PODCAST: Brand Matters (Again) In Mobile Search; Medio Drives Mobile Advertising
The white label/branded debate that marked the mobile space a few months ago hasn’t cooled; it has taken on a new dimension as it becomes clear that search is the de facto interface to content. As search becomes more central to the content consumption experience, the brand on the search engine will ultimately become core to the operator’s value proposition.
Should operators go with branded search engine providers because of the halo effect it can have on their own often times lackluster brands. Or should they shy away from branded search engines and tie-up with white label providers whose motives are much easier to divine? (Consider a recent BusinessWeek article outlining Google’s wireless ambitions, and since just last week new rumors resulting from Google’s presentation at MoMo in Barcelona and its own admission that it could imagine being a mobile portal destination in its own right.) The jury is out on which strategy is superior. They both have their merits: branded gives operators buzz while white label gives them control. (And who says operators will choose one over the other? Many operators I speak with confide they are determined to have it both ways in the end. Does this create an opportunity for mobile meta-search, I wonder?).
At the London mobile search conference I co-chaired, Omar Tawakol, Chief Advertising Officer at white label search engine provider Medio Systems, eloquently outlined what is at stake. Can the operator afford to give up mobile search to one of the online portal search brands? In his view, even aligning with Yahoo or Microsoft providers willing to put their brands second when operators’ business rules demand it can be a risky business. Ironically, Tawakol pointed out that operators may find themselves in a no-win scenario where “consumers begin to think of their devices as Google phones.” (And I may add this observation is all the more eye-opening when taken in the context of this weekend’s user poll by the Equs Group, via Information Week’s blog, which claims that over half of respondents surveyed would “purchase a mobile device made by Google or Yahoo if such hardware existed.” The methodology is shaky at best, and I’m in contact with the company to get some answers – but the findings nonetheless speak volumes about the trust users already place in search engines brands.)
I caught up with Tawakol following the conference to learn more about the raging branded debate, as well as focus on other key topics including Medio’s current efforts to build an inventory and an ecosystem through its Ad Network, and the increasing importance of content discovery and recommendation in mobile search services mix.
Listen to the podcast here:
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More is better: Microsoft’s acquisition of Screen Tonic was a must. “Typically search engines are not organized and don’t think in the right kind of way to be able to really go deep into a carrier. I think the acquisition of Screen Tonic by Microsoft is really about getting that type of thinking and that type of organization and those sets of relationships right in terms of building a network on top of carrier traffic.” Meanwhile, Medio continues to invite “networks like Ad Mob, Ingenio, who we’re already working with, and a couple of other networks we’ve been working with that we haven’t announced but are already live and active on our system.” The goal: “Keep fluid and get as many networks to participate with you [Medio] as possible.”
Different game, different rules: Google’s megalomania can be linked to Wall Street’s expectations. “Wall Street expected of them that they would diversify their revenue, so they added different types of search and then they started going into radio and offline and mobile and they even bought Double Click to get access to brand advertisers.” But size won’t secure even Google a top-notch spot in mobile search. “The one core thing the search engine has to do for the operator [is to make] the world discoverable so that people will use more and more of the data services that they’re [operators] trying to build up.” The other job of a search engine is to deliver quick and actionable answers.
May the best ad win: “In our ad network today we will sometimes put our results and sometimes put other people’s results based on what’s relevant for the consumer, and the reason you do that is that no one network is going to have all the ads in the world, and so by getting them to your diversity of ads from multiple networks, you’re going to guarantee you’re going to find the best thing for the user.”
Retrofit doesn’t work: Branded engines are hardly a match for mobile. “They’ve generated search engines that just get squeezed into the phones and their ad feeds for mobile are extremely sparse. They may come to you and say we’ve got 50 people selling ads in this country, but when you really dig deeper you find that 49 of them are selling online ads and one of them is selling mobile. So, you’re not going to find with any of these search engines the huge monetization you find online following into mobile just because they jump into mobile. I think it’s reasonable at this stage in the game to resist the temptation to say just throw your hands up and run to the branded.”
Ad relevancy on steroids: Some companies run the risk of spamming users because they define relevancy too loosely. This approach isn’t part of Medio’s modus operandi. “Erring on the side of consumer relevancy is absolutely core and [to do that] we maintain a conceptual hierarchy. We tend to balance it by saying you can get a little bit broader than the [search] topic because that still could be relevant by the user. But take it out too far and you lose the context that the user really cares about and that’s where we draw the line.”
The discovery channels: Don’t get too excited about mobile search. It’s a user-pull paradigm that assumes consumers always know what they’re looking for. Medio has no such illusions and considers itself “more of a discovery company than anything.” Search plays a central role but discovery is decisive because it helps overcome the inherent limitations of mobile devices. “Because you have a small screen, you’re trying to get to an answer. There’s a lot of information for you to sort through, so we’ll use a mix of those techniques [i.e. search, discovery, recommendation] to make sure that you discover the answer as fast as possible.
Future roadmap: “Our view is that at the end of the day, you want all information to be discoverable with search and you want that search box to go higher and higher on the deck until it reaches the idle screens. So, that pretty much draws a roadmap of how you expect us to work with the operators to pull together different types of search and go higher and higher in the screen. A lot of what you’ll see from us in terms of analysis and strategies will be things around that.”
