Roundtable report: Mobile marketing

Sponsor: AdRevenue

The panel:

Paul Quarterman, AdRevenue
Gillian Kennedy, Pitch
John Willshire, PHD Media
Justyn Lucas, Yodel Digital
Tom Knapp, Advertising.com
Reggie James, Digital-Clarity
Rachel Mepham, Digital-Clarity
Conrad Swailes, Weboptimiser
James MacDonald Unanimis
Phil Williams, Rocketseed
Alice Mallick, Harvest Digital
Jamie Toff, Propel London
Naomi Lennon, AdRevenue
Xavier Adam The Adam Media Consultancy
Jonathan Watson, Reactor Mobile
Robin Langford, Netimperative
Graham Jarvis, Media-Insert Communications
Davina Lines, Netimperative
Charlie Lines, Netimperative
Liane Dietrich, LinkShare
Kevin Kozinchik, Linkshare

Session One 

The session began with Davina Lines asking the panel if there really was a market for mobile advertising. Paul Quarterman CEO at AdRevenue, thought this was a question of identifying what are the key drivers for the platform.  

Paul believed that online had evolved to a stage where it was meeting a point of saturation where advertisers are turning to mobile as an alternative platform to reach their target audience. He added that unlike the Internet, mobile is a response lead device.  

Despite the rosy outlook projected by recent mobile research, Paul warned that the industry should not caught up in the hype and remained skeptical about the vagueness of some forecast revenues from advertising. Alice Mallick at Harvest Digital agreed, citing a key main barrier to mass mobile adoption among advertisers. She thought people were far less willing to give out their mobile number as opposed to their email address, as it’s a more personal device that is with the user nearly all the time. 

Reggie James at Digital Clarity looked at UK firm Blyk as an example of where mobile marketing could work. The ad funded mobile network gives 16-24 year olds free mobile texts and calls in return for receiving around 6 mobile marketing messages a day. Gillian Kennedy from Pitch agreed, saying that Blyk had ‘turned the mobile marketing model on its head’. However, the while the panel thought the idea was working, many felt the commercial value of Blyk’s  revenue model was yet to be fully proven. 

John Willshire at PHD Media said that while it makes good sense for Blyk to target the youth audience who are more accustomed to mobiles and receptive to ads, he added that age wasn’t an issue as long as ‘advertisers got their incentives right’ in terms of target audience. He added that the main consumer concern remained the extra charges for accessing the web online.  

Ultimatley, John thought this was holding mobile internet back from reaching that critacl mass of people to tempt advertsiers to shift their budgets to mobile. “ Advertisers want millions, not thousands,” he concluded. 

Gillian agreed, saying demand was still pretty low in the mobile display market for WAP sites, and believed that advertisers are currently getting ‘some great deals’ on the spare inventory on mobile portals. However, Jonathan Watson at Reactor Mobile saw a significant turning point stemming from operators investing  in ‘off-portal search’ to help draw people onto the mobile web. 

John moved the discussion onto the role of GPS. He thought that location was a great strength of mobile, provided it is done on an opt-in basis. James MacDonald at Unanimis agreed, and said this had a lot more potential than simply a banner ad for a fast food chain.  

Paul Quarterman was more skeptical, saying that the industry has been talking about location based services for a long time, but its successful application still hasn’t materialized.

Jamie Toff at Propel London asked the panel about the importance of creative. He said the mobile was limited by technology and screen size compared to other platforms, and as a result was not enaging customers visually. 

John countererd that there were different ways to engage’ a customer, not just visually, but through different formats, such as Bluetooth. 

Phil Williams at Rocketseed thought that not enough work was being done to integrate mobile into the overall marketing mix, and that advertisers need to ‘think holistically’ when planning their campaigns. 

Paul  thought these points drew the debate back to a fundamental question about the way customers are using their phones. “What is a mobile?” he asked. “Is it a device you take out of your pocket to do something, or do you take it out for something to do?” 

Alice cited some creative work Harvest Digital did with a client for an off portal mobile campaign. While it reached only a small volume of mobile users, the click through rate resulted in an impressive 4.5%. This was enough to prompt the client to follow up with a new campaign trying to target double the volume- but there were simply not enough people to reach, so the project was abandoned.  

James said this was a typical problem in mobile marketing, and the only ‘mass audience’ remained in the walled garden portals such as Vodafone Live! but he thought the targeting on these portals was still too limited. 

Paul added that these networks are currently desperate to recover debt after being forced to spend masses of money securing 3G licenses while package deals for calls and texts have resulted in their  revenue yield ‘going through the floor’. He also felt that operators have given away their “crown jewels” of advertising inventory through “middle man” deals with the likes of Yahoo and Google. James agreed and thought that eventually, operators will want to retain their own ad inventory. 

