker Focus Features with
its “Burn After Reading” movie campaign, as well as for ESPN The
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
Masters 2009 and Cartier 2009.
The user interaction rates for these types of units have improved as
this form of rich­media advertising becomes more familiar and present.
McDonald’s also ran an admirable campaign for the launch of its
McCafe coffee, using both print and display ads to encourage users to
either text to a SMS short code or enter their mobile number into a dis­
play ad, and then get a coupon for their new McCafe right on
their phone.
Consistency required for future growth
In the future expect mobile to be more aligned to social networks
where individuals start connections simply via mobile devices.
There are billions of people who will only experience the Web only
on mobile devices. The industry needs to make sure that it lays the
foundation to facilitate these discussions early on in the process so that
brands do not get left out of the conversations.
“Overall, the mobile advertising industry is waiting for the eventual
adoption of the Adobe Flash player and the explosion of creativity that
it will allow,” Mr. Baughman said. “Even with tighter specs, of course,
having Flash capabilities opens up many doors for creative and engag­
ing advertisements.”
Clearly, the mobile advertising market, which is currently on a large
growth curve, is different than that of online advertising and will not be
driven as much by solely display advertising as a combination of adver­
tising across all media.
“I believe that from a technology and creative perspective, that mo­
One major challenge today with mobile is that the creativity of the
campaigns is reaching past the technology available. However, this is
not so much a problem as an opportunity for new innovation,
PointRoll’s Mr. Baughman said.
“Today there is no unified platform per se other than the mobile­
based Web browsers, which are not as compliant as desktop­based
browsers,” he said.
So, not all Web browsers will render the exact same site the same
way, he pointed out.
“From the overall creative strategy standpoint, this causes sites to
be designed in various versions to accommodate various mobile
browsers, making layout and display ad formats varied as a result,” Mr.
Baughman said. “In order to be efficient, we need to have consistent
size specifications across devices.
“It’s always great to be sitting in a meeting brainstorming creative
ideas before you look at the technology available, that’s just what in­
spires innovation in our industry,” he said. “If there weren’t challenges
like that in a market, everyone would be using the same cookie­cutter
approach to deliver their message and brands wouldn’t be able to dif­
ferentiate from their competitors.”
With mobile comes the opportunity for a much higher degree of
technology growth. Many marketers, including mobile marketing
firms, seem to be taking advantage of that in the market.
“Mobile companies that will be able to weather the economic con­
ditions will be companies that are profitable today, don’t require a lot
of investment capital and, of course, companies that have proven solu­
tions in mobile marketing and advertising,” Mr. Cowley said. ■
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 65
Loo k beyo nd t he Ap ple iP ho ne

e
I
By Jeff Hasen
t is pretty safe to say that the iPhone has changed the face of mobile
marketing. In May 2009, Brightkite and Gfk NOP stated that iPhone
users are more likely to recall mobile ads than non­iPhone users.
That is great news for the entire marketing community. After all, it
is our job to find the best ways to market our companies in a way
that sticks.
But is the iPhone truly the best way to reach our core audiences?
Well, to quote Reverend Lovejoy, the minister from “The Simpsons”
television show, in explaining a much more complex mystery: “Short
answer, yes with an if; long answer, no with a but.”
However, as you do embrace SMS, marketers can move up the
pyramid, adding layers on such as mobile Web/WAP, mobile advertis­
ing, richer custom applications, and, yes, even an iPhone application.
These provide less and less reach but often drive a viral component
that adds to the overall program—and may also hit a specific demo­
graphic in your target audience.
And let us face it: as marketers, we are often most impressed by the
latest and greatest and, in this case, the iPhone application is just that.
Cool, buzz­worthy. But is it selling more widgets?
Wily marketing
Consider the case of Wiley

The catch is that while marketers are falling over each other to em­ Publishing, publisher of the wildly­

brace the iPhone, many of us fail to realize that there are around 20 popular “For Dummies” book se­

million iPhones in use and it is hardly a representative sample ries. The publisher came to us with

of America. a goal of reaching the masses and

Those cool iPhone delivering a rich brand experience

applications that have via mobile.

people buzzing are ac­ Together, we devised and exe­

cessible to a very small cuted an integrated campaign that

segment of the con­ included the following:

sumer audience. And • Text: A text­to­win sweep­

they may be the audi­ stakes gave consumers a chance to Jeff Hasen, CMO, HipCricket

ence you want in your win high­end consumer electronics prizes via SMS, using the keyword
target demographic, or “DUMMIES” to reinforce the brand.
they may not. All who entered received a rebate for $5 off any Wiley “For Dum­
mies” title. Consumers even had the opportunity to opt­in for future of­
MyPhone? fers and information. This was the point­of­entry for the campaign and
IPhone applications the best way to set a baseline.
are no doubt cool and • Mobile banner ads: Through optimization via our platform, we
memorable, but they delivered more than 1.3 million impressions with a call to action and
are only a single ele­ branding familiar to consumers.
ment of mobile marketing. More importantly, click­through rates were four times as high as
Let us think of a those produced by the companion online campaign.
pyramid. The iPhone is • Mobile WAP site: The “richest” brand execution delivered the
at the apex – if we were “For Dummies” logo, look and feel and gave those interested an easy
thinking about Dick way to opt­in to receive offers and rebates.
Clark’s “$10,000 Pyra­ The site even featured a store locator to find the closest store, as
mid,” the iPhone is the well as a list of the most popular “For Dummies” titles.
$300 answer. How did the campaign do?
But as mobile mar­ It moved product as well as the loyalty scale. There was a 34 per­
As marketers, we are often most impressed

keters, we need to guide cent conversion rate for consumers joining the TXT4Dummies Club.
by the latest and greatest and, in this case, the

our clients through a The campaign received the prestigious Cross­Media Integration award
iPhone application is just that. Cool, buzz­

strategic process that covers the entire spectrum of mobile marketing from the Mobile Marketing Association.
worthy. But is it selling more widgets?

to make certain that their marketing reach hits all of their prospects,
not just the ones with the coolest phones.
SMS is at the base of the mobile marketing pyramid. It sits at the
bottom foundational layer – it gives brands and agencies the greatest
reach and taps into the behavior and interests of hundreds of millions.
To extend the TV analogy, it would be a $100 answer. But without
the $100 answer, you could not move to a $200 or $300 question.
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
In this case, Wiley never made it to the top of the pyramid – and did
not need to. The base provided more than enough reach to meet or ex­
ceed each of Wiley’s goals while only getting part way up the mobile
marketing pyramid. ■
Jeff Hasen is chief marketing officer of HipCricket, Kirkland, WA.
Reach him at jhasen@hipcricket.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 66
Worl d w id e w here? Ge tting lo cati on­ base d
T
mob ile marketi ng rig ht
t
By Chris Glodé
he new generation of mobile Web browsers provides the missing
ingredient for marketers: location. Ever heard this story? A cus­
tomer walks past a Starbucks, receives a timely SMS alert with
a coupon, and a full­on latté­sipping­fest ensues. This, we have been
told, is the Promised Land of location­based mobile marketing.
Setting aside whether customers would embrace this type of expe­
rience, mobile technology limitations and platform fragmentation have
currently constrained reach (read: how many customers are accessible).
Historically, the promise of location­based mobile marketing has
far surpassed its true capabilities. As a result, such campaigns remain
fodder for futuristic movies –“Minority Report” – rather than practical
marketing solutions.
However, technology is catching up. The new wave of smartphone
browsers such as Safari on the iPhone 3.0 and Android on the G1 allows
marketers to obtain device­location data during a customer’s Web
browsing session, providing a whole new set of tools to
engage consumers.
Better yet, these geo­browsers are another example of the conver­
gence of mobile and traditional Web browsing.
Firefox 3.5 includes geolocation support as well, further extending
the reach of this technology to an audience that will finally equate to the
critical mass that advertisers crave.
Now, Web content can now be served to Web­surfers with an aware­
ness of where they are.
Imagine checking your favorite news site, blog or discussion board
and having hyper­local stories appear instantly – for example, hours
ago, the police arrested a prowler one block from your home – or re­
ceiving local special offers from businesses that you walk by daily.
With the wider support for browser geolocation offered with iPhone 3.0 and
Firefox 3.5, demand for location­based advertising is already heating up.
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
Better targeting = bigger demand
Let us say you run a local pizza joint with three locations in a large
metro area.
Current advertising through mobile and online channels has not
shown a good return for you. After all, without quality geo­targeting,
more than 90 percent of your ad impressions are wasted on customers
who are outside of your delivery area or live too far to drive to
your shop.
With the innovation of geo­aware browsers, you will be able to tar­
get your mobile and online advertisements based on ZIP code, neigh­
borhood or even street intersection.
You can advertise with confidence that 100 percent of customers
who view your ad are within range
to actually purchase a pizza at your
shop. That is the power of location­
based mobile advertising.
Further, geolocation signifi­
cantly enhances the ability of mar­
keters to extract more value from
performance­based campaigns,
particularly for brands with a
strong bricks­and­mortar presence.
In other words, when physical
store locations are important for a
brand, the value of knowing a
Chris Glodé, senior director of
prospective customer’s location in­
product management,
Useful Networks
creases, as the customer can be directed to the store, and conversion is
easy to measure via coupon redemption.
For example, a nationwide quick­serve restaurant could blend a tra­
ditional mobile brand awareness campaign with a performance­based
call­to­action campaign. Users located more than a few
blocks from the nearest restaurant could be served a
brand/product awareness ad.
Meanwhile, users within a small radius of a nearby
restaurant could be presented with a time­sensitive
coupon which is only valid locally, along with a map
showing the store location and contact details.
Campaign performance tracking is another disci­
pline which will benefit from geo­targeting.
Marketers can now track campaign engagement
and performance – for example, click­through­rate or
cost per acquisition – at a hyper­local level.
Using map visualization tools, a campaign man­
ager can analyze the success of a marketing campaign.
Think of a heat­map­style report which reveals that
a jet­ski campaign is over­performing in neighbor­
hoods within 3 miles of a body of water. The marketer
then makes the adjustment to increase spend in this
area or specify additional new targets with a similar
geographic profile.
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 67
 The ball is now squarely in the court of the advertising networks
and agencies.

Read it

Indeed, it is their task to develop the tools and campaigns to lever­

age the underlying browser technology and allow marketers to under­
stand, embrace, create, manage and report on geo­targeted

and reap.

advertising campaigns.

How does it work?

The enabling technology behind Web geo­targeting has been in de­
velopment for years, combining advances from a variety of ecosystem
partners and components.
On mobile devices such as most smartphones which have multiple
sources of location – GPS, cell tower, Wi­Fi – the developer or pub­
lisher implementing the campaign has the ability to tap into each of Invaluable insights,

breaking stories and

these unique sources depending on what source best meets the needs of
the campaign.
For example, to target a regional advertisement at customers in a
certain geographic market, a Wi­Fi or cell tower location is just the news­to­know, daily.

ticket: quick fix, low accuracy requirement and almost

always available.
By contrast, a mobile advertising campaign which ultimately pro­
vides walking or driving directions to the nearest retailer could benefit
Click HERE for your free

from the pinpoint accuracy of GPS, provided the potential customer is subscription to

Mobile Marketer Daily.

outdoors and has the device GPS turned on.

Meanwhile, for traditional Web browsers, Wi­Fi location is the an­
swer. After all, we are just now starting to see laptops that have
GPS capabilities.

What about privacy?

