Mobile Advertising from “The Experts”
I stopped by the Mobile Mash-Up event that Nokia put on down in Palo Alto yesterday. It was a great event, very happy to see Nokia doing things like that as they integrate more into the Silicon Valley community! Unfortunately I had a meeting in the morning and was only able to make it down for the afternoon.
One of the things that really stuck out to me was the commentary around mobile advertising. It doesn’t seem like many of the folks commenting on mobile advertising necessarily understand what’s going on. One conversation with one advertising agency is really all it takes by the way, they’ll lay the whole thing out for you. And the necessary response is really pretty obvious.
There’s always a lot of commentary about how mobile advertising needs to be richer, engage the consumer at a different level, enable a dialog around a particular piece of content, provide ways to share an offering among friends, etc. Yea, those things are fantastic, I do sincerely hope that at some point we end up in a place where many of those are the default behavior in advertising. In my mind the ultimate endgame really has advertising merging with other forms of service provisioning and it’s pretty much impossible to tell an advertisement from a free image, or a game, or website. Those are the same things we said about web advertising though, and web advertising is different than television advertising, sure. But it’s hardly become the completely one-to-one mass customization market that everyone predicted. Keyword advertising dominates, but banner advertising is still very much alive.
New marketing mediums seem to be driven by technologists for a while at the start. Everyone goes “Hey, now we can find out if you sing while you take a shower!! How awesome is that!?!? Think about the advertising premiums we can demand for such personal information!” Yea, very good. The part that most folks don’t consider is that no one really cares. And if someone does they’re not necessarily going to be willing to pay you enough for that service in order for you to offset your cost.
Here, let me break down the big list of things that advertising agencies care about for you. Ready, get out your pen and paper. Here it goes:
- Reach
Yep, that’s it. Do they want targeting? Do they want to be able to measure audience response? Yes, but reach comes first. They don’t care about reaching 5 people with specific goals and profiles, they need a mass audience. So yes, they want targeting, but only if after targeting they’re left with a large enough audience to make it worth their while. Do they want a cool channel they can push some interesting alternate reality game down to generate some buzz? Sure, but they’re not going to shift their entire marketing spend into alternate reality gaming if they see a campaign that works out.
So where does that leave us for mobile advertising? Currently mobile web or application advertising doesn’t have the numbers necessary to go after a lot of the big budgets. It’s starting to happen, the numbers are starting to look pretty good (which is one of the reasons we started releasing our numbers at AdMob publicly). The mobile industry is in the middle of an expansion phase. The lines are all pointing in the right direction, but the volume isn’t there yet for the deep pockets to care. Which most people point to and say “Yea, mobile advertising isn’t here yet.” Which they’re basing on the fact that most agencies aren’t yet moving significant portions of their advertising spend to mobile yet.
However the shift in mobile right now isn’t about shifting advertising dollars away from television or online. It’s about setting up services that allow developers to create applications they weren’t able to before, and make a living doing it. And that is happening right now. So to say that mobile advertising isn’t happening yet is just completely wrong. First we need to disrupt and overturn the mobile ecosystem, then we can go after traditional advertising. Please, one major market revolution at a time, lets not get ahead of ourselves.
