Mobile advertising is an area that a huge number of buying agencies, creative teams and advertisers are trying to nail. But what kind of advertising is worthwhile to the actual mobile operators that enable the majority of this content? Eddie Callaghan, Business Development Manager for Jinny, an Irish mobile advertising solutions agency, spoke at the Visiongain Mobile Advertising conference, and examined the different mobile advertising channels.
The predicted increase in advertising spend between now and 2013, depending on who you ask, is between 7.6 and 19 billion euro. Both of these are massively inflated, especially given current economic conditions. Mobile advertising will be worth money, but almost certainly not that much. So what’s a reliable revenue stream? Well, voice and text are the most commonly used mobile services world-wide – but these services are gradually decreasing in value as price wars continue. So operators need to pursue new revenue streams.
There are a staggering number of channels to be pursued in mobile advertising – MMS, SMS, idle screen, ringback, interstitial, applications… the list goes on. It would be far too time and effort intensive to fill all the channels, so operators have to pick the right one. The higher penetration channels like SMS can carry a very limited amount of content. The channels that allow greater content (like apps, games, interstitials) have much lower reach – there may be 4 billion handsets worldwide, but only 17 million are iPhones.
Banner advertising doesn’t really work either – it’s something that has been inherited it from the online web without considering whether it really works on the mobile Internet. Mobile Web usage may be high in some markets, but globally it’s TINY. It is growing, but operators need to know far more about consumer behavior before they can make proper choices. Display ads that appear on-portal only account for a tiny percentage of overall actions on mobile advertising, somewhere around 2-4%. Off-portal sites do much better – almost entirely because they vastly outnumber the amount of operator portals. And now on-portal ads have transcoded mobile Internet pages to compete with as well.
So what about SMS? It’s certainly not as flashy as other forms, but it has unrivalled penetration. Every mobile handset can already use text messages, so there are no technological obstacles. It is currently the most commonly used form of advertising, but that’s mostly in the format of unwanted spam ads. Several companies offer “SMS Ad Insertion” – which fills unused space at the end of text messages with advertising. For example, bank balance request SMS from banks. And since these ads are sent to a specific handset instead of being scattershot, advanced targeting techniques can be applied to make sure the ad is relevant.
Opportunities are huge in emerging markets – but operators can’t use on-line advertising methods. Due to wide ownership of extremely low-tier handsets, operators are pretty much forced to use SMS. Vodafone used SMS Ad Insertion, combined with a click-to-call link in the SMS itself, to inform people about AIDS in areas of Africa where the disease is a serious problem. The campaign was massively successful, and Vodafone is planning several more along the same lines.