Clearly, users want to know when and with whom their location in­
formation is being shared.
How this experience is handled has been left to the individual
browsers. It generally involves a simple popup asking the user for con­
sent to share her location with the Web site being viewed.
This opt­in­based process ensures that consumers have total control
over whether to give permission for their device to share location with
the content publisher and advertiser.
While there is potential for abuse, advertisers and publishers are
well­incented to promote customer understanding and trust in this tech­
nology, and how it is being used.
After all, any type of privacy incident will be the responsibility of
the marketer or publisher, since the user must consent to each individual
Web site – by domain – when sharing location.
At least, this method is how early­adopting mobile browsers have
implemented the Javascript Geolocation API which enables this
location technology.

What’s next?
With the wider support for browser geolocation offered with iPhone
3.0 and Firefox 3.5, demand for location­based advertising is already
heating up.
Several highly successful nationwide trials nationwide were re­
cently completed, and we will see many more this year.
With the converging trends of increasing smartphone penetration
and browser­based geolocation ubiquity, expect to see more engaging,
interactive and lucrative location­based advertising campaigns from
the forward­thinking brands and agencies savvy enough to capitalize on

Mobile Marketer

these emerging opportunities. ■

Chris Glodé is senior director of product management at

Useful Networks, a location­based advertising service provider in
Denver, CO. Reach him at christopher.glode@useful­networks.com
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 68
T
W hy r ea ch is t he c r itic al m obile a dv er tis ing m et r ic

c
By Erin (Mack) McKelvey
he ongoing debate over the “right” metric for measuring online
advertising’s value as a medium continues. Despite the wired
Web’s growth and maturity, few signs point to a consensus.
There is an opportunity here for the mobile advertising ecosystem to
focus on what is important for advertisers.
Similar to online, there are conflicting views on the most effective
metrics to gauge the scale, growth and value of the mobile advertising
market. This is not surprising.
Some believe that total ad impressions is the barometer by which to
best measure the market. Total ad impressions is a legacy metric that
has not accurately measured online effectiveness and is not relevant
for mobile.
The mobile consumer’s Web experience is unique and in some
cases, complex. In all cases, it is a substantially shorter session time
than the wired Web. It is 1.06 ad requests viewed per page and, there­
fore, brings a world of op­
portunity for targeting and
engagement. But first, you
must have reach.
Reach is the enabler of
delivering sizable seg­
mented audiences. Adver­
tisers choose a mobile ad
delivery partner based on
they do in other media, they must know they are reaching a real, meas­
urable audience of sufficient scale.
Demonstrating this common metric, alongside the lift that cam­
paigns have seen as benchmarked against online­only campaigns, will
ensure that mobile becomes a channel of choice, and the spend will be
allocated accordingly for the broader market of brands and agencies.
2. Reach shows the true scope and power of the mobile adver­
tising marketplace
Simply defined, reach is the size of the audience exposed to an ad
message through a particular medium.
According to the Nielsen Mobile Report for April 2009, the mobile
Internet reaches more than 59 million users, a number that steadily con­
tinues to grow month over month.
In fact, The Kelsey Group fore­
casts that by the year 2012, the U.S.
mobile Web will reach more than
91.7 million users. This represents
a 55 percent increase of an address­
able mobile audience in just
three years.
In contrast, online will remain
relatively flat, with a 6 percent in­
crease in audience over the same time
period, according to Kelsey projections.
When you look at these user
Erin (Mack) McKelvey, VP of

who can most efficiently numbers set against the backdrop of

marketing, Millennial Media

reach their consumers.
Therefore, a customer­
centric approach would
indicate that key metric
definition must start
with reach.
The mobile advertis­
ing industry needs to
move beyond a simple ac­
counting of ad impres­
sions and look to reach as
the essential measure­
ment—a true indicator of
maturity and evolution—
More people access news via the mobile
the attrition and market erosion occurring across other types of media,
these are extremely compelling numbers for mobile.
As evidence of the mobile’s increasing reach and influence, we can
look to recent comparative data for newspapers.
According to March 2008 data from the Audit Bureau of Circula­
tions, approximately 27 million people read newspapers nationwide
every day.
By comparison, 22.2 million people access news and current events
via their mobile phones, according to April 2009 data from
Nielsen Mobile.
An even more telling statistic—more people access news via the
mobile Web than the top 100 largest newspapers in the United
States combined.
The message could not be any clearer. If you are buying traditional

for several reasons. Here media channels, you also need to look to mobile as a powerful way to
Web than the top 100 largest newspapers in

they are. reach a large audience base with accountability and efficiency.
the United States combined.

1. Reach is the established metric that advertising agencies
and brands value
Reach is the measurement that the media world understands. Media
buyers buy newspapers based on total circulation. They buy television
based on viewership, and radio according to the number of listeners.
So if reach is the metric that advertisers and media buyers know
and value, then clearly we need to speak a common language and focus
on reach.
For media buyers to spend millions of budget dollars in mobile as
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
3. Reach determines how many consumers you can engage
and impact
On a basic level, there is a direct correlation between the number of
people that you are able to reach and the number of people you can po­
tentially impact, influence and engage. There is simply no getting
around this fact.
If your audience reach is 1 million, then 1 million consumers is the
most that you can possibly influence with your message.
This is why maximizing reach is much more critical for mobile ad
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 69
networks than simply churning an existing user base for more impres­
sions with diminishing returns. While the value of a single impression

Monday

can vary greatly, the value of reaching a new consumer remains

a constant.

4. Reach will be the truest indication of value to advertisers as

through

the mobile Web grows

More people are using the mobile device as their primary access to
digital information. Weather, food and dining, entertainment and other

Friday.

Internet categories are showing impressive mobile lift numbers.

According to Nielsen Mobile, the weather and real estate categories
are seeing a 38 percent mobile lift. Food/dining is showing a 35 percent
increase, and email and games are showing 20 percent and 19 percent
mobile lifts, respectively.
With more users migrating from online to the mobile Web, they are
generating more page views—and accordingly, more ad impressions.
So as the mobile medium becomes more mainstream, reach will
emerge as the defining indicator of value. Page views and impressions
become far less significant.
One effective way that advertisers can limit excess impressions
while maximizing reach is through the use of frequency capping.
By limiting the number of ad impressions for a placement over a set
Click HERE for your free
time­period, frequency capping enables the highest effect per user, and subscription to the
Mobile Marketer Daily
the maximum number of users per campaign.
As advertisers become more educated about buying mobile, the use

e­newsletter.
of tools such as frequency capping to drive campaign efficiency and
delivery will continue to increase.

5. A critical mass of reach is necessary to effectively segment

and target audiences
Mobile is a medium that is perfectly suited for audience segmenta­
tion. Along with capturing all the typical data associated with the wired
Internet—user registration information, content affinity and observed
behaviors—mobile has the unique ability to deliver carrier, handset and
location data.
This makes it ideal for reaching and engaging highly segmented
groups of consumers. Using behavioral tendencies and keywords, we
can aggregate special audiences who have demonstrated a particular
category interest.
By delivering relevant, targeted messages to an engaged and recep­
tive group of users, we consistently generate higher click­through rates,
more interaction and better campaign results.
Creating and delivering these advanced segmentation and targeting
campaigns requires a critical mass of consumers in sufficient scale.
Mobile’s ability to deliver brand messages to engage millions of
consumers is significant. However, taking this broad user base, seg­
menting, delivering and optimizing effective ads that are relevant and
meaningful to specific audiences—this creates tremendous value for
both the advertiser and the consumer.
Ultimately, mobile advertising will succeed on the broadest scale
for all the reasons that it is successful today: higher click­through rates,
better targeting and an overall lower cost of delivering an engaged user.
Bottom line, mobile advertising is a more efficient spend of media
budget dollars and will continue to be so.
The sooner we use reach as the metric to communicate the unique
value and true power of this medium, the faster more brands and agen­
cies will ensure mobile takes its rightful place as a key component of
major advertising buys, alongside the traditional mass media channels
of television, print, online and radio. ■ Mobile Marketer

Erin (Mack) McKelvey is vice president of marketing at Millennial

Media, Baltimore, MD. Reach her at mack@millennialmedia.com
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 70
I
Bl ow ing cam paig n b udg et on pr e­c anned dat a?

?
By Andrew Bovingdon Today, new campaigns literally
run blind for at least a day before
n medicine, doctors use thermometers to gauge a patient’s temper­ you can determine if it was a suc­
ature. The “real­time” data enables the physician to make a more cess. That means a large percent of
accurate diagnosis and adjust treatment before additional your budget most likely is spent be­
complications appear. fore you spot any problems.
Like that thermometer, Web analytics data should provide an imme­ It is sort of like throwing
diate read on the health of your business or vigour of your money over a high wall hoping that
marketing campaign. your target market is ready and
Yet more often than not, today’s Web analytics products do not waiting on the other side.
deliver “real­time” data. Advanced analysis tools promise plenty, but
the complex metrics require vast amounts of data storage and process­ Get real
ing to deliver – tricky to achieve even for premium analytics products. This 24­hour­delayed model is
Andy Bovington, VP of product
marketing, Bango
As a result, we are seeing a very different analytics market emerge so outdated compared to other current industry trends.
– one where most products deliver pre­canned data that is at least 24 Take information publishing, for example.
hours out of date. Not long ago information was simply published on Web sites every
so often. This eventually turned into a stream of
shorter, more frequently updated blogs and
RSS feeds.
Today we have constant flows of real time
tweets coming at us from all directions. The real­
time information allows us to react and adapt
faster than ever.
By contrast, delays exist in both mobile and
traditional desktop analytics products. Few so­
lutions can give you the foundation on which to
react and quickly build successful campaigns in
real­time.
There are signs of change, however.
It will not be long before real­time reports
from live data reach the forefront of quality an­
alytics. Accurate hour­by­hour or minute­by­
minute results can give marketers the flexibility
to quickly evolve mobile Web sites and
marketing campaigns.
The real­time information is beginning to
take shape in the wired Web analytics
market, too.
For example, the new Yahoo Web analytics,
currently in beta, is going after Google with the
same sort of detailed real time results about wired
Web sites and campaigns.
Not having real­time results simply gives other people a

Occasionally we run across customers that

window of opportunity to adapt and steal your market.

It works like this: Each night your recorded campaign and site data
is turned into a wide range of fixed reports. Then the raw data is thrown
away to save storage space and expense.
This approach is vastly different from the good old days when rudi­
mentary analytics solutions simply examined your Webserver logs and
told you which pages were being read.
Although measuring those early Web campaigns was basic com­
pared to today’s bounce rates and funnels, it provided real­time an­
swers. You could start a campaign, review the first few people to reach
your landing page and adjust the campaign accordingly.
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
say they are not worried about having their information in real time.
Thing is, not having real­time results simply gives other people a win­
dow of opportunity to adapt and steal your market.
Having the facts as they happen allows you to react to market
changes and stay a step ahead, before your entire budget has been spent.
Let us be real – real­time data is a necessity when it comes to the
fast­paced mobile world. ■
Andy Bovingdon is vice president of product marketing at Bango,
Cambridge, England. Reach him at andy@bango.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 71
T
Why c ar rier­bas ed billing ma kes s ens e
e
By Jay Emmet
he growth of the Apple App Store is without a doubt one of the
biggest bright spots in the mobile world with nearly $1 billion
of revenue derived from more than 1 billion application down­
loads – an astounding feat.
A combination of an innovative mobile device, a progressive busi­
ness model and the brand cachet of Apple has produced one of the most
successful mobile innovations in recent times.
Following the Apple App Store success, Google, Research In Mo­
tion and Nokia have launched a second wave of off­deck app stores
that are fundamentally different from Apple’s store.
As these app stores are not associated commercially to a single
wireless carrier’s subscriber base and tend to be specific to a device
manufacturer or proprietary operating system, they have a very loyal
customer base.
While these companies are very sophisticated in terms of marketing
their app stores, a fundamental issue remains problematic. That issue is
enabling a billing mechanism to support the desired mobile
purchase experience.
Billing me softly
The absence of sim­
ple payment alternatives
poses a significant com­
mercial risk. Credit
cards are a possibility,
but market experience has suggested that consumers balk at the need to
enter credit card information, especially for impulse buys.
Industry research from Deutsche Bank has revealed that credit cards
are too insecure and time­consuming for consumers. Requiring a con­
sumer to type in a billing address, credit card number and other per­
sonal information is simply not the type of experience a mobile
purchase is trying to provide.
Alternate payment schemes such as PayPal and Google CheckOut
are also a possibility, but they require a payment account to be opened
and funded with a credit card prior to a purchase being made.
This is the same model that Apple has used for its app store. A con­
sumer must have an iTunes account before any download or purchase
can occur.
There is only one iTunes store, however, and most of its market
penetration has been driven by Apple’s iPod product. Other third­party
mechanisms are generally unproven in mobile or limited by their sub­
scriber base penetration.
The reality is that to achieve a successful mobile purchase experi­
ence, an app store must offer an easy, safe, ubiquitous payment methodology.
Mobile consumers are unwilling to make purchases unless the pay­
ment scheme takes only a few seconds. Carrier billing for these app
stores is the only payment scheme that will support growth and scale
to position them for commercial success.
Carrier billing allows consumers to make purchases on their mobile
phones or a Web site and have the charges billed on their monthly
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
mobile invoices.
The growth of premium SMS
nationwide has shown the commer­
cial appetite for carrier billing. But
premium SMS has limitations.
The need for an offline SMS
session to initiate the billing event
obviously degrades the app store
experience. No doubt there.
In addition, if there is a cus­
tomer issue regarding a premium
purchase, the customer service
costs are assumed by the carriers.
Jay Emmet, general manager,
OpenMarket
This fact obliges the carriers to keep 30 percent to 40 percent of the
retail price.
Lastly, the carriers often have divergent proprietary requirements
and commercial models which pose tactical issues for companies trying
to offer a consistent product experience.
BOBO should click
True carrier­based billing, often referred to as BOBO (billing on
behalf of), eliminates many of these issues.
BOBO allows the purchase to be made with one or two key clicks
entirely within the storefront. No SMS session is required.
In addition, customer service inquiries can be directed right to the
app store call center, as is done for the Apple App Store. The carrier no
longer has to bear the costs or own the customer care issue. Consumers
understand they bought an app from Apple, and that Apple is respon­
sible for resolving their issue.
Moreover, the purchase experience from a consumer perspective
takes only a single click or two. This simplicity eliminates many of the
inconsistencies that typically occur from the need to support
multiple carriers.
Offering BOBO functionality also provides a tremendous untapped
opportunity for carriers.
A fundamental competitive advantage for the carriers is having an
established billing relationship and high brand credibility with
their subscribers.
Offering BOBO functionality to trusted partners allows wireless
carriers to leverage and monetize this unique advantage, to establish a
strong position in the value chain, and to avoid the dreaded
dumb­pipe syndrome.
The BOBO model offers many advantages.
BOBO offers a simple payment methodology to off­deck app store
companies, leverages the carrier’s competitive advantage and offers
subscribers a seamless and quick, purchase experience.
As mobile devices continue to grow in functionality and occupy
greater mindshare with the average consumer, BOBO billing is a fun­
damental step in the next wave of mobile success. ■
Jay Emmet is general manager of OpenMarket, Seattle. Reach him at
jay.emmet@openmarket.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 72
I
Ho w to t r ack a n d me as u re a mo b ile a d ca mp aig n
n
By Bruce Braun
t is doubtful that you will find a mobile advertiser – make that any
advertiser –who is not highly focused on the ROI for any of its
media spends. Not that accountability is anything new. It has been
with us for decades.
As John Wanamaker, one of the early department store magnates,
is famous for saying, “I know half the money I spend on advertising is
wasted, but I can never find out which half.”
Fortunately, Wanamaker’s problem is not one we have to worry
about today. Unless, of course, the advertiser is ignoring campaign
performance analytics. The answers to Wanamaker’s lament are avail­
able and, best of all, actionable.
But not so fast.
We now have the 21st­century evolution of the Wanamaker lament
presenting itself in the form of a computer, dashboards, endless pages
of Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables. Talk about data overkill.
Consider, click­through rate, impressions, total visits, unique visits,
page views, cost per click, cost per visitor, program CPM dollars, pro­
gram CTR dollars, cost per acquisition, total conversions, total versus
unique visits, cost per click versus total clicks, landing page entries,
total downloads. And this is just for starters.
Add to these the latest forms of engagement and search metrics, all
presented in a dashboard or spreadsheet, and it becomes apparent we
have created a forest of data that is divisible into thousands of different
types of reports by virtue of database software capabilities.
And let us not forget things that are unique to mobile such as geo­
location, handset type and carrier. We also want to know things such as
click paths to the advertiser and what actions take place by the con­
sumer on the advertiser’s site.
We are interested in the design and layout of a mobile site as it per­
tains to content and ad placements. Why? Because we want to make
sure the mobile site is optimized for peak response levels. We call this
part site analytics, apart from campaign performance analytics.
Does your head hurt yet? Do not feel alone. We are legion.
Whatever you choose to call these measurements, be it metrics or
analytics, they do not need to be off­putting.
The funny thing is, today’s John Wanamakers are still asking the
same question: What part of my advertising is working? More specif­
ically, is every dollar of my media spend returning two, three or more
dollars in return? Call it ROI or return on investment, in MBA parlance.
Where to begin
“If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up some­
place else.” – Yogi Berra, New York Yankees catcher
Clicking on the mobile ad transports the consumer to the adver­
tiser’s mobile Web site. But then what?
Think of your mobile Web site like as a bricks­and­mortar store.
The ad you saw has only persuaded you to visit the store. What happens
when you arrive at the store? What you experience the moment you
walk in has a huge effect on your ultimate decision to buy or to
walk out.
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
Retailers have made a science
of where merchandise is located
and how it is displayed. Your mo­
bile site is no different than a
retail store.
Does your mobile site deliver
the promise of your mobile ad?
I would suggest to those new to
mobile advertising and wondering
how to use analytics to measure
campaign success or effectiveness
begin by considering some excel­ Bruce Braun, CEO, Agent M
lent suggestions from Eric Peterson of Web Analytics Demystified in
his recent white paper, “The Truth About Mobile Analytics.”
Keeping in mind campaign effectiveness is heavily dependent upon
the consumer experience on the advertiser’s mobile site, Eric has com­
piled 10 questions to ask or to include in any mobile analytics RFP.
Here are five:
1. Make a list of metrics that are most important to you from an ac­
curacy standpoint. Are you trying to drive adoption? If so, visitor counts
are important. Trying to drive application use? Visits and page views
may be appropriate. Are you actively marketing your online site? Cam­
paign metrics will be critical.
2. Assess the technology you are using to deploy your mobile site.
Are you primarily focused on a particular platform or carrier? Or are
you trying to design an experience that transcends the device? Are you
using HTML or XHTML exclusively, or do you have a WML­ or PML­
based site?
3. Be prepared to ask measurement vendors for specifics about
their technology.
Ask how the solution counts visitors, visits and page views in the
absence of images, cookies and JavaScript.
4. Make a list of “known issues” with whatever strategy you deploy
and socialize that list. Don’t hide behind a lack of knowledge regarding
sources of inaccuracy. Make sure you fully understand what might be
causing the numbers to fluctuate so that you can incorporate those in­
sights into your analysis.
5. Remember: It is not the data, it is what you do with it. No matter
how much time, money and effort you put into making the data you
collect accurate and precise, if you are not using that data to improve
the user experience you may as well make up the numbers as you go.
Tracking your campaigns with analytics
Now the fun begins. You have your creative and your media plan
and the buy has been made.
What are the most important things you want your campaign to do?
In my experience, the CEOs and chief marketing officers are held ac­
countable for primarily two things: increasing sales and profitability.
Brand advertising is sometimes viewed as non­selling advertising.
Ask a CEO if he or she is OK with the brand’s advertising not gener­
ating revenue. All advertising is expected to deliver sales, especially
in today’s economy.
Tracking impressions, clicks and page views tell you about activity.
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 73
But you want results, and results in most marketing campaigns are
defined as engagements.

Webinars.

Engagement is, without a doubt, the most critical element in meas­

uring campaign success. How many people asked for a brochure,
bought that handbag, asked to be contacted for a test drive, or bought
or downloaded a product of some kind?
These sorts of actions by the consumer will tell you in detail if your
ad creatives and mobile Web site are producing finite results.
With that in mind, the ultimate success of your mobile ad campaign
will depend on how you set your primary campaign goals for maximum
ROI. To achieve your goals, analytics will be your tool for
accomplishing them.
For your mobile advertising campaigns to be truly effective, you
need to know exactly how well they are performing. Not just at the top
level, but with deeper insight. You need powerful metrics to follow
each publisher and creative for everything from the first click through
the final action.
Key to achieving your goals is campaign tracking that provides for Mobile Marketer’s latest
the following:
• A mobile campaign tracking tool that is not a bastardized version
lead­generating channel.
of someone’s online tool. Mobile is very different from online, as we
all know.
The premier forum for
• Ease of use that does not require attending three days of classroom brand case studies and
the executives behind
instruction with a four­inch thick user manual for mastery.
• Actionable analytical insights that can optimize campaign ROI by
allowing the comparison of any combination of key performance indi­
cators you select. successful campaigns.
• Intuitive campaign recommendations and optimization capability
based on your defined goals.
• Consolidation of all mobile campaign publisher and creative ac­
tivity into a user­centric and customizable dashboard. This functionality
is crucial to saving you time and money aggregating multiple publisher
reports into Excel spreadsheets and then into pivot tables.
• The ability to see all campaign data on a daily basis without hav­
ing to wait for monthly publisher reports. This is vital if you are to op­
timize performance. Analytical information is only as good as its
timeliness and accuracy. What good is after­the­fact data?
• Media­to­activity tracking on the campaign, publisher and creative
Interested sponsors,
unit levels. You will want to see how each one of your creatives are
performing across each publisher and placement.
please contact
• Client­customizable engagement metrics. As mentioned above, ads@mobilemarketer.com
for pricing and details.
you will want to see how people are responding to your calls to action.
Perhaps most importantly, there must be independent and objective
third­party verification of publisher and creative mobile advertising
campaign performance.
Why is this important? It all gets down to transparency and objec­
tivity. You owe it to yourself and your clients. Publisher performance
data that is not independently verified should be viewed skeptically.
Last February, Jamie Wells, then U.S. mobile director of media
planning and buying agency OMD and now at Microsoft, informed mo­
bile publishers of the following in a story that the Mobile Marketer
publication broke:
“Omnicom Media Group’s OMD media agency will no longer ac­
cept site­served publisher data for mobile delivery and click perform­
ance related to mobile display advertising.”
With all of the above considerations in place, you will be able to
move forward with confidence that the media spends you make in mo­

