The present and future of mobile advertising - according to the carriers

The panel I was most interested in attending at MMF was the carrier panel. At conferences you usually get a few network representatives attending, but rarely more than one or two on stage at any one time. But this was a panel entirely constructed from networks! Verizon, Cricket, Sprint and AT&T took the stage and told us what they think about the current play of mobile advertising, and what they’re planning for the future.

Moderator:

Cristy Burgan, VP Marketing Solutions, Acision

Panel:

Richard Williams Executive Director, Digital Media Operations, Verizon Wireless
Sue Chandler Sr. Product Manager, Cricket
Cynthia Sullivan Sprint, Group Manager of Premium Services and Social Networking teams
Eric Horowitz Director, AT&T Advanced Ad Solutions

Mod - Mobile advertising is incredibly complex, with a huge number of different channels and types of mobile ad. What’s working for you today in mobile advertising? What would you brag about?

Richard - overall, mobile has some unique values. It’s measurable. It’s scalable. It’s effective. Those three qualities apply to EVERY mobile advertising channel, from SMS to idle screen. Verizon has found, as we’ve invested in mobile advertising, that they’re ALL effective. But you find a lot of brands are more comfortable with banners, because of their experience on-line. You can use banners on mobile web sites and in-app, and this is where we’ve gotten the most traction with advertisers.

Sue - Cricket has seen that campaigns can transcend the mobile web and SMS to other forms of mobile advertising. A mobile campaign can rove out to other mobile channels - but there’s a fear among advertisers because of fragmentation. It’s all about taking that step to do it creatively, and with proper targeting. And not every product SHOULD be on mobile! If you’re selling a product to 70 year olds then you shouldn’t even be considering a mobile campaign.

Cynthia - a specific channel that Sprint has seen great success with is mobile banner ads, which we’ve used to drive premium services. It works great for the customer, because it shows them clearly what they can buy. And because we can integrate our own billing system, it’s very easy for the consumer both to make the purchase and to see exactly how it will effect their bill.

Eric - AT&T has been focused on bringing mobile into broader media plans. We want to use it across all the different media channels, because the strength of mobile is that it can be integrated with every other channels. Mobile is the device that can make everything in the world “clickable”. It can be the glue to hold a cross-media campaign together. Specific successes? Over the last few years we’ve seen far more non-mobile and non-tech brands start to advertise on mobile… even Wal-Mart!

Mod: How about the future? What will the opportunities be in the next 12 months?

Richard - I think we’re starting to see customers using their phones to shop and redeem coupons. Customers can use their device real-time, at the “moment of discovery” to research and even purchase. That’s what I think you’ll see more of.

Cynthia - I’d like to see larger brands getting more involved in the space. Getting national brands into the mobile space would build trust with consumers. If you have a potential mobile  customer who isn’t sure that mobile is a secure channel for making a purchase, they will feel more at ease if they’re dealing with a big brand whose name they recognise. Getting those big brands in would help with that.

Sue - Speaking of the national brands… if you’re out there advertising, you’ve probably got a lot of money. But the big successes we’ve seen on mobile advertising are further down the chain, on a local level. There’s a lot of dollars down there, and we need to pay attention to it. Just because the companies are small doesn’t mean they don’t have money to spend, and there are an awful lot of these smaller companies. A lot of our customers want to use their phones to help them with local search and purchase. And we can be involved in that. The brand doesn’t need to be a Nike or a Coke.

Eric - There’s so much you can do with a device now. It’s hard to pinpoint one thing we’re most excited about. We’ve actually created a framework at AT&T of what we think will be successful. We call it our ABC! “A” is for advertising, particularly search and banner ads. “B” is for using mobile as the Bridge to connect offline with online, it can “activate” any other media. “C”  is for content and utilities, from applications through to LBS. These are the things we expect to continue to succeed in the next 12 months.

Mod: What do you think needs to happen for mobile advertising to flourish?

Richard: We need a way to make sense of all the different ways you can enable things through the mobile. There are SO many channels. Video interstitials, SMS, WAP banners….. we need to tie these together. We’re doing smaller one-off campaigns at the moment, and it’s hard to properly show the value of a larger campaign integrating different mobile channels. We also need better metrics to show the brands, and highlight how much success they can have in the mobile space.

Sue: There are a couple of things that need to happen. First, we need auditable third party metrics. We can’t continue just saying “here are the numbers, they’re great. Trust us, we’re the operators”. We need someone like Nielsen to do independent measurement for us. Second, we need operators to more closely follow best practices - there are standards proposed by the MMA, for example, that operators should follow in order to make sure customer experience is solid and consistent. Third, we need to ensure that the process of launching a mobile campaign is much shorter. It should take days or even HOURS, rather than the months it currently takes.

Eric - It starts with the audience. I don’t think we need to convince anyone that there’s a significant audience out there. The audience is there! We just need to build an ecosystem of trustworthy agencies that can drive this properly and easily. Most advertisers are convinced that the audience is there, we just need to make it easy for them to dive in and play.

Mod: let’s talk about app stores. What are your views of apps stores? WIll you create your own?

Cynthia: Sprint announced a few months ago that we’re creating our own app store - it’s a very open environment. The approval process should be very quick. We’re very open to the idea.

Eric: The AT&T perspective is that we serve consumers. And consumers want choice, particularly where apps are involved. We even create and publish our own apps, and we recently bought an application developer and made it part of AT&T. So you could say we’re very bullish on it!

Sue: Open standards are going to be a fact at some point in time. What this will bring is more choice for the consumer, more app varieties, more business models. And this presents its own challenges. How many apps can you have per user? How many apps can you have advertising on? Everyone is going to have a different business model, and it’s possible to swamp the user with advertising. That’s where the challenge is. The challenge is not in serving apps, but in serving them WELL, and in a way that the consumer will enjoy. As you have hundreds of thousands of apps, how do you handle the ad inventory?

Richard: we’re also launching a VCast app store. And it works across the entire ecosystem, so we’ve got both customers and developer feedback. And what the developers want is faster launch time, so we’ve made a commitment to make sure that the time between submission and launch is no longer than 14 days.

Mod: what about privacy issues? How do you balance that with what you can share with third parties?

Richard: we don’t share the data with advertisers. We do allow them to target certain users groups, but we hold individual customer data very close.

Sue: the important thing is to only share the description of an overall segment - but protect the anonymity of the users within that particular segment.

Cynthia: in terms of LBS, that allows you to pinpoint a particular user at a particular time… but that HAS to be opt-in.

Eric: we’ve embarked on a policy called “respectful engagement” - so we don’t share any private information about a consumer without their permission. But it’s really about creating an intelligent dialogue with consumers. Just spraying out ads isn’t effective - you need to have consumers that are asking for ads.