Note: James, in his capacity as a conference organizer at IIR Ltd., is attending Mobile Advertising in Budapest until November 28^th. It’s a conference he was instrumental in developing and we’re looking forward to his take on panels and participants including 3 Austria, 4^th Screen Advertising, Blyk, CNN, Orange France, Vodafone, WIND and Yahoo among many others… In the meantime, here are his thoughts from SurfKitchen’s mobile advertising roundtable:

Despite the release of guidelines and a wealth of industry metrics to support the mobile advertising cause, real market growth and large scale campaigns are yet to materialise. Some of the brightest minds in mobile are still trying to work out the best way to deliver monetiseable ad solutions without drowning the mobile audience in a tsunami of spam.

In an effort to provide some answers to these pressing questions SurfKitchen, a major provider of on-device portal solutions to encourage content discovery, recently put together a mobile advertising roundtable, featuring some of these brightest minds from across the mobile advertising value chain, including tier one mobile operators, advertising agencies and mobile technology vendors, as well as media and analyst commentators to discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by mobile advertising. (Checkout the MSG exclusive podcast with SurfKitchen here.)

It concluded that growth in mobile data services, coupled with the decline in traditional advertising effectiveness in print and on TV etc, gives the industry a massive opportunity to marry together mobile data and advertising. However, the key is to play to mobile’s strengths of ubiquity and personalisation, which make it arguably the most influential medium for advertisers.

One of mobile’s key attributes is that, in a marketing context, it allows limitless segmentation, enabling advertisers to deliver contextual and precisely targeted ads. Initially, the most important segments will be device type, location and subscriber age, but advertisers will increasingly look at different segmentation models and how to use different mobile services as vehicles to deliver contextual brand messages, the panel suggested.

This emphasis on content and personalization gives new meaning to an old rule of thumb: Think global, act local. In the panel’s view this mindset is crucial if mobile advertising is ever to deliver positive results. Put another way, mobile adverts must be personal, so a one size fits all global ad campaign will be doomed to failure.

The challenge: achieving these objectives without damaging the very personal relationship users have with mobile. While context and relevancy are the key, ads must not be disruptive otherwise users will switch off altogether and the opportunity will be lost.

The roundtable showed that constituents from across the mobile advertising value chain recognise that the relationship that subscribers have with their handsets is fragile and, while mobile advertising potentially reaches the segment of one, over-saturation or the deployment of obtrusive advertisements may prompt consumer backlash.

But a definitive advertising delivery platform will be required if mobile advertising is to reach its full potential. The question is whether this should be based on current or future technologies.

All these points are valid and must be considered before the industry can drive real growth. For me, though, the single biggest barrier so far has been lack of an audience. But this bottleneck will surely disappear once operators reduce data tariffs and effectively let users surf the mobile Web for free. (Remember surfing in the fixed Internet didn’t take off until all-you-can-eat offers were firmly in place.) When this happens there will be a positive knock-on effect as users accept mobile advertising as a means to understand just what is out there. What has to be avoided is a model where users end up paying data charges to receive adverts. That simply won’t work.

Peggy adds: This is what Ivanka Hahnenberger, European Business Development Director, Admob , hinted at in this post when she commented on the interplay between mobile search and advertising. She suggested advertising has become the back door into search, allowing users to drill down and discover content and results through ads that appear on their screen. Indeed, this may be the value-add that increases user acceptance and appreciation of mobile advertising provided it is – of course – relevant.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, On-Device Portals, Personalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.