Mobile Marketer

bile will return the results you and your client want. ■

Bruce Braun is CEO of Agent M, San Francisco. Reach him at

bruce.braun@agent­m.com

MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 74

Ti m e t o f li p the s cr i pt f or m obil e
N
By Josh Webb
ow is the time for purpose­built, rich mobile media. Until re­
cently, mobile has almost invariably played second fiddle to
other media, commonly a third or fourth option in a wider
cross­media campaign, and an idea that is dreamed up that will “mobi­
lize” the concept.
Consequently, a lot of mobile marketing has been designed for peo­
ple who are already sitting in front of the television, reading a magazine
or otherwise engaging in another form of media consumption.
But things are changing, and thanks to recent developments in de­
vices and networks, consumer uptake of progressively richer mobile
media is on a fast rise.
In other words, brands are changing tack to meet this new critical
mass of demand. Mobile has become an ambitious upstart aiming to
usurp the rest of the media family.
The path now is paved for a new scenario: truly rich, standalone
mobile media that is built from the ground­up to take advantage of the
unique aspects of mobile.
People might look back at 2009 as the time when mobile started to
flip the script on traditional advertising.
Creatives are thinking about the mobile aspects of a campaign first,
with other media playing support in some cases. We are not talking
about mobile Web sites with pretty graphics in the likeness of the latest
print campaign – that is getting old and stale in a social­network­
obsessed 2009.
What we are talking about is ground­up mobile application experi­
ences that can incorporate multiple sub­sets of mobile technology, such
as image recognition, location­based services and augmented reality.
By combining these kinds of technologies, and making some cre­
ative leaps, we are now able to take the inherent mobility of mobile
and use it to its true potential.
In the mobile 2.0 generation, we are connected with other real peo­
ple around us, their collective intelligence using the medium as a tool
to discuss the world and filter through the options available.
This behavior is even more useful in the mobile context because it
can be employed in field rather than just theoretically from your desk.
The social networks we access can inform us of our present sur­
roundings, helping us navigate, discover and filter the world we live in
to more closely suit our preferences.
So, while cyberspace imitates real life in a virtual world, mobile
now brings us a new realm: hybrid­space, where real­life is made better,
in geo­code and right in front of our eyes.
Let's take a look at some of the possibilities that go beyond the basic
mobile media offerings.
Image recognition and augmented reality
A recent and popular development in high­tech mobile marketing is
augmented reality.
Still very much in infancy stages but already having a huge impact,
this is a technique that can place virtual content over the top of real­life
scenes that you view through your mobile phone cam.
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
The technology uses image
recognition to superimpose 3D
graphics onto special marker
graphics, which are placed in real­
world locations – magazines, sub­
way advertisements and buildings.
If that is hard to imagine, con­
sider pointing your phone at a
friend sitting next to you, and see­
ing what they would look like with
a multi­tentacled, alien face­sucker
for a head. Now you get the idea?
You may have seen some exam­
Josh Webb is a New York­based
mobile strategy consultant
ples of this recently. The Nike T90 product launch in augmented out­
door ads around Hong Kong with 3D virtual football boots and hidden
codes tied in with a competition.
The Fanta virtual tennis game, allowed you to view a virtual ball
and court through your phone cam, which you and a friend could use
to play a game together – a shared augmented reality.
Even more interesting, though, is that future iterations of this tech­
nology will be able to do away with the marker image and start to do
real­world environment recognition in tandem with GPS.
Think along the lines of “Virtual Earth” or “Photosynth,” but where
you can point your phone at anything you like, and it will give you in­
formation about it.
Alternatively, we can forget the information and get creative. What
if I were to point my phone at the Empire State Building, and King
Kong appeared, climbing and swatting at airplanes flying past?
What if the airplanes also happened to be pulling Taco Bell banners
or writing the Coca­Cola logo in smoke trails?
This is where the fun really begins, and the marketing potential
starts to explode.
Social beacons and location­based services
One of the definitive aspects of Web 2.0 is social­networking, and
as this spreads onto mobile, there are two branches emerging: tradi­
tional social networks such as Facebook and Twitter creating mobile
versions, and ground­up, mobile­only social networks.
Despite a common misconception, the mobilized versions of social
networks are not an alternative to mobile – they are just another thing
to do on a mobile phone that may be accessed through a phone or a PC,
depending on location.
While vastly popular, however, the mobile versions of the big­play­
ers, in most cases, offer little enhancement to their Web counterparts.
It is beside the point – they are made for a reason and that is to connect
with other people that you know, one way or another.
But by thinking ground­up, several mobile­specific networks are
pushing in different directions, particularly in the area of
people­locating.
Users are now finding romantic interests, getting ratings and re­
views on places in their vicinity, or tracking friends as beacons on real­
time maps, although the moral and practical implications of this are yet
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 75
to be fully tested and debated.
As a basketball player, my favorite mobile social application lately
is the Nike “Ballers Network” – also a Facebook tool, but with a mobile
version – allowing me to find or organize games in my neighborhood.
Anyone can join in and play, then navigate my way there if I choose
to play.
The “Nokia Vine” is another great example which allows users to
track their movements on a GPS­generated map, and record their expe­
riences along the way using image, audio, video, text and bookmarks
on the map. They can then go back and re­live it at a later time.
It is like a tiny personal blog that you create in the process of living
your life. You can share it with others to show what you are doing, or
go back to it yourself when you forget the location of a great coffee
shop, piece of street­art or hidden clear­
ing in the park.
Perhaps the best example of mobile
social networking recently is “Aka­Aki,”
which tells me if a friend is in proximity
to me and helps us find each other.
It is a pure social­beacon tool, mean­
ing that one need never get lost in a
crowd again, or fail to bump into a friend
who was in the same place as you, but
looking in the other direction at the time.
This stuff is very real, available right
now, and ready to make consumers’ lives
much better.
Mobile applications
To achieve most of the next­level functionality I am talking about
here it is almost mandatory to build discrete mobile applications. It is
the only way to achieve the type of user­experience that people want on
their handset right now, period.
In the PC world, downloading and running an application has
started to become an undesirable option, taking you away from the
happy place of your browser environment.
There is also little point these days, since your browser houses a
powerful runtime environment of Java, Flash, Silverlight and Ajax.
Making most standalone applications redundant, these are effectively
little encapsulated applications that run in your browser.
Mobile, on the other hand, is quite the opposite.
The mobile browsers are still unable to accommodate most third­
party runtime environments. And even if they could, the processors in
the devices are still too slow to compile code on­the­fly as PC can do
for Web applications.
Therefore, on mobile it is still necessary to use native applications
to achieve strong user­interfaces, fast execution and tap into handset­
specific features that are often crucial to the applications functionality.
These will often exist in tandem with a good mobile Web or SMS
campaign, but the user’s experience only becomes compelling and
sticky with a native application as the interface.
Unfortunately, there is little standardization in mobile applications
and developing for one handset is often very different from another.
So how does a marketer deal with the need to work across multiple
platforms in this case?
Well, at present it has been a matter of picking the platform – or
multiple platforms, in some cases – which will appeal to
the demographic.
The natural assumption of many marketers seems to be that the
iPhone is the only option. This is a fairly safe bet as a starting point, as
that one device is now generating almost half of the mobile data traffic
with what is still reported to be a single­figure market share.
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
In other words, people who own iPhones are really using them a
lot more, and for more data­intensive purposes – think more media of
a richer nature and with more browsing and application usage.
However, this is far from a standard yet, and we cannot forget there
are a lot of other devices out there.
Research In Motion recently launched its own BlackBerry App
World store, Nokia has a new offering called Ovi, and Microsoft’s Win­
dows Mobile has a mish­mash of third­party Java application stores
floating around the Internet, as well as a Windows marketplace in
the making.
Google’s Android Market is even taking shape, with many of the
usual suspects starting to appear on it. When more devices pop up it is
going to be a serious contender indeed.
Also consider the markets you want
to hit.
There’s a classic BlackBerry bias
from corporations, a Windows Mobile
bias in a lot of Asian countries, a Nokia
bias in Europe, and the true geek com­
munity already seems to be rallying be­
hind Google’s Android for its cool
openness factor.
Targeting multiple platforms will ob­
viously cost more to do, but does offer
economies of scale because once a spec­
ification is created for one platform,
porting it can dramatically reduce the effort and cost required to get a
second or third version to market on other platforms as well.
It also makes sense, in the same way that it makes sense to advertise
on more than one television channel – in fact more so, because mobile
users do not get to push a button whenever they want to own a
new handset.
The bottom line is to cover the most platforms that can be afforded,
and in the markets that make sense. The economy of scale, as well as
the extra novelty on some of the lesser­hyped platforms will make up
for the smaller possible audience.
Pulling it together
To engage increasingly savvy consumers in 2009 and beyond, we
need to provide a great user interface and compelling applications that
improve quality of living.
We need to start to leverage the true advantages of mobile – people,
legs and the real world – and find ways to add value in hybrid­space.
If we are going to do mobile properly, we need to start to think
about mobile as a first point of contact, and about how to rally other
media behind it to take true advantage of the medium.
By all means we need to cover the basics, get a common short code
and SMS campaign running, and create a mobile Web presence.
But then we need to think creatively and take true steps to use the
full range of mobile technology in a way that people can interact with
intuitively and easily.
I would urge any brand, product manager, content producer or other
kind of marketer to build a good mobile strategy with a specialist mo­
bile consultant or agency with experience across the range of
mobile offerings.
Work to figure out how your goals, as well as your customers wants
and needs, will be met by using mobile. Then implement a compelling
campaign that will truly make real­life better. ■
Josh Webb was previously director of operations for The Hyperfactory,
and is now an independent mobile strategy consultant in New York.
Reach him at joshwebb.nz@gmail.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 76
Ca lli ng fo r a tr us te d t hir d p ar ty to m an age
M
m ob ile co ns um er da ta
By Patrick Seymour
obility for millions in the United States and billions of indi­
viduals globally means never leaving home without our
mobile phones.
Beyond making calls, the capabilities of our mobile devices help
us maintain connections with family, friends and colleagues. Smart­
phones allow us to search for information, to educate and entertain our­
selves, and give us the ability to make transactions – all elements that
will continue and will compel increased usage.
These sophisticated mobile capabilities and services, combined
with mobile subscriber behavior, will not be ignored by marketers. Ad­
vertisers and marketers are increasingly looking for ways to develop
and use consumer information.
An ecosystem made up of wireless carriers, aggregators, applica­
tions, content providers, search engines, location­based services, pay­
ment services, ad networks, agencies and marketers have been
collecting information about consumers. Each of these companies has
developed ways to collect, use and potentially abuse this information
to contact consumers.
Consumer groups, federal state and international agencies, mobile
technology and marketing associations and others within the industry
have made efforts to establish best practices and standards for contact­
ing mobile consumers.
All mouth, no teeth
An agreement was recently announced with the four largest U.S.
carriers to align their mobile marketing practices with the guidelines
and best practices of the Mobile Marketing Association.
I applaud the efforts of partnership between the U.S. carriers, Mo­
bile Marketing Association and others in the mobile marketing ecosys­
tem. And while I agree with the standards and best practice published
by the Mobile Marketing Association, they are, at best, guidelines with
few clear enforceable standards.
Since the beginning of 2009 consumer groups such as the Center for
Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group have
petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to investigate mobile
marketing practices.
The Federal Trade Commission released guidelines regarding the
self­regulatory principles for behavioral advertising on the Web. How­
ever, its recommendations fell short of meaningful protections of con­
sumer privacy and relevance to organizations within the overall
mobile ecosystem.
A recent study by comScore M:Metrics revealed a surge in mobile
spam across five European Union markets – Britain, France, Spain,
Italy and Germany.
The study reported the number of people receiving SMS messages
from companies without permission is increasing by 61.3 percent in
France and 21.3 percent in the EU5 year on year.
Also in recent weeks, social networking sites such as Facebook
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
have changed user agreements
around privacy. Google has re­
cently announced a behavioral
targeting program.
Voluntary guidelines, behav­
ioral targeting and opt­in/opt­out
agreements are all evolving ele­
ments in an effort to deliver respon­
sible communications. But they
will not stop spam, nor do they de­
liver the full potential of mobile’s
value to their own organizations or
meaningful, relevant interactions
Patrick Seymour, president,
Seymour Consulting Services
to consumers.
Permission­based and relationship marketing have been gaining
momentum for some time, reflecting a widespread trend among con­
sumers to avoid unwanted advertisements, and a willingness to receive
content, promotions or special offers from companies. However, these
permission­based communication models alone are not the answer.
How many data collection screens, permission­based or opt­in
email messages have you received this week?
A recent report from Merkle, “View from the Inbox,” 2009 found:
• The percentage of total permission email viewed on a mobile de­
vice increased 5 points since last year
• More than half of respondents were less willing to sign­up for per­
mission email compared to a few years ago
• The main reasons subscribers choose to opt out of email programs
– perceived irrelevance and sending too frequently (cited by 75 percent
and 73 percent, respectively)
• Thirty percent of permission email recipients have stopped doing
business with at least one company due to their poor email
marketing practices.
Reconciling trust with data
Clearly, mobile subscribers are concerned and frustrated with how
information is being collected and used to contact them. Consumers
want relevance, privacy options and interactive experiences that add
convenience to their mobile lives.
Conversely, organizations who wish to attract and retain customers
want relevant, actionable consumer information.
Companies want better methods of data collection, consumer pro­
filing and measurement. Most companies currently collect elements of
consumer information. Even without permissions companies may share
consumer data, but typically the shared detail is an aggregate – without
individual specifics.
Marketers want more than just aggregate information, such as mo­
bile browsing histories, demographic, device, geographic details or pur­
chase behavior to target, tailor and deliver relevant communications at
every point of the relationship.
Certainly it is in everyone’s interest to work together to produce a
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 77
solution that will meet the needs of consumers and marketers.
The following model is an attempt towards this solution and can
provide relevant, responsible communications for every organization

