Yet another set of mobile advertising guidelines will be released this week as the dotMobi Advisory Group (MAG) unveils a 44-page document for companies looking to target wireless users.
The group, a nonprofit offshoot of mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd., hopes to foster growth of the mobile Internet under the controversial .mobi domain. The document is designed as a primer of sorts, describing the mobile advertising ecosystem, value chain and business models, and outlining several campaign case studies.
“What we’re trying to drive through our involvement in the dotMobi Advisory Group is to advance the growth of the mobile advertising market as a whole,” said Eric Eller, Millennial Media Inc.’s senior VP of products and marketing and chair of the group’s mobile advertising task force. “And one of the key ways to do that is to (examine) the buy side of the equation and look at what works in mobile advertising and what doesn’t work.”
More rules?
Whether the space really needs another set of best practices, guidelines or blueprints is debatable, though. The Mobile Marketing Association-a dotMobi ally-has churned out dozens of case studies, best practices and other documents, including geographically targeted guidelines for North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The Interactive Advertising Bureau last year created a mobile committee to endorse “measurement guidelines, creative guidelines and best practices” for wireless marketing, and has the support of such heavyweights as Google Inc., Walt Disney Internet Group, Yahoo Inc. and NBC Universal. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) launched a Mobile Web Initiative more than two years ago and has developed a Web-based service that allows publishers to enter a URL and check whether their site adheres to the W3C best practices.
Focused approach
But while other efforts are targeted at the mobile Web as a whole, MAG is concerned only with the .mobi sliver of the wireless world. While that’s unlikely to appease critics-who claim a mobile-exclusive domain serves only to fragment the Web and confuse customers-it may help to serve as a beacon for publishers and advertisers looking to leverage the .mobi universe.
“The piece that’s clearly different (with the dotMobi effort) is the influence it has over the dotMobi organization itself,” said Eller. “If the uptake of dotMobi domains (lags), it’s not going to have a huge impact. On the other hand, there is a huge number of dotMobi sites including CNN.mobi and Weather.mobi, so we feel that it has some traction in the market.”
