AT&T believes mobile local search is the future of advertising

At the Mobile Marketing Forum in Los Angeles today, AT&T Interactive CMO Matt Crowley spoke about mobile local search advertising. As AT&T pushes further into mobile services and advertising, it has come to believe that the major source of revenue for mobile advertising in the years to come will be from local search. Not only this, but Crowley impressed the powerful role that operators can play in delivering targeted advertising to huge numbers of people.

AT&T relatively recently combined all of its advertising units into AT&T Advertising Solutions, which handles all AT&T inventory sales. This has allowed an extremely centralised hub to gather metrics from AT&T mobile advertising - which is mainly handled through AT&T Interactive. The sheer amount of media traffic that AT&T sees actually makes it the 17th largest media company in the US.

If you take a look at the breakdown for mobile advertising in the US, the amount made from search advertising has jumped by around 300% over last year. It went from bringing in around 25% of the revenue in 2007, to over 50% this year. Projections indicate that the search share is only going to expand. And various research agencies estimate that 50% of search revenue is going to be LOCAL revenue.

AT&T has a strong interest in mobile local search advertising:

So here’s a case study, with some information that AT&T hasn’t shared before: through a combination of two AT&T Interactive properties, we can deliver incredibly targeted advertising. The first property is MEdia Net. This is the AT&T mobile web portal, combining internet services, media and search. We’ve got 22 million monthly user views on this portal, and 22% of these are people who access MEdia Net on a daily basis. Not only does this give AT&T a vast audience to advertise to on mobile, but these are all AT&T subscribers. No one has better access to metrics and targeting information for this audience than the operator. The second property is the mobile version of AT&Ts on-line yellowpages service, YPmobile. This is a fully functional port of the service to mobile, and it is preloaded on every AT&T device that leaves a shop. And YPmobile integrates with MEdia Net, powering the local search service there. So anyone with an AT&T phone can be served local search ads via YPmobile.

Local has “gone mobile”:

Mobile is the “need it now” marketing medium. There are 275m mobile subscribers in the US, and metrics show that local info is usually the 3rd most popular thing to look for on that channel. And since we’re in LA, let’s take a look at the local results for mobile search here - but these are comparable to those in the rest of the States.

What are the most popular local searches? Banks, pharmacies, hotels, tires and pizzas. These are the biggest things people look for. They want it close and they want it quick. This is a great marketing opportunity! Think about this from a brand perspective - you can push local deals, coupons or just ads through that search to attract nearby users to your brand. We’ve also found that the weekends see almost 9% higher search volume than during the week.

And here is some brand new info on local search that we haven’t announced before. For local searches per month, mobile is used 20% more than on-line. Mobile click through rates are 2 to 3 times higher on mobile than online. And unsurprisingly, “call through” rates are 3 times higher. So this is a massively powerful medium… if we don’t abuse it.

The future of mobile search advertising for AT&T:

There are the four main areas AT&T is concentrating on in mobile.

First, we want expand our consumer reach. We want to push mobile services, search and advertising to as many people as possible. This involves educating consumers and advertising the services. I’d also advise you to not to forget about feature phones. Sure, smartphones are great, but feature phones still drive a huge amount of mobile web usage.

Second, we’re looking at rapid cross platform development. So, mobile applications are great - but it’s hard work! Everyone is developing apps and trying to push consumer experience… but you’ve got over 9 mobile operating systems to deal with, and more than 15 screen sizes. That makes cross platform development extremely difficult. So AT&T has bought an app company called plusmo, that allows you to (for the most part) write an app once and deploy it everywhere on the AT&T network - across platforms, devices and third party developers. We really think plusmo has cracked the code for developing apps on a mass level, quickly.

Third, we want to push advertising solutions that suit mobile. For example, Pay Per Call ads were tailor made for mobile. This is huge for small, local advertisers - as they only pay when somebody actually calls through their ad. For consumers, it’s non-intrusive - people are asking for this information. We’re seeing 150% growth in PPC year by year - and 40% of these calls are mobile. And on mobile, the average length of the call is 30 secs longer, because you need more information from the person at the end of the line. So it works for advertisers, merchants, conusmers AND operators. The caller is more engaged - this is an area I would strongly advise people to look into.

Fourth, we want to expand our publisher network. We’ve got mobile deals in place with a lot of people, including JumpTap and Bing. Let me just show you an ad for Blackberry from Verizon. I thought it was pretty interesting - you might ask why a guy from AT&T is talking about a Verizon ad? Well, it’s pushing Bing Mobile search. And if you look at this, you’ll see it carries ads from our yellowpages.com. And what we’re seeing here is non-intrusive, cross-carrier mobile advertising. This is the kind of thing we really need to push mobile search, and especially local mobile search.

In summary:
- mobile ad growth is being fueled by local search
- mobile advertising can be incredibly valuable, as long as we’re careful to be non-intrusive
- now is the time to get involved in mobile search advertising, and we need to get everybody involved.