Make us hip

within the mobile ecosystem.

I believe what is necessary to achieve this common ground is a

to your news tip.

trusted third party which collects consumer information, applies the

desired consumer preferences and distributes the information to com­
panies within the mobile ecosystem.
Customer involvement and trust are essential to this model. Con­
sumers generate profiles of all of the brands with which they wish to in­
teract. Consumers would then manage their profiles which include
privacy options, permissions to share information, as well as prefer­
ences for the types of desired communications on a regular basis, with
options to update the profiles at any time.
I believe this model provides consumers with the relevance, control
and convenience they desire.
Also, I believe those in the mobile ecosystem would find this model Got some industry

gossip? Breaking news?

compelling, allowing greater capabilities to profile, deliver and measure

relevant communications to their intended audiences.

Serious – give it to the do­no­evil guys Interview ideas?

Who is capable of developing a trusted environment that will bal­

ance consumer demands for privacy and relevant communications with
the desires of brands and marketers?
In Japan and South Korea, wireless carriers have formed joint ven­
We’re all ears.

tures with advertising agencies for new companies exclusively focused

on mobile marketing.
This arrangement allows each company to focus on their core com­
petencies. However, it does not necessarily provide a full picture of the
consumer profile. More important, consumer preferences for privacy
editor@mobilemarketer.com
and communication are not fully realized.
While effective in Asian markets, in my opinion, carriers and mar­
keters – or a union of the two – are not the most trusted entities to de­
liver this model in the United States.
I believe consumer organizations, government regulators or indus­
try self­regulators could position themselves to become this trusted
third party. However, their history of influencing consumer data collec­
tion, privacy and communication practices has not engendered signif­
icant trust or enforcement.
A search engine marketing company such as Google is perhaps the
most knowledgeable, capable and trusted entity that could execute such
a model. It has the clout, infrastructure and trust to develop and cham­
pion this model.
My instincts suggest the only way such a model could be imple­
mented is through alliances and effective partnerships among members
of the mobile ecosystem.
Mobile devices have become a necessity in our daily lives. In the ef­
fort to reach consumers, mobile technologies will be the vehicle of
choice used by marketers and advertisers in the future.
Consumers need a trusted system to receive communications from
the horde of companies wishing to contact them and must take an active
role in this evolving process.
A model that allows consumers to develop and manage their own
information and communication preferences that are adopted by com­
panies and marketers is compelling to both consumers and the entire
mobile ecosystem.

Mobile Marketer

This model is not only possible, it is imperative to provide the great­

est value for consumers, as well as every company within the
mobile ecosystem. ■

Patrick Seymour is president of Seymour Consulting Service, Park City,

UT. Reach him at patrick_seymour@q.com
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 78
The m obil e adve rt i s ing ba zaa r
W
A me dia a ge nc y blue pr int fo r m one ti zin g mo bil it y
y
By Jamie Wells
hile there is widespread agreement that the rapid prominence
of the mobile device around the globe represents a tremen­
dous long­term revenue growth opportunity for digital ad­
vertising agencies, to date the vast potential of the channel has gone
relatively untapped.
As excuses and marketplace misperceptions abound, the inability of
our industry to aptly monetize the mobile channel can be best traced to
a fundamental failure of organizational philosophy.
This is not to say that agency monetization of the mobile channel
is not fraught with significant barriers to success –far from it.
Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the channel can
point to any number of seemingly insurmountable challenges in the
mobile advertising and marketing sectors: marketplace fragmentation,
lack of standardization, poor infrastructure and limited reach are among
the most prominent.
Yet it is these challenges that necessitate a vastly different approach
to mobile than the flawed models employed by our competitors.
This column provides just such an approach. It is a recommendation
set that isolates and circumvents the trappings of previous systems by
drawing upon the successes and learnings of industries faced with sim­
ilar challenges, the sum of which form an agency model for the success­
ful monetization of the mobile channel that scales on a national,
regional and global level.
Key challenges
While the barriers for the media agency wishing to successfully
monetize the mobile channel are too numerous to quantify in the lim­
ited confines of this work, chief among them are the following key
challenges – all of which must be overcome if the agency is to activate
the channel on behalf of its clients.
Marketplace fragmentation
The mobile advertising and marketing landscape is besieged by an
expanding variety of tactical channels with few dominant players and
frequent new entrants.
The sheer volume of mobile advertising publishers, networks, infra­
structure providers and other entities wishing to capitalize on the ever­
evolving sphere of mobile opportunities bog down planning cycles and
overwhelm the creative process.
Lack of standardization
An intimidating array of violently competing technical and adver­
tising formats fueled by powerful marketplace gatekeepers and evol­
ving business models confound the strategic planning process and
hamper the swift planning and execution of mobile
advertising initiatives.
Poor infrastructure
The mobile channel is further distressed by comparatively limited
research sources and rudimentary planning, ad serving, tracking, opti­
mization tools as well as an inherent inoperability between mobile pub­
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
lishers, networks, carriers and key
channels. All of these often neces­
sitate redundant or manual operat­
ing procedures, ultimately adding
incremental labor stresses to the
entire system.
Limited effective reach or low
perceived value
While varying significantly by
tactic and geographic region, over­
all there is a general marketplace
consensus that the reach potential
and creative options of mobile mar­ marketing for mobile advertising
Jamie Wells, director of trade
keting and advertising channels lag
solutions, Microsoft Advertising
considerably behind most forms of established offline and
digital media.
Certainly many of the aforementioned issues are inherent in any
emerging medium. However, one could make a compelling argument
that, with respect to mobile, the intensity of these challenges has esca­
lated to a scale that dwarfs previous “like” emerging media scenarios.
Whether driven by the sheer technical complexity of the channel,
global ubiquity or simply soaring investor interest, the frenzy surround­
ing the emergence of mobile as a marketing medium has inflated these
barriers by orders of magnitude beyond what has been previously ex­
perienced by most other forms of new media.
The cathedral and the bazaar
In searching for a model that would satisfy these vast hurdles, in­
spiration has been drawn from a seemingly dissimilar industry that has
faced a very similar set of challenges: the software industry.
As with the mobile marketing and advertising system, the software
development process has been similarly stymied by a confluence of
like phenomena: competing technical standards, dizzying market frag­
mentation and inadequate toolsets.
Like the marketer, the software engineer also struggles with a com­
plex problem­solving process straddling both creativity and analytics,
rooted in real­time business objectives, aggressive deadlines and over­
arching cost constraints – all driven by multiple objectives
and taskmasters.
While challenging on any level, these issues become increasingly
prominent when attempting to scale the software development process
to meet the accelerating complexity of global software needs.
This challenge was most notably documented by Fredrick Brooks
in his 1975 breakthrough book, “The Mythical Man Month,” where the
author famously identifies the core paradox that has become known as
“Brooks’ Law.”
Put simply, it follows that in software development, like most “tasks
with complex interrelationships … adding more men [to a project] …
lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.”
This apparent contradiction is due to escalating internal communi­
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 79
cation needs and the inability to fully partition the labor demands, as re­
lated to the many complex and interrelated tasks that form the process
of developing software.
Mr. Brooks becomes a fierce advocate for what he calls “conceptual
identity,” a necessary precondition for successful software development
that can only come about by the work of a single mind or a small team
of likeminded individuals.
Railing against systems designed and developed by large teams or
committees, he likens poorly managed software projects resulting
“from the separation of design into many tasks done by many men” to
“tragically” disjointed European cathedral designs spawned from con­
struction schedules spanning several generations, where “later builders
attempted to ‘improve’ upon the designs of earlier ones.”
Mr. Brooks’ approach – that the best way to manage the software
development process is to severely restrict the number of persons in­
volved in its design – became the industry’s standard, and was more or
less left unchallenged in the software community until the emergence
of the open source model in the early 1990s.
In a 1997 landmark essay exploring the open source movement,
“The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond challenged the notion
that complex software systems “needed to be built like cathedrals, care­
fully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in
splendid isolation,” and instead promotes a model “resembl[ing] a great
bazaar of differing agendas and approaches.”
However, it should be noted that Mr. Raymond’s concept of the
“great bazaar” should not to be confused with the contemporary notion
of “crowd sourcing” or other simplistic “free­for­all” distributed
labor models.
In his analysis, Mr. Raymond identifies several specific precondi­
tions necessary for successful implementation of the open
source model:
1. A leader that recognizes good design ideas from others, and pos­
sesses the charisma to attract people and keep them interested and en­
gaged with the project’s success.
2. The presence of a “plausible promise” that the project will even­
tually “evolve into something really neat in the foreseeable future.”
3. Access to a (cheap and easy) medium to exchange and archive
knowledge.
4. “Openness to the point of promiscuity.”
Additionally, Mr. Raymond identifies several specific “truths” or
“lessons” that further inform the success of the open source model:
1. Contributors for any given project are self­selected.
2. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s
personal itch.
3. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what
to rewrite (and reuse).
4. Given a large enough co­developer base, almost every problem
will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone (or put an­
other way, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”).
5. While one can test, debug and improve [a project] in bazaar style,
one should not attempt to originate a project in bazaar mode.
6. If you treat your beta­testers as if they are your most valuable re­
source, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource .
7. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great
tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
As demonstrated below, Mr. Raymond’s “necessary preconditions”
and “truths” to the successful open source model can be similarly lever­
aged to great effect by the agency attempting to activate the mobile
channel on behalf of its clients.
Pros and cons of the agency “cathedral building”
Before delving into the proposed “Agency Mobile Bazaar” model
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
for the monetization of the channel, one must first examine the current
system used by media agencies to activate the channel in order to iden­
tify why the model is failing to meet industry­wide expectations.
As defined by the previous section, it is apparent that “cathedral
building” remains the near universal agency model for the monetization
of the mobile channel.
The process basically works as follows: A “mobile expert” (or in
very rare cases, a small group of two or three members) is responsible
for keeping up to date with the latest movements of the mobile land­
scape; distributing a highly condensed version of such information
(usually in the form of periodic emails or a series of “mobile 101” pre­
sentations); and consulting with brand teams for the purposes of creat­
ing, selling in, and executing mobile advertising and
marketing campaigns.
The model has gained widespread acceptance due to the fact that –
at least on the surface – it appears to be an efficient use of
agency resources.
Information related to mobility and mobile advertising and market­
ing is highly specialized, lending credibility to the application of an
“information silo” in the form of the “mobile expert.”
Additionally, to date agency revenues related to mobile advertising
planning and buying have been nominal at best, significantly restricting
the resources available to the agency to put against mobility.
Primarily, it is these key concerns have given rise to the current sys­
tem: the emergence of the agency “mobile expert” and the resultant
“cathedral building” model.
Unfortunately this model clearly fails to meet the core objective of
leveraging an expertise in the mobile channel for the benefit
agency clients.
To begin with, the sheer volume of knowledge needed to consist­
ently and competently “stay abreast” of the mobile space, inclusive of
the latest research, leading players, usage cases and toolsets, is beyond
the capabilities of a single individual to follow, much less communicate
to a larger group.
To this add the Sisyphean process of providing “spot” mobile con­
sulting services to a large group of brand teams – all representing a
wide range of clients from dissimilar business categories.
The process is dubbed “spot consulting” as, unlike the formal con­
sulting process, the consultant must settle for an intermittent, irregular
and, at best, tangential connection to the core goals, brand objectives
and strategies as crafted by the client and agency brand team, with little
prospects for a more meaningful bond.
The spot consulting process typically begins with a brief period
whereby the brand team briefs the mobile expert on the particular goals
of the campaign or plan, followed by a condensed working period
where the mobile expert crafts a set of mobile recommendations.
It should come as no surprise then that the spot consultancy model
ultimately yields a consistently low quality of work, as the consultant
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 80
is operating with severely limited knowledge of the account while
working under appreciable time constraints.
Beyond this, the process is an overwhelmingly inefficient use of
agency resources. Brand teams are forced into woefully incomplete yet
wastefully redundant internal briefing cycles with the mobile expert,
while the mobile expert spends an inordinate time attempting to “flash­
learn” account histories, permanently distracted from his or her core
goal of information­gathering and sharing.
This effect is, of course, compounded when attempting to scale the
model, which ultimately results in even lower quality work, lost rev­
enue opportunities, staff burnout and turnover.

