Posts Tagged "Ad Networks"

That’s the phrase which popped into my mind upon seeing this January 14, 2010 post on MobileMarketingWatch, titled “Tracking Mobile Ad Click Rates: Symbian Rules.”

Mobile advertising, just like traditional web ads, is an exciting area because of the reach and audience segmentation possibilities.  In parallel with significant investment moves by Google and Apple to get involved via acquisition, the hype around mobile ads is at a fever pitch right now.  I’m afraid customers and investors who fixate here are in for some disappointment down the line, however.

Click through rate, or CTR, is the measure by which mobile and traditional online ads alike are gauged, and the article highlights global research showing that the unlikely Symbian platform is the leader in offering high CTRs, even in the U.S. where it’s not as dominant in terms of market share.

Clearly, a lot of advertisers are thinking “I have to be on Symbian” yet the hype and press would never point an ad buyer at this platform as opposed to the iPhone or a Google Android device.

Advertisers need to remember as well, where are those who click through going to?  A mobile optimized landing page or website?  A smartphone application download?  A coupon or bar code for redemption at the point of sale?  If the answer to any of these is “none of the above” and instead “we’re just happy to have lots of eyeballs seeing our message,” a huge opportunity to drive sales, engender loyalty, or cultivate brand affinity is wasted.

Viewing mobile as an engagement channel that allows businesses to create highly personal interactions that induce action on the part of customers is the real opportunity represented by mobile advertising.  It needs to be viewed as just one part of the value equation, which is why marketers are increasingly coming to Interactive Mediums to leverage our mobile customer engagement platform and expertise around creating effective mobile dialogues with customers across SMS text messaging, mobile web, apps and social media.

Today’s news was all about the debut of Google’s mobile phone, Nexus One, and also Apple’s acquisition of mobile ad network Quattro Wireless for $275 million.  The timing of either announcement cannot be coincidental.  Google and Apple appear to be converging on the same opportunity; mobile devices as platforms for advertising.

Yet read between the lines and you could imagine each company’s approach complementing one other very well, providing marketers with a variety of effective and measurable approaches to reaching consumers.

While there is nothing to prevent Google from developing a large screen tablet mobile device such as is expected of Apple shortly, a larger screen should serve as a higher value advertising basis than handheld devices.  This January 4, 2009 article about Nexus One on The New York Times website says as much:

“…some surveys show that users are wary of ads that could clutter the precious real estate on their small cellphone screens.  And phone users seem more willing to pay a few dollars for applications or content than PC users, potentially reducing the importance of advertising.”

Handheld devices lend themselves much better to simple advertisements akin to those seved by Google in association with its search engine or even by recently acquired AdMob.  This article speculates:

“(Apple) could develop ad units and formats that it thinks are way better than the tiny banner ads already on the mobile web.”

Apple’s reputed tablet device may be the ideal basis for such higher value ad formats.  Marketers will soon be faced with having to decide among different approaches for reaching their customers via mobile advertising, but should not neglect the need to engage customers directly using mobile marketing techniques such as those offered by Interactive Mediums.

With advertising focused almost entirely on acquisition and loyalty a constantly moving target, marketers require compelling engagement capabilities to rope customers into fulfilling experiences that encourage consumption.  That’s what Active Customer Engagement is all about.

Today I came across an interesting post on GoMoNews.com about the emerging challenges associated with measuring the effectiveness of mobile advertising; specifically tying results from different ad networks together in a consistent manner such that they can be compared.  The post recommends that ad networks begin offering APIs (application program interfaces) such that the raw data can be accessed by clients and then massaged into a consistent display for assessment by marketers.

While that sounds like a terrific step or opportunity for consulting firms, as I point out in a comment on the post I don’t see many marketers taking advantage of APIs to this end.  Instead, I see:

• Marketers partaking in mobile advertising across multiple networks without any expectation at resolving the metrics across them, at least not at first.  All forecasts predict that mobile advertising will explode in the next few years, suggesting marketers are either unconcerned or unaware of the issues described in the blog post.
• Because marketers generally are drawn to mobile because it is among the most trackable and accountable channels, they soon may bump into the metrics integration issue.  Those marketers who do will fall into two camps: those who lack the resources or business case for integration regardless of API availability and those who will integrate because mobile advertising directly supports sales.

Let me explain: Many businesses utilize mobile advertising for awareness, branding and demand generation.  If resolving metrics across networks becomes an issue, I expect many marketers to narrow their network partners to one or two that offer access to the most targeted group of potential customers – to undertake an integration exercise is simply not worth the effort.  Other businesses that can drive sales via mobile transactions, however, will find it imperative to integrate metrics and tie these back to sales since the advertising directly supports the business.

With awareness/branding and demand generation representing arguably the largest mobile ad market opportunity, it suggests that mobile networks as a segment will narrow to 1-3 leaders with others either acquired or rendered irrelevant.  Thus, pretty quickly a consistent view of mobile ad metrics should happen almost automatically.

When it comes to engaging customers in the mobile channel, there is a strong analogy.  A single system which allows marketing objectives to be tailored to the mobile channel, executed and tracked, should be high on marketers’ priority lists in 2010.

Technology-wise, I am talking about SMS text messaging, mobile optimized websites, mobile applications, mobile email and social media.  In practice, marketers enabled with a solution that stitches each of these together will have a significant advantage over those who don’t.

For example, imagine engaging your customers via SMS text messaging, let them forward the invitation response to their Twitter followers, send text responders a thank you email, point them to a mobile website to redeem a coupon or to download a mobile application designed for their handset to enhance the shopping experience.  And, track this activity across all these mobile channels in a single system that easily integrates with the only system that matters — the one registering sales.

That seems a valid question given the image posted alongside news articles today discussing the acquisition of AdMob by Google (attached to this post).  The fact an empty space where the name of a company might fall beneath the SMS Ads image telegraphs such a move.  That wasn’t obvious to me until seeing this article today on the acquisition titled, “Is Google Gearing Up To Buy A Second Mobile Ad Network?”

Whether this happens or not depends upon whether Google’s offering around text message ads today falls short of the ideal solution.  At first, the best candidates would seem to be those who have already developed an ad network, yet in practice the value of a network relative to the technology to serve, track and measure SMS advertising should be greater.

Why do I say that?  Because unlike display ads in an iPhone application or on a website, SMS text ads are different – they align with interactive message flows between businesses and their customers.  They don’t live or render on an application interface or webpage waiting for someone to see them.  That is fundamentally a different advertising application even if at first blush it seems the same as display ads or hyperlinks appended to search results and among company websites participating in an ad network.

If Google does make a move into text messaging, it will be interesting to see who they buy and what they hope to obtain by doing so.  Players in the space are angling for a shot at being bought, if you read between the lines of vendor comments here.  Should they take the plunge, it will most certainly align the company closer with the exciting new area of Active Customer Engagement.