As companies seek to extend their brands into the mobile space and take advantage of its one-on-one, personal connections, they face the challenges of a medium that can look like television or the Internet but is not quite the same as either.
Companies are taking lessons learned from the Internet and applying them to mobile-but the medium also brings its own challenges, in the form of tiny screens, tiny keyboards and different networks that make it a challenge for brands to put across a consistent experience for customers.
Jack Hallahan, VP of advertising and brand partnerships for MobiTV Inc., said companies need to be aware of the new medium and not rest on their non-wireless laurels.
“You don’t just take what you’ve already created and slap it on the mobile phone,” Hallahan said. He noted that, for companies with a mature Web business, it can be frustrating to create a separate WAP site-even though it can create new opportunities for marketing and selling.
Companies that are looking to take their brands mobile, Hallahan said, also need to “recognize that it’s an emerging platform and give it a break. Don’t come to it thinking, ‘It looks and feels like TV’ or ‘It looks a lot like what I’ve been doing on the Web.’ . You’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
“It looks and feels like some of the things we’ve done, but it has its own characteristic way about it.”
On-the-go access
For example, he said, people are accessing mobile on-the-go instead of in a stationary environment, which offers companies the chance to tie in with other forms of advertising they’ve bought. But, Hallahan added, wireless does have its shortcomings.
“While mobile is definitely the latest, hottest sort of shiny object out there that’s got a lot of people focused on it, it’s has significant, almost Third-World problems around its ability to do what you expect to find in a lot of the traditional media,” Hallahan said.
For instance, he noted, wireless either works on a national scale or very local scale, without the type of targeted regional options of traditional media. Also, Hallahan said, “I think the biggest challenge for the brands, and really for the industry, is that the handsets all have varying technology; the carrier data packets and data technologies are diverse and not standardized; the carrier platforms are different (as are) the carrier footprints.” While a wired broadband connection is essentially the same regardless of the user’s location, he pointed out, location matters a great deal when it comes to wireless.
Another key difference, according to Laura Marriott, executive director of the Mobile Marketing Association, is that companies that are used to paying, say, $40 per year for a domain name are suddenly plunging into a world where it may cost $1,000 per month to have a short code.
Also, she noted, “Consumers don’t know how to use the advanced functionalities on their devices, across the board. The adoption of non-text-based services is not experiencing as rapid growth as we would liked to have seen at this point.”
Most mobile advertising is driven by sweepstakes and promotions, Marriott said.
“Voting for ‘American Idol,’ voting for ‘Deal or No Deal,’ the million-dollar text-to-win-these are teaching people to text for the first time or how to access the mobile Web for the first time,” Marriott said. The number of mobile advertising initiatives has grown rapidly, Marriott added.
“Now we’re seeing almost every major brand deploying a mobile initiative,” she said.
In more ways than one, the mobile ecosystem resembles the early days of the Internet: Consumers access the mobile Web mainly through a few large operators (similar to the old-time gatekeepers AOL or MSN) and they access from devices with varying processing capabilities and heterogeneous connection speeds.
Attracting content, brands
Action Engine, which specializes in on-device portals for brands such as TiVo and MSNBC.com, said that in its early days, when it targeted its services to operators, it had limited success. That changed when it began shopping its wares to content companies and brands, according to CEO Scott Silk.
“The decision cycles and the buying patterns for the content companies and media brands are very different, much more aggressive,” Silk said. “They tend to be much more willing to take a risk and make a bet on an up-and-coming startup.”
Action Engine found that once it lined up the brands as customers, carriers followed. TiVo provides an Action Engine-built application through a partnership with Verizon Wireless. The company also supported the launch of MSBNC.com’s multimedia mobile application, which is available directly to consumers for free as a download and gives consumers easy access to the brand’s content.
Silk said that brands drilled the company on four areas that they’ve come to call the four M’s: a good mobile user experience, the ability to reach mass market handsets, monetization and manageability, or the ability to measure performance as well as manage the application.
While mobile offers potential rewards, Silk said, it also offers its fair share of risks. If a brand offers a dreadful mobile experience, he pointed out, “People aren’t going to say, ‘There must be some inferior middleware in there.'” They’ll associate the bad experience with the brand itself.
Within the past year or so, Silk said, a sea-change has occured in the relationship between operators and content companies. In past years, the dealings between the two groups amounted to a “big control battle,” he said-but today that’s no longer the case. Now, operators and content companies are collaborating more, and the issues under negotiation no longer have to do with control but instead are about revenue share.
“Both content companies and operators know there is big money to be made, so rather than have unmet demand and fight over who has control, what we’re seeing is the two working much more closely together than they have in the past,” Silk said.