The mobile bazaar model for media agencies

Clearly then a need arises for a scalable agency model for organi­
zational expertise in mobility.
The following “agency mobile bazaar” model draws upon the les­
sons learned from the open source software development movement
by tapping into the primary resource common to all digital media agen­
cies: a large pool of ambitious, digitally­savvy, young
marketing professionals.
At its core, the agency mobile bazaar model uses open source soft­
ware techniques to “de­silo” mobile expertise and executional compe­
tency to arrive at the following desired state:
1. Like other forms of digital media, mobile media planning, buying
and execution occurs at the account team level, by individuals with an
intimate understanding of the account, and its needs, goals
and personality.
2. The mobile media planning and execution process achieves effi­
ciency and effectiveness through a shared organizational intelligence,
populated by an accessible, relevant knowledge base and a talented
pool of internal mobile media enthusiasts.
3. High­level mobile strategies, alliances and other corporate­level
directives will be driven by an individual or core group of mobile spe­
cialists focused on the channel.
To summarize from previous sections, the successful agency model
for the monetization of mobility must effectively meet the following
core product­specific challenges such as marketplace fragmentation,
lack of standardization, poor infrastructure and limited channel reach
or low perceived value, and labor­specific challenges including main­
taining a level of high quality work and output, preserving a market­
leading expertise within the mobile channel, limited resource
availability, and scalability across multiple geographic regions, brand
teams and client business categories.
Recommendations for the implementation of the mobile bazaar
model are summarized on the table in the next column.
Planting stage. The first stage of implementation may appear to
the casual observer as “cathedral building” in that the mobile expert is
occupied by many of the same tasks, such as meeting with account
teams to educate them on mobile advertising, and making ad hoc rec­
ommendations to their account teams as requested.
The key difference is that while certainly all of these activities are
important, the primary objective of the planting stage is to build interest
in/recruit participants for the “agency mobile bazaar.”
Recruitment can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but in gen­
eral will leverage the following benefits to the target, who will likely
be a junior to mid­level member of the digital account team:
1. Ambition. Mobile is the future of interactive media. Become an
early leader in the medium and your career will rise with the promi­
nence of the channel.
2. Exhilaration. Simply put, mobile is cool. IPhones are cool. GPS
targeting is cool. QR codes are cool. Pattern recognition is cool. Mixed
reality gaming is cool. IVR, SMS and even Bluetooth can be cool. This
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
is the reason you are in digital media in the first place, and not outdoor
or print, right?
The recruitment process will begin in person, with the individual
digital client teams, at the “Mobile 101/State of Mobile” presentation
where the mobile advertising space will be positioned in the most hope­
ful and exciting of lenses.
This is not to say that client teams will be fed “marketplace hype”
– quite to the contrary. Client teams will be presented with a realistic
outlook of the channel, the potential which will nearly speak for itself.
A knowledgeable and charismatic presenter is also a requirement.
Near the end of the “Mobile 101/State of Mobile” presentation, the
mobile expert will solicit members for this new group of “agency mo­
bilists” (working title), the sole “membership” requirement of which
will be a genuine interest in mobile marketing – and nothing more.
Group directors may be consulted in advance of the meeting for
recommendations on possible “best fits” within their team, as well as
for any additional help in recruitment process. The primary goal for the
planting stage is to recruit one agency mobilist per digital account team.
During this phase the mobile bazaar community will begin to take
shape by a variety of tactics, all of which will rely on decidedly low
tech or Web 1.0 tactics: Biweekly emails of “cool” mobile marketing
news, interesting case studies (nothing boring); and access to key re­
sources such as mobile network reach, targeting and contact informa­
tion and presentations shared via access to a shared network partition.
Community feedback for this early phase will be passively solicited
in the form of manual techniques such as email. From its earliest pos­
sible point, any “official” community correspondence or language will
be inclusive, supportive and decidedly casual.
Additionally, “spot mobile consultancy sessions” will still be used
during this phase to support the client teams, but executed quite differ­
ently than previous models, and with two added goals: The passing of
mobile expertise, and the forming of community bonds.
Whereas in the past the mobile expert would, in perfect “cathedral
building” style, work up a set of recommendations more or less in iso­
lation from the client team, in the bazaar model the mobile expert
would work directly with the client team’s resident mobilist, providing
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 81
insight, support, resources and recommendations, but will refrain from
actually building the proposal proper.
By encouraging, reviewing, supervising and supporting – but not
actually authoring – the mobile recommendation set, the mobile expert
will in effect transfer ownership of the work to the mobilist, instilling
all the pride and satisfaction that comes with possession.
If no mobilist is yet present in the client team in question the con­
sultancy session itself becomes another recruitment opportunity.
Ultimately this process – that of planning, selling­in and executing
of mobile strategies and campaigns – will be shared with the group via
the aforementioned communication channels. Community feedback
will be encouraged but never expected, observing Mr. Raymond’s rule
of self­selected participation.
Cultivation stage. The intermediate phase of the implementation
plan is most prominently staked by a marked upgrade in smart
collaboration tools.
Shared network drives and other manual communications channels
such as PowerPoint and Excel will be de­emphasized in favor of more
effective tools.
While the email list will continue to be important, more often than
not it will be used to point traffic to a relevant internal blog posting or
internal wiki article.
Information from the legacy formats, such as an Excel database
housing data on mobile ad networks, will be transferred to the new,
more accessible and malleable mediums.
The internal blog, published primarily by the mobile expert, will
assume the ideological center of the mobilist community, providing an
essential axis for the group and the expression of its personality.
Postings will reference and drive traffic to relevant internal wiki ar­
ticles; highlight any prominent forum chains, internal case studies or
ongoing projects; praise good works; and humbly revel in the satisfac­
tion and exclusivity of expertise.
That said, the blog is by definition a “one­ or few­to­many”
medium, and – even with the ability for users to post comments on ex­
isting posts – as such is not a true “community channel.” Hence the
need for the more robust communication channels such as the wiki, list
serve and forum.
While early participation in these channels will likely be limited to
the mobile expert and a small group of like­minded emerging media
specialists inside the agency, it is eventually through these channels
that the greater mobilist community will begin to share information
about working projects, learnings, vendors and other points of interest
– soliciting others for help on a particular challenge or simply bragging
about the results from a recent campaign.
The legacy spot consulting process will gradually give more ground
to the “spot collaboration” method, where the mobile expert’s advice is
supplemented by that of the community.
As with the previous stage, the mobilist – not the community and
certainly not the mobile expert – will assume an ownership position of
any and all mobile campaigns, as the client teams become the driver of
mobile activity within the agency.
It is expected that the mobile expert will be consulting on key
clients, but the actual need for his or her services will vary considerably
from account to account.
The mobile expert can now begin to focus more effort on identify­
ing corporate partnerships and alliances advantageous to the agency,
and researching new mobile planning and execution tools as they
emerge in the marketplace.
To this the leader’s role is to keep the base engaged by continuing
to introduce exciting and entertaining innovations from both the corpo­
rate level and from the field, promoting any local “mixers” or industry
events of interest, and maintaining an inclusive environment where
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
ideas and new thinking are valued.
Recruitment efforts will continue but will not be given the same
emphasis as in the planting stage, as it is expected that organic growth
will offset any natural turnover in the system.
Harvest stage. It is the final stage of the implementation plan
where the agency will be able to fully reap the benefits of the bazaar.
At this point the mobile expert’s relative contribution to the com­
munity will appreciably diminish, as the cooperative spirit of the group
increasingly asserts its dominance.
The leader will continue to participate in community­building ef­
forts via blogging and other means, but will by no means overshadow
the conversation.
The mobilist bazaar itself, via shared knowledge and experience,
will eventually become “the mobile expert” in and of itself, collectively
superseding the limited resources that the mobile expert can bring to
bear on any single project or campaign.
As mobilists begin to plan and execute mobile advertising cam­
paigns independent of the mobile expert, the latter can focus more fully
on high­level corporate initiatives.
Spot collaboration activities by the mobile expert will no doubt con­
tinue on key accounts, but in a greatly reduced volume and at a much
higher level, significantly increasing the quality and effectiveness of
such recommendations.
With this process, mobile expertise is continually distributed to the
client teams as the model reaches its desired state.
And so…
If effectively applied, the open source model can provide a solution
to the vexing chicken­and­egg scenario agencies face when attempting
monetization of the mobile channel.
In the software industry the model has already produced brilliant
and wildly successful software applications such as Apache Web
Server, mySQL, Firefox and WordPress – applications built by a com­
munity of volunteers that have come to dominate, outperform or out­
innovate competing products produced by many teams of full­time
programmers from the likes of Oracle, Sun and a host of other
industry giants.
Likewise, industries such as pharmaceutical, legal and finance
which face a similar set of challenges – high­complexity of tasks, com­
munication failure, poor distribution of labor and severe time and cost
constraints – are also translating the open source model as a scalable so­
lution to meet their seemingly unique needs.
As with most successes, the key to ours will ultimately lie in
its execution.
Beyond the few rudimentary software needs detailed above – the
best of which are, ironically, all open­source or free products – the most
crucial component that ultimately drives the success of any open source
project is the leader’s ability to fully embody and express the ideals of
successful open source community: an egoless enthusiasm for the
space, a full­throated transparency of thought and of action, and will­
ingness to value and reward the thinking of others.
It is through the positive expression of these ideals that the commu­
nity takes shape, grows and, in the end, achieves far more than any in­
dividual or formally organized group in terms of the quality and
quantity of thought, insight, knowledge and productive work. ■
Reproduced with permission, this article was edited and adapted for
style from Jamie Wells’ blog at http://www.mobilestance.com
Jamie Wells is director of trade marketing for mobile advertising solu­
tions at Microsoft Advertising, New York. Reach him at
jawells@microsoft.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 82
T
Ove rco mi ng m o bi le a dv erti sin g eco syste m hu rdl es
s
By Scott Cotter
he mobile advertising ecosystem is still evolving. In 2008, the
Kelsey Group reported just $160 million in U.S. mobile adver­
tising revenue. By comparison, Internet advertising was $28 bil­
lion (Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates), newspaper was $35
billion (Newspaper Association of America estimates) and television
was $47 billion (Television Bureau data).
Contrast the amount of time we spend with our mobile phones com­
pared to a personal computer, TV or newspaper and it is easy to see the
potential upside.
A number of hurdles holding back successful off­portal mobile mar­
keting campaigns must be addressed for consumers to partake and ad­
vertisers to increase spend on mobile as an effective advertising and
marketing medium.
Lackluster media
Many consumers are still waiting for a
better mobile Web experience. If the media is
not satisfying consumers, why advertise on
that platform?
As an industry, would we use billboards
on abandoned roads or place ads in magazines
with no readers?
When trying to access their favorite URL,
consumers often find the site can freeze a
phone browser or important features such as
login, completing a transaction or accessing
video content.
A full, rich experience is now possible for
any Web site a consumer should choose.
Content transformation solutions being
deployed by carrier networks automatically
adapt content to the specific capabilities of
the device. Hence, consumers enjoy a better
mobile experience and usage increases, which
in turn means more eyeballs for much
longer durations.
Ineffective targeting and tracking
Targeting is typically limited to carrier
network, phone type and perhaps basic site categorization such as
sports and finance. So much more valuable information is available in­
cluding user account profile data, location and mobile clickstream behavior.
Central tracking of consumer behavior and campaign metrics across
mobile’s broad array of devices and networks is critically important
for success.
For example, the popularity of social networking sites has created
a wealth of information around consumer behavior and media sharing.
Contextual advertising created by mining this data enables personally
relevant ads to be delivered in the right place and time.
The result? Click­through rates that are typically five to 10 times
higher than online.
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
Constrained creative
Mobile ad formats are limited
relative to other media. Rich inter­
action is often not possible and the
offer/payoff is difficult to deliver
consistently across the myriad of
different devices. Advertisers are
forced to pursue a “least common
denominator” approach.
By building upon platforms that
enable creatives to use Flash and
multimedia, develop interesting for­
mats including pop­ups, intersti­
Scott Cotter, senior director
of marketing, Novarra
tials, load time messages and even sponsored widgets across any
handset, advertising becomes more appealing. This, in turn, creates bet­
ter recall and or click­through rates.
Further, rich landing pages, click­to­call,
mobile coupons and secure transactions are
possible, enabling more compelling direct re­
sponse tactics and tracking components.
Simple yet effective, the Zippo virtual
lighter application has become a viral adver­
tisement that people use at concerts to signify
the appreciation of a performance.
More importantly, the immersive experi­
ence is highly nostalgic and personally relevant
for a new generation of Zippo consumers.
Immature business model
The mobile advertising ecosystem is still
evolving. Wireless carriers’ models for mone­
tizing both on­ and especially off­portal are not
yet clear.
Also, tracking and analytics expectations
and capabilities between site publishers, adver­
tisers and ad networks often vary. And every­
one is trying to capture their piece of the pie.
Just as mobility has changed social para­
digms, mobile as a media channel must tap into
these new usage models while leveraging the
best of existing advertising media channels.
Minutes for ads, viral word of mouth and always­on access to spon­
sored information present interesting opportunities.
The industry will develop new campaign strategies that take advan­
tage of mobile Internet services being deployed today that enable qual­
ity service, effective targeting and tracking and rich media to realize
the channel’s full potential.
The mobile channel presents low production costs, higher­than­
average click­through rates, targeted demographics and an always­on,
always­with­you medium – a marketer’s dream. ■
Scott Cotter is senior director of marketing at Novarra, Itasca, IL.
Reach him at scotter@novarra.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 83
H ac h et t e F ili pa cc h i m o ne t iz es m a ga z in e