Session Two 

Davina Lines at Netimperative began the second session asking the panel what they felt the main barriers were to mainstream mobile marketing adoption.  Jamie felt the greatest barrier was still the perception that if you go online mobile it will cost a lot of money.  

John said often limitations stem from the client side. He talked about a campaign he did for a company using spare Bluetooth space to put films onto users handsets. This was successful and generated a great number of leads, but the client did not have the resources to run a CRM program to follow up the contacts. 

Liane Dietrich at LinkShare felt that mobile was still being overshadowed by other media. “There’s a budget for TV, radio, online, press,  outdoor- mobile doesn’t get look in,” she said.  “John said he considered mobile as part of the outdoor budget. “Its a place thing,” he said. “It’s either posters or mobile.” 

Jamie also thought customer education was an issue with many people still just usung their mobiles to “text, call and wake them up in the morning”.  He cited Orange’s implementation of Orange Trainers in their shops to give demonstrations on how to get the most out of their phones as the type of education needed. 

John thought a big problem remained on the operator side, as they are essentially still telecoms companies and  are therefore modeled around ‘charging the customer, not the advertisers’ via expensive tariffs and bundles that lock subscribers into 18 months contracts. He thought a better revenue model would be to attract larger audiences though cheaper mobile web services and start generating more ad money to counter that lots through subscriptions. 

Lianne made an interesting point that mobile marketing is still largely untested by some big brands, which could cause inertia as any mobile campaigns are seen as “research and development dollars, not marketing dollars”.  

Naomi Lennon from AdSmart Mobile then moved the discussion onto SMS marketing, asking why advertisers are hesitant to book text-based, even at the most basic level, such as including SMS shotcodes on their ads. 

John thought push SMS campaigns are among the ‘worst forms of advertising’ saying the phone is a highly personal device and text ads are often viewed as an invasion of privacy that could tarnish the associated brand. 

Naomi argued that TV ads could be considered to be just as intrusive, but viewers have put up with that for 50 years and have come to accept it.   

Paul pointed to markets where SMS was working and getting big brand backing from the likes of Coca- Cola, such as India and China, and asked why there is brand resistance in the UK. The panel thought this was a mix of cultural differences and differing regulations. 

James thought it all depended on how you apply SMS in a campaign. He talked about a 118 118 campaign he worked on using SMS marketing as part of an opt in CRM campaign. 118 enquiries received a sponsored text back related to their enquiry with a link to a WAP site. 

The panel then discussed the role of data lists, weighing up the merits of bought lists versus builing lists from scratch. James said that options are limited with bought lists, while self-built lists can be segmented offering more relevancy and potentially  higher conversion rates. 

The discussion then  moved on to looking at the future of the mobile device, and its relation to other media platforms.  John  thought that operators would have to prepare for a point when Wi-Fi becomes ‘free and ubiquitous’ meaning customers would no longer be tethered to their operators services- instead able to access Internet telephony services easily and cheaply. 

Panel looked at the more developed mobile market in Japan as an indicator for future trends. Kevin Kozinchik at Linkshare said the Japanese market is more transaction lead with many major brands owning m-commerce sites. People are far more likely to be buying household products  rather than just ringtones and games, he said. 

James felt that culturally Europe was different to Japan, and saw the UK mobile market being lead more by and advertising and marketing funded model. Kevin disagreed, pointing out that saying that if we the growth of online retail was directly proportional the  growth of internet technology and accessibility. He said he expected the mobile market to mirror this trend over the coming years. 

Phil Williams said that ultimately, technology was just a ‘means to an end’ , for example, the iphone was just  a way to access the internet, not just the mobile Internet as is the standard case currently with mobiles.  

This moved the panel onto discussing whether the mobile internet is eventually going to be superseded by the standard internet, which would essentially make the mobile simply ‘another screen’ for you to access the internet on the move. Kevin was cautious as to how this model would work in terms of advertising, and doubted advertisers would be prepared to pay the same price to show ads if they were displayed on smaller mobile screens compared with PC monitors.  

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About AdSmart

AdRevenue's AdSmart Platform is a mobile marketing tools that lets clients integrate SMS into online creative, collecting data simultaneously.

The product had been designed to cater for the growth of Web 2.0 technologies, which have empowered the consumer, causing them to expect things right here, right now. Standard ad formats need to evolve to meet this time-poor audience, so AdRevenue developed a platform that enabled advertisers to incorporate a mobile SMS element in their campaign. 

Results have seen an improvement on conversion rates and greater interaction times with an online audience. What’s significant about AdSmart over other SMS marketing methods is that it eliminates the need for a short-code and allows users to engage with advertisers without leaving their online page. 

The product helps to remove entrance barriers associated with clicking through banners to landing portals and the usage of mobile in advertising. Furthermore the ‘opt’ is resolved as the client supply’s the mobile number.

To find out more, visit the AdSmart website.

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The venue for this Roundtable was kindly provided by online marketing solutions provider LinkShare: