Mobile ad space promising, but fledgling

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Calling mobile the most personal platform to date and one that advertisers need to capitalize on soon to keep pace with the rapidly evolving convergence of mobile and advertising, Brian Cowley, president and CEO of Ad Infuse, told a small audience at the Mobile Ad Degree conference that he’s astounded by how quickly things are growing.
Indeed, Cowley argued that, during the past couple of years, mobile advertising has grown at a much higher rate than the early ad days of the Internet. For comparative purposes, he doesn’t count mobile advertising data until about 30 months ago when the carriers began to embrace the opportunity and entered the fray.
Mobile click-through rate is higher
Stephanie Bauer Marshall, Verizon Wireless’ head of mobile advertising, said mobile is already experiencing a higher click-thru rate on ads than what companies are experiencing online today.
The nation’s second-largest carrier is constantly experimenting and testing advertising opportunities that go beyond the banner ad, including things such as video or interactive applications, she said. Still, she added, mobile banner ads are doing really well by most standards.
As the company looks to breach further into the advertising proverbial pot of gold, Verizon Wireless is experimenting with different ways to use its internal data that might increase value for ad agencies and their clients, she said.
And there’s plenty of data to sift through.
“We have gigabytes of data that we don’t even know what to do with,” Bauer Marshall said. “We have to be very careful about it, but there are things we can share.”
Lucy Hood, the former head of Fox Mobile Entertainment, gave a keynote that took audience members through a brief history of the mobile space, as she sees it.
She believes 2008 has already proven to be the “year of the consumer,” with unlimited plans, voice search, SMS, movies and Nokia Corp.’s Comes with Music service hitting stride.
“This is a real shift in the approach to the consumer,” she said, adding that it’s predicated upon achievements made in the industry last year that lead her to frame 2007 as the year mobile content came of age.
Hood still recalls getting the deer-in-the-headlights look when she introduced herself as a Fox executive back in 2001 when data services began to ramp up.
“Let’s just say there weren’t a lot of entertainment execs around,” she said.
Nonetheless, she views much of the ad-meets-mobile space as a playground for innovators.
“Basically anyone working in this industry at the moment is a pioneer,” she said.
Dag Olav Norem, a senior analyst at m:metrics Inc., rounded out the morning event with some of the latest reporting numbers the firm has clocked on mobile data as it relates to advertising.
Shore codes: untapped opportunity
Of the seven countries the firm covers, Spain receives the most SMS ads followed by France, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany and then the United States. The company just entered the Chinese market.
And yet, the response rates to those SMS ads are askew. Italian users responded to SMS ads the most among that group, followed by U.S. users, despite the fact they receive the least amount of ads, he said.
On the flip side, and based on that data, he sees as a largely untapped opportunity with short codes. While short code marketing is doing extremely well in Europe, the U.S. is lagging behind by a significant margin, he told the audience. And while every brand is trying to extend its relationship with consumers, there have been fewer more successful avenues on mobile, he said.