F
t it les wit h m ob ile ad s
By Dan Butcher “Along these lines, we have a number of smartphone applications,
beginning with the iPhone ... that we believe will provide compelling
rench­owned magazine publisher Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.
solutions to both mobile users and advertisers looking to reach mobile
is using the mobile channel to monetize seven of its
audiences,” he said.
magazine titles.
There is an Elle Astrology mobile application currently available
HFM is selling ad space on the mobile versions of magazine to all Verizon, BlackBerry and iPhone users.
brands such as m.Elle.com, Car and Driver slideshows
m.CarAndDriver.com, and wallpapers are currently
m.Ellegirl.com, available to all Verizon,
m.Premiere.com, AT&T and Apple iPhone users.
m.RoadAndTrack.com, In addition, various HFM
m.WomansDay.com and titles offer SMS alerts, which
m.Ellegirl Latina. Quattro are powered by 4Info.
Wireless handles ad sales and Elle’s SMS alerts include
serving for the titles. fashion tips, beauty tips and
“On the premium side, we runway news.
have a few branded applica­ Ellegirl’s text­message
tions we sell that are available alerts have celebrity gossip,
on a number of carriers and fashion tips and beauty tips.
handsets,” said Yaron Oren, Car and Driver’s SMS
director of mobile strategy alerts have automotive news
and operations for Hachette and reviews.
Filipacchi Media U.S., New Premiere’s text­message
York. “On the mobile adver­ alerts have movie news
tising front, we have a net­ and events.
work of seven mobile Web Finally, there are different
sites, reaching a total of ap­ SMS­alert services from
proximately 2 million Woman’s Day: WD Now! –
monthly unique users, and six which offers home decorating
text alert services. and organization advice,
“Through these services, recipe ideas and health tips –
we offer our advertisers a and WD Eats, which provides
wide variety of mobile dis­ recipe ideas.
play, SMS and integrated pro­ “As far as our mobile au­
grams,” he said. “Going diences, we target both our ex­
forward, we will continue to
isting readers and users on
Will mobile be a page­turner for Hachette?

build our mobile business through advertising and subscription/

other platforms, such as print and online, as well as new audiences al­
premium services.
ready active in mobile that we believe will value our services.
“From a monetization standpoint, we are placing a heavier empha­ “The target demographics by brand are similar to print and online
sis on mobile advertising as we believe there is ultimately more revenue with a tendency to skew a bit younger,” Mr. Oren said.
potential there.” “Hachette primarily views mobile as a profit center,” he said.
HFM tapped Quattro Wireless for its WAP sites and deployment of “However, our mobile efforts certainly provide the additional benefit of
mobile display ads. helping our brands reach new audiences and strengthen relationships
Brands that have advertised on one of HFM's mobile sites include with existing ones.”
Procter & Gamble’s CoverGirl, Toyota's Scion and Unilever's Knorr. The strategy is to maximize brand quality and consistency on all
All URLs for HFM’s wired Web sites redirect to the mobile sites platforms and to promote brand extensions, said Anne Janas, senior
when accessed from a mobile phone. vice president of corporate communications for Hachette Filipacchi
“From a product development standpoint, we are focused on creat­ Media U.S.
ing new tools and utilities around our brands that specifically cater to­ “This will support and accelerate the mobile development when it
wards a mobile user,” Mr. Oren said. fits into overall brand strategy,” she said. ■
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING .MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 84
W
ES P N: Mobi le l ucr at iv e cha nne l f or publi s he r s

s
By Dan Butcher bert said. “Mobile is a connection hub for all of our media platforms,
and cross­platform is not a zero­sum game—mobile wraps in elements
ith the new ScoreCenter iPhone app to complement existing of all of our mediums together and connects all media.
mobile offerings including SMS polls and ad­supported “If you consume TV you’re going to read the magazine, and if
alerts, a much­trafficked mobile Web site, games, live video you’re visiting ESPN.com regularly you’ll visit ESPN Mobile regu­
and video on demand, ESPN is staying at the forefront of larly,” he said. “For guys being dragged to Bed, Bath and Beyond every
mobile publishing. weekend like me, this is the only way to stay connected with
According to the sports your teams.”
publishing giant, the iPhone ESPN has a dedicated
phenomenon has helped to staff working exclusively on
change clients’ perception of mobile, including a separate
mobile, and applications have mobile news team, and the
provided publishers and ad­ company offers content cre­
vertisers a way to provide util­ ated and optimized specifi­
ity and entertainment. The cally for the mobile platform.
publisher discussed these top­ “Our mobile offerings are
ics and went into its mobile programmed by fan behav­
strategy in­depth at IAB ior,” Mr. Colbert said. “What
Marketplace­Mobile event in we do in mobile is informed
July 2009, in New York. by our fans and how they
“The tide is shifting, and want to consume the content.
mobile finally has a seat at the “Having multiple media
table—as overall usage of touchpoints helps us form a
mobile Web and mobile video deeper connection to fans,
are up and mobile publishers with TV to mobile with fan
reach scale, it has increased opinion voting, polling and
advertisers’ interest,” said video; digital to mobile with
Brian Colbert, director of mo­ apps, SMS and mobile only
bile ad sales for ESPN, New editorial; print to mobile with
York. “Mobile is now part of interactive ads, SnapTell 2D
the discussion from a media bar codes and SMS short
standpoint, and mobile is def­ code marketing; and radio to
initely something clients want mobile urging consumers to
to hear more about. call in or text in and
“Significant budgets being talent chats.”
dedicated to mobile and While the presentation fo­

clients are thinking more cused on ESPN’s various mo­

ESPN's Baseball Tonight is available via MobiTV and MediaFlo

strategically to make a big splash with their mobile initiatives, and it’s bile initiatives, the session was not without its controversial statements.

