Is mobile search mobile advertising?

by: admin Friday, April 20th, 2007

Rating: blurry search advertising

Our friendly blogging neighbor Bill Slawski recently wrote about Google’s Patents in mobile advertising and questioned if Google was becoming more of an advertising company. It is an interesting article and one I have talked about in the past.

Here is a article I wrote earlier this year called is Mobile Search Mobile advertising?

On January 31, 2007, mobile search company JumpTap announced a strategic partnership with WPP Group, one of the world’s biggest advertising and marketing agencies. There are some big implications for mobile advertising and search.

WPP is to invest in JumpTap (the amount was not disclosed – existing investors include Valhalla Partners, General Catalyst Partners, BCE Capital and Redpoint Ventures). The rationale? WPP will be able to offer its existing advertising partners and media buyers access to mobile. JumpTap will be a preferred partner and consequently, WPP’s advertising sales channel, mobile search index and keyword sales programme will quickly enable an abundance of mobile adverts via the JumpTap mobile search service.

There are wider implications. Firstly, this move replicates the fixed Internet model. Mobile search will be the main and key driver of mobile advertising and the way in which mobile adverts will be pushed to consumers. This is not as obvious as it initially seems, because so far mobile advertising has focused on sporadic banner adverts across mobile operator portals or interstitials from companies such as AdMob, Third Screen Media and Screen Tonic.

The move from pushing simple banners on to the mobile Internet to making mobile search the key way in which users receive and view advertising is of utmost importance. It changes the role mobile will play in the wider market and how mobile search will be used in future.

This is why. Mobile search is about discovery, that is, search is used to find services and offers that haven’t been used by that consumer before. Whereas advertising is easy to ignore on the Internet where search is much more general and protracted, mobile advertising can be carefully targeted and relevant to what consumers are doing at any given moment and are less likely to be dismissed out of hand.

This might sound like a no-brainer, but it’s crucial to the development of mobile search and its advancement, for it transforms a pure data mining or spider-controlled mobile search engine into one triggered by advertising.

As Dan Olschwang, CEO of JumpTap said an interview with BKI Media earlier this month, “Mobile advertising needs traffic…The best channel or facilitator of traffic is search”. He’s right. So far, mobile data traffic has been minimal and mobile Internet use remains abysmally low, consequently advertisers have been slow to add mobile to their media planning.

Now the considerable clout of WPP is being brought to bear. It is making a strategic investment in a new medium that will re-channel the focus of mobile advertising away from banner ads on operator mobile portals to an Internet-style, end-user-centric, focused search, but with far greater accuracy. During a mobile search consumers tell advertisers what they want, which is an advertiser’s dream come true.
Other advertising means can only guess at what the consumer wants. So, if the consumer is watching FI on Mobile TV, they must be interested in cars. If they purchase a Madonna ringtone they probably like Gwen Stefani as well. Although there might only be one person in the room with the TV on who is interested in cars and not all Madonna fans are keen on Gwen Stefani.

Even better, mobile search is intuitive and it learns; it doesn’t only focus on the search in question – it remembers previous results or queries which create synapses in the ‘brain centre’. Hence the search engine can predict for and target each user, matching appropriate advertising to the search.

Big brand search engines from the fixed world, such as Google and Yahoo!, have hugely successful businesses built around a less refined version of this search model, although they have not yet made much of an impression in mobile.