It’s Official! Medio Joins The Big Leagues With T-Mobile Deal To Deliver Mobile Search & Advertising Across 5 European Countries
I picked up on the changes on T-Mobiles’ t-zones portal a couple weeks back and posted it here, but the German operator waited until today to give us the details. In a nutshell, white-label mobile search provider Medio, has replaced Microsoft (more accurately, Microsoft acquired MotionBridge, the company that was T-Mobiles’ on-portal search provider). The mobile search service, live in the U.K., Germany, Austria, The Netherlands and the Czech Republic, delivers results across t-zones and a range of downloadable mobile content contained on the portal, including music, images, games and video.
In addition to providing mobile search, Medio will essentially run the operators’ search advertising marketplace (for the t-zones portal) beginning in 1Q2008. The deal doesn’t impact T-Mobiles’ web’n'walk, the premium mobile search service provided by Google.
I was fortunate to have a pre-briefing last week with Michael “Luni” Libes, Medio co-founder. It was a fairly lengthy phone call and I have listed the main points in a Q&A further down. (BTW: Andrew Darling, a well-known writer and valued colleague based in the U.K., had a one-on-one with Medio execs and contacted me to say that he would contribute a blog to fill in any gaps I may have missed. Since he’s somewhere on his way to Helsinki and I’m in all-day sessions in Singapore, it might get a little tricky, but we’ll see what happens.)
Q: What content are you searching and exposing to searchers?
A: It’s t-zones search, and it’s operator-branded. It’s a new search box that appears on the front page of t-zones, searches all the content there as well as all the partners that are part of the portal. It will also be searching mobile Web, but it’s [that functionality] temporarily turned off for some adult content reasons. [FYI: No way of knowing at this point when this functionality will be turned back on.]
Q: What about web’n'walk? Is there overlap?
A: Yes. There are bits and pieces of t-zones visible within web’n'walk, and when you navigate over there, you find our search box and Medio search on those pieces.
And this is the way the customer [T-Mobile] wants to do it. They want to have at the moment, two portals – one being the premium portal and they don’t want to lose the fact that they spend a lot of money and a lot of effort on the t-zones portal, so they’re re-using it in the other products.
Q: Let’s talk about the real news here: the advertising deal. Search advertising will be pat of the search results next year.
A: Yes. These will be paid search results, not banners, but paid placement results within the search results. Google-esque, in a way.
Q: How are you going about this?
A: We will sell the ads. We have our Medio Mobile Now ad network and we have a sales force that now exists in Europe, and they’ll be going out and talking to advertisers and telling them about this opportunity. When we have search inventory, that’s the premium content, that’s the premium inventory that advertisers like, because it’s self-targeted. We know what people want because they’ve just told us. So, we’ve had no problem filling that inventory.
So, we’ll be going to the usual suspects. We start with the content providers who are already selling things on mobile; we go to the TV networks that want people to go watch their TV shows, the travel companies, the typical direct response advertisers from online.
Q: What’s different about the T-Mobile search experience compared to other services you provide your other operator customers?
A: It’s the same core engine that we have deployed at Verizon and T-Mobile and Sprint. The one difference, visually, which you’ll see in this search from the others, is what’s called in the UI “Top Results.”
When you type in some music artist, or you type in Green Day or U2, you’ll get top results at the top of the page, three results that come from some of the categories that are listed. It’s the same clustered search that you see in mobile, ubiquitous clustering. We pull out three of the top best results and show them at the very top with little thumbnails to save users a few clicks and help them search quicker.
Q: How do you arrive at the top three results?
A: Our recommendation engine and ranking algorithms pull out three from amongst the categories below, much the same recommendation system as you find in our deployments elsewhere. I’d say we have a bend towards portal content versus off portal content.
Q: Any response you can share, or even figures?
A: It’s on an upward slope in Europe. We turned on the services; brand new for these customers. They hadn’t had this opportunity before and so we see our typical ramp-up when a new search box appears on the front page. And remember, this is a new search,
as opposed to some previous deployments we did where we just replaced the search box.
This did replace a Motion Bridge powered search, that was not on the front page, that was hidden as a search link off the bottom of the page leading to another page that required you to choose yet another link to get to the search box. So this a completely new search experience for users.
Q: What is the real significance behind this announcement?
A: It’s certainly big news because it’s a tier-1 operator in Europe that is not just giving away the keys to Google or Yahoo or another brand for mobile search. Instead, T-Mobile is actually taking control of its business, putting their brand forward and providing this service to their customers as themselves.
In terms of milestones in the industry, we are dropping in in five countries and we should have approximately the same footprint as [Vodafone with Google] in Europe. So, we’re bigger in Germany, they’re bigger in the U.K., for example. So, in terms of the chessboard, it’s a big deal and in terms of Medio also, this is the first proof that we’re not just an American company, we’re a global company.
Q: Let’s wrap up with a clear explanation of your mobile advertising approach. Where do you begin and end in the value chain, so to speak, and what is your chief differentiator?
A: We are soup-to-nuts search advertising – we have the sales force, we go find the advertiser, we put them in a database, we pick which one to show, we put it on the screen, we track the clicks, we charge the advertiser, take the money, share the money with the operator. Everything needed to do search advertising, we do. Really, there are some deals in the industry that are ad based, but this kind of flips around the value chain and the revenue flows. In other words, we collect the money we share with operators as opposed to them paying us, and collecting money from the customers and paying us.
This turns search into a revenue stream across revenue sources that it will cost center and it justifies the effort that they put into it because it’s a new revenue source for them.
This deal is about text links. There’s no client here, this is all done in WAP, and so you can’t do interstitials in WAP. No fancy homepage, so we do those rotating banners on the front page of our apps, but this is not an app.
Q: Finally, what’s your next step in this inventory land grab?
A: There isn’t a mobile search advertising company that we know of to buy. There’s a distinction between what AdMob does and what we do and that’s the search piece. They sell direct response ads, but they don’t sell them via search engines, so, based on the context of the page, based on the topic of the page. That’s a different offering, it’s a different item for sale.
So, you can’t buy them and there isn’t an AdMob for search ads, the closest would be Medio. Medio, by the way, soon has more search advertising traffic than anyone besides Google and Yahoo and so we are looking for partners and working out some deals to help fill all that inventory, but, for the most part, we’re going to be doing this the nice, simple way of hiring staff and having them go sell ads.