become a watershed product for us and all publishers,” he said. “Mobile
used to be a cool, bright, shiny, new toy, but there wasn’t enough scale
for advertisers.
“However, we now have enough scale to make this a great adver­
tising vehicle for brands, and brands are thinking about mobile in ways
they weren’t thinking about the channel before.”
ESPN ScoreCenter for iPhone and iPod touch is a free application
available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese.
The ScoreCenter application features real­time scores, live game
updates, game summaries and statistics for nine major sports.
The application includes real­time scores for 500 leagues, including
MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, NCAA, NASCAR, PGA and tennis.
“Mobile enables fans to be better fans and always stay connected,
and we’re giving fans the content they want on their phones,” Mr. Col­
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
Specifically, ESPN subscribes to the notion that mobile publishers
are competing with ad networks and thus should sell their own mobile
ad inventory.
“Ad networks were an easy way to buy mobile, and ad networks
do work for some clients in some instances, they do have a place, be­
cause they helped create more buzz about mobile and increased the ed­
ucation process, which has helped all of us, but we’ve heard from
clients that content does matter,” Mr. Colbert said.
“Ad networks only exist because we let them exist,” he said. “A lot
of other premium publishers we talk to agree. If you think about long­
term strategy, we’re not competing with other publishers necessarily –
our biggest competition is the ad networks.
“Ask yourself, ‘Is letting the ad networks have your inventory the
best way to move the industry – and your business – forward?’” ■
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 85
M
W hat ar e the r equir ement s f or a m obile mar keting exe cut iv e??
By Heather Baker
obile advertising and marketing maybe on your company’s
wish list but how do you qualify the talent, which department
takes on the responsibility and whether you have the budget
for it?
Before answering these questions, let me first start out by saying
this channel is still relatively new in the scheme of things. Thus, there
has not been enough time to develop a significant pool of knowledge­
able top talent.
Therefore, if you are not among the lucky few to find those hidden
experienced mobile marketers, you must consider some cross­function
skills that would apply well for mobile advertising and marketing.
Just like the dotcom startup era, the qualifications have not been
set in place to determine what constitutes great talent because the
medium is still evolving.
Hire versus assign
The first question as it relates to mobile advertising and marketing
is whether you need to hire someone for this task or instead assign mo­
bile to an existing department. I would argue the case that to be success­
ful you will need a dedicated staff member.
Indeed, I would recommend a dedicated employee for mobile and
you should be paying them the same you would an interactive marketer
with comparable skills.
A well­compensated position with a respectable title also signals
the respect with which the organization regards mobile advertising and
marketing in the multichannel mix.
That said, even if the mobile job is assigned to one individual, it
should be integrated with other advertising and marketing channels
within the company.
For mobile advertising to be taken more seriously within an organ­
ization, the person in charge must ensure that the channel is not to be
treated simply as a campaign or one­off program.
Now let us say if you did not have the budget, but did need to assign
the mobile responsibility to someone – which department gets the task?
An easy answer would be the interactive department already working
on online advertising and marketing efforts.
However, marketers need to be careful that mobile should not be
treated as pure technology but a marketing strategy.
To be successful the marketer needs to direct the strategy, and not
simply the technology. Online companies fell into this trap and the mo­
bile executive may similarly be bedazzled. Witness the latest craze with
mobile applications.
So, does your candidate understand the marketing first and then the
technology to back up the marketing premise? I see this as a problem
in the online marketing world as well. It is rare to find both skills in the
same person, but still possible. However, be clear about what you are
looking for.
Skill set
Chief among the skill requirements are knowledge of brand market­
ing, database and measurement, privacy issues, consumer behavior and
MOBILE MA KE E CLA IC G IDE O MOBILE AD E I ING
the power of copywriting.
Take consumer behavior strat­
egy. Timing is everything as it re­
lates to delivery and acquisition of
the consumer. You need to under­
stand how and when they want
products, which is something direct
marketers are all too familiar with.
Mobile is a direct marketer’s
dream. They know how to use con­
sumer behavior data and tie it back
to their database to create relevant
messages to their consumer.
Add to that a strong understand­
Heather Baker, managing partner,
ing of audience segmentation,
BennettBaker
measurement and analytics, as well as database marketing – one of the
major strengths of SMS programs – and how to build a permission­
based database.
Privacy is another issue that requires special attention – again, a
skill that a mobile marketer will have to share with a direct marketer.
Knowledge of the double­opt­in and opt­out processes is required.
Mobile advertising typically involves mobile banner ads, SMS,
MMS, mobile video ads, in­game ads and rich­media on the mobile
device that promote a product or service.
Take SMS, the most commonly­used mobile tactic along with mo­
bile banner ads. Since SMS is much­used within mobile and there are
a fair amount of similarities with online marketing, the candidate will
have to be knowledgeable about double­opt­in requirements, data­
base/CRM and privacy laws.
SMS is like search and Twitter, only with 160 characters to get
across your message. Twitter is 140 characters and a typical paid search
ad is about 100 characters or so. The pitch has to be perfect with SMS.
Indeed, SMS harkens back to the days of telegraph and the telegram
– brief and to the point, but highlighting the sense of urgency. It is very
different from email. Yes, you do not want to confuse SMS for email
because of the different protocols and laws involved.
Working on banner ads and rich media requires an understanding of
branding, landing pages, calls to action and measurement of actions
sought. The candidate should have marketing­ and technology­savvy
with the Web, even if the initial experience is on the wired Web.
Another quality required in the candidate is flexibility. The mobile
executive’s role in understanding and interpreting the technology,
ecosystem and attitude to behavioral and geo­location marketing should
grow with the industry’s evolution.
It is best to either nurture talent from internal resources, network
within the industry or tap outside help to find the right candidate for
handling mobile advertising and marketing responsibilities within your
organization. Your company’s mobile advertising will be only as good
as the person running it. ■
Heather Baker is managing partner at BennettBaker, a Chicago­based
recruiting service for response marketers in direct, interactive and mo­
bile marketing. Reach her at hbaker@bennettbaker.com
.MOBILEMA KE E .COM AGE 86
A
Mob ile ad ver ti ser s con tin ue to fac e lega l chal le nges

s
By Gonzalo E. Mon The companies challenged by
the Florida attorney general have
nyone who reads Mobile Marketer knows that a growing num­ each had to pay at least $1 million
ber of companies are engaging in mobile advertising. Fortu­ to settle the investigations.
nately for companies that are new to mobile, there is no Mr. McCollum is currently de­
shortage of examples of successful campaigns that can be used veloping a “zone system” which
for inspiration. will dictate where and how disclo­
However, the list of success stories can sometimes be marred by sures must be made.
examples of companies that have had to pay high prices for failing to For example, price disclosures
comply with various legal requirements. The biggest problems have will have to appear within a certain
had to do with failure to disclose offer terms or get consent. number of pixels of the submit
Advertising laws require advertisers to disclose important offer field, in a specific font size, and in Gonzalo E. Mon, an attorney with
terms in a “clear and conspicuous” manner. a color that contrasts with Kelley Drye & Warren

In most cases, though, laws do not specify exactly what constitutes the background.
“clear and conspicuous.” While the zone system is pending, advertisers would be well­ad­
vised to review the Florida attorney general’s settlements with other
P’s and cues companies to see what has gotten them in trouble and check with their
The Federal Trade Commission encourages advertisers to consider legal counsel to ensure their ads comply with the law.
the Four Ps: (1) proximity; (2) placement; (3) prominence; and
(4) presentation. Yes to consent
Many companies have also gotten
in trouble for failing to get consent
from consumers.
You need to get specific consent
before you can send SMS messages
to a consumer, even if the consumer
has agreed to receive messages in an­
other medium such as email.
Again, the costs of getting this
wrong can be high.
For example, footwear maker
Timberland last year agreed to pay $7
million to settle a case involving un­
solicited text messages.
Please review the Mobile Market­
ing Association guidelines for re­
quirements for getting consent.
Many mobile advertising cam­
paigns involve the efforts of multiple
parties. It is tempting to focus on your
company’s part and just hope that
your partners comply with the law.
Unfortunately, in some cases, you
It is tempting to focus on your company’s part and just hope that your partners comply

Although the absence of a specific standard provides advertisers may be held liable for your partner’s faults.
with the law. Unfortunately, in some cases, you may be held liable for your partner’s faults.

with some flexibility, it also creates some uncertainty over whether a
disclosure will comply with relevant laws.
In recent years, Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum has chal­
lenged a number of companies for failing to make disclosures suffi­
ciently clear and conspicuous.
For example, the attorney general has challenged companies that
advertised “free” services, but buried costs in the fine print.
Disclosing costs in the fine print is unlikely to satisfy laws in any
state. Instead, costs have to be presented in the main body of the offer.
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
Make sure your agreements with partners contain representations,
warranties and adequate indemnifications to protect you in case things
go wrong.
Even then, it pays to monitor partners so that you can identify any
problems and address them before regulators do. ■
Gonzalo E. Mon is an attorney in Kelley Drye & Warren’s advertising
and marketing law practice in Washington. Reach him at
gmon@kelleydrye.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 87
S
Au di enc e e ng ag em en t m ore i mp orta nt th an cl ic ks
s
By Paran Johar
o you convinced your client about the power of 4 billion mobile
phones around the world – almost three for every five people on
the planet. You even showed them all the case studies from the
Mobile Marketing Association about brand recall and how the average
mobile click­through rates are ten­fold than those on the wired Internet.
Even though your client spends most of its ad budget on branding,
after all these years of advertising on the wired Web, your client really
wants to see those people click.
Like a true media star, you develop your RFP which includes all
the target audience information such as demographics, psychographics,
even a hint of the creative strategy.
Now all you have to do is wait for the proposals from the publishers
and ad networks and then present your recommendation to your client
as the newest mobile expert at the agency.
Everything seems to be going well until something odd happens.
To get on the media plan, one of the ad networks comes up with an
idea to guarantee a click­through rate. Guarantee a CTR? Sounds great,
you think to yourself.
If your client’s ad does not achieve an agreed­upon click­through
rate, the ad network will deliver bonus impressions until a certain av­
erage has been achieved for the campaign.
Before you sign that insertion order, you might want to think twice
and remember a click is not always a click.
At first glance you may think that you have hit the jackpot, but I am
here to tell you not all clicks are created equal and you should be wary
Not all clicks are created equal and you should be wary of ad networks
or publishers that try and seduce you with this.
of ad networks or publishers that try and seduce you with this.
If there is one thing we should remember – though the almighty
click is important – audience engagement is even more critical.
Buying audience to focus on user engagement is certainly not new
fodder for the wired Internet. Agencies have been doing relevant target­
ing and optimizing post­click for years.
One must remember these principles of user engagement when
MOBILE MARKETERʼS CLASSIC GUIDE TO MOBILE ADVERTISING
planning mobile media as they are
hyper­intensified on the mobile
phone due to the lack of clutter and
the personal nature of the medium.
Below I have listed some things
to remember when evaluating
media opportunities.
First, quality content is king.
There is a reason that advertising
within quality content commands a
premium. Advertisers pay a pre­
mium for the right to associate their Paran Johar, chief marketing
brand and message within the con­
officer, Jumptap
text of premium content.
Second, relevancy is even better. Ideally all messaging will be a
value exchange between brands and consumers.
In an ideal world, users only see ads that they are actually interested
in. Since the advertising is actually relevant to the user, the message
actually holds value to them and their time engagement is a trade for
providing valuable messaging.
Third, post­click is the true test of engagement. Anyone can drive
clicks. The wired Internet proved that all it takes is a simple “free” offer
and your click­through rate will spike. The issue is what percentage of
those users actually has an effect on your client’s business.
Measuring how many pages your consumer engages with post­click
is a good start at evaluating ROI and comparing performance of ad net­
works and optimizing your client’s WAP site experience.
Finally, transparency will make everything
clear. The first thing I would ask your ad networks
is whether your mobile ad buy will be transparent.
Transparency is critical in knowing not only
which category of media your ads will appear in, but
also the actual sites and placements. That is why
when evaluating media opportunities, one must un­
derstand where the clicks are coming from and how
they got there.
As part of guaranteeing a click­through rate,
some ad networks will run impressions in places you
would rather not see your brand, thus lowering the
value of those clicks.
This is not to say that cost­per­click advertising
is flawed. It is quite the opposite in fact. If done with
the proper levels of targeting technology and param­
eters, it can work quite effectively.
The key is to ensure relevancy as part of the buy,
whether the pricing is cost per click, or cost­per­
thousand impressions. By focusing on content and context, you ensure
your client’s brand the true test of ROI: user engagement.
Remember, it is not the number of impressions or the clicks you
buy, but the impression you make. ■
Paran Johar is New York­based chief marketing officer of Jumptap.
Reach him at paran.johar@jumptap.com
WWW.MOBILEMARKETER.COM PAGE 88