Comments on: Mobile Advertising Is Broken – Who Will Fix It?

By: jMac

jMac — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:37:54 +0000

Outstanding post. I know I may be biased (due to hat tipping in my direction) but really, this indeed is our joint revolution. By every single one of us.
This is the equivalent of human rights in marketing.
Asking not telling.
–
Today whilst presenting to one of the biggest brands in the world, I asked who would be happy sitting in a restaurant with 100 tables and everyone got black pudding given to them. No menu, just big dollops of congealed blood served up.
1 person said they would like it – the others said they would be outraged and leave immediately.
This, my friends, is the world in which we live.
To re-cap > 1 person loved it, others want to leave.
Wanna know how it can change?
Wanna know when the ‘year of mobile is’?
Wanna know what the massive, big, scary, mammoth idea is?
Ok..
Here it is…
Brace yourself….
Ready….?
Ask people what they want.
—
Yes…..its really that simple.
I propose the future of the Big Idea is the small idea.
I write on behalf of every single one of us.

By: London Calling » Mobile Advertising Is Broken - Who Will Fix It?

London Calling » Mobile Advertising Is Broken - Who Will Fix It? — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:36:46 +0000

[...] Salz from msearchgroove and she has invited me to write semi-regular guest posts on her site. The latest of these addresses the issues we currently face with mobile [...]

By: Edw3rd

Edw3rd — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:32:30 +0000

As at least one person on stage rightly pointed out at MWC this year, this has been The Year for Mobile Advertising for nearly a decade.
Let’s recall that TV advertising didn’t explode until the “network” evolved from local broadcasting. National brands wanted to buy national audiences. Same problem arose when the Internet first appeared and anyone with a web site created their Ad Sales team and started calling on brands and agencies. Today every operator wants to be and behaves like a local broadcaster or unique web site. Yet, every brand – and it is every brand – is today a global marketer and they want to buy audience globally. Long tail strategies require it. Remember, for brands the key buying factor remains Scale.
It is simply not efficient for a brand or an agency to buy from so many outlets, in such small media quantities, and with so many unique creative units. Note, the example of Blyk – which I completely agree demonstrates success, functions OUTSIDE of the normal operator-led ad sales channel. And, I’d venture to guess that their Operator partners may review Blyk at the Board level as simply a Strategy Test.
Operators do not seem to be serious about creating or participating in the formation of ad networks – they prefer to pretend they are now media companies. When will they learn? But, when you have big-monied CEO’s and deferential industry groups certain that declining ARPU can be made up by taking share from the Advertising pot, what can one expect? Even the industry association promoted test in the UK has gone nowhere. Why? Not because Buyers don’t want it. The reason is that Sellers prefer to chase the Golden Goose on their own.
I believe it is incorrect to chastise brands that under-investment is the problem or to encourage Operators that only if they engage metrics vendors can they demonstrate the valuation possibilities so brands come to the table(s) – those are simply ways to keep a little momentum going for niche vendors and agencies.
Real change will require an industry change. It will be up to a few Telco CEO’s and the MMA, IAG, GSMA, ANA, CTIA and others to engender industry support.
Not an easy feat.

By: ea0d

ea0d — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:31:31 +0000

Didnt an advertiser on Blyk come out and say they only had 23,000 subscribers? How many Blyk customers are using it as a second sim. Do you think giving things away airtime and texts lessens the interest in the brand? Every Blyk customer i speak to says its rubbish.
The big operators will never give away that data, if customers found out then they would get more churn.

By: jMac

jMac — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:24:56 +0000

ea0d
You have missed so many points I feel compelled to actually request some time to speak with you.
The fact you are posting on this site means you have validity in this conversation and I truly would like to take a few minutes discussing a different world.
Please feel free to contact me at jonathanmacdonald.com
I promise it will be worth your while.

By: Scott (Mippin)

Scott (Mippin) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:22:19 +0000

There are some great points made in this post but the club wielded to diss the traditional print advertising is too heavy.
- you threw away large parts of the paper (including [shock/horror] the Sport section), but this simply avoided you being hit with advertising from irrelevant ads. I would argue that advertisers know this in advance and price accordingly. In a Google world an advertiser would work hard to avoid negative keywords, you perform this action for them by throwing unused elements in the bin
- we all claim never to see advertising but the fact is (and I am looking for a study to help me illustrate this) that we absorb the brand advertising subconsciously. Watch an episode of Derren Brown some time. The next time you come to make a purchase there will be an impact from advertising “you have never seen nor responded to”. This is all part of the brand value of an ad over the clickthrough value and why CPMs are always higher than the eCPMs of their text counterparts on mobile.
Your points make it a leap to say that traditional advertising is not working. Indeed, I’d argue that your purchase of the Telegraph exhibited the three Ps of permission, privacy and preference albeit in an old fashioned format.
That said, I think the point is right but it is more to do with the dwindling audience for traditional media rather than its ineffectiveness on a per ad basis.
The solution though is not mobile – at least not in its own right. I find the P&G quotes depressing as it indicates more of the same from the advertiser – ‘we like mobile because it is a very large broadcast medium’ is how I would paraphrase.
The true power of the 3P’s is in leveraging the community and interaction – this can be harnessed across all media and certainly most potently online and through mobile.
If mobile does have an advantage it is in that there are so few structures in place regarding advertising that there is no established paradigm to unstitch before doing the right thing. Which is, as you highlight, turning the broadcast model on its head and allowing the user to direct brands as to what would be useful or not.

By: Blogwatch: The 4G picture becomes clearer, or does it? « TelecomTV *Raw

Blogwatch: The 4G picture becomes clearer, or does it? « TelecomTV *Raw — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:21:04 +0000

[...] on the subject of mobile, Andrew Grill over at the M-Search Groove blog posits that Mobile Advertising is Broken. It’s a length post that ties in with an LBS conference this week, but he concludes by [...]