VIDEO: Economic uncertainty could weigh down mobile ad experimentation : MMA updates marketing guidelines, prepares for annual event

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“We definitely are seeing a decrease in, or a halt to, discretionary spending,” the outgoing president of the Mobile Marketing Association said last week. “So we have seen a few members that have asked for delays in renewal (fees), and some have actually dropped their membership.”

Those losses have generally been offset by new members from developing regions, she said, including Latin America and South Africa. But while the MMA’s membership base remains solid — the group has grown from 40 member companies a few years ago to 740 organizations today — the space as a whole is undergoing tremors that are likely to grow stronger as the economy slows. Companies that have deployed mobile marketing campaigns are likely to continue to invest a channel that’s been largely successful, she predicted, but those who have yet to experiment will probably stick with more established mediums.

“The economic climate is definitely having an impact on those who haven’t tried mobile yet,” Marriott observed. “I would say we’re still early, so it’s hard to see what’s going to happen. But economists say we haven’t hit rock bottom yet; that may happen in 2009. So I expect that companies will continue to tighten their wallets.”

The financial slowdown coincides with something of a farewell tour for Marriott, who has overseen the organization since joining it in 2005. She will resign at year’s end, making way for a yet-to-be-named replacement, and assist the new president as she steps into a two-year stint on the MMA’s board. And she’s gearing up for next week’s Mobile Marketing Forum in San Diego, where the group will hold its annual awards dinner to recognize the best ad campaigns in wireless. The event will be preceded by a day-long workshop on the Qualcomm Inc. campus for brands and agencies looking to expand, or perhaps initiate, their wireless efforts.

Text still effective medium

The group last week named finalists for the awards and released an updated version of its global mobile ad guidelines. Revisions to the policies include new formats for video, TV and Multimedia Messaging Service campaigns as well as tweaks regarding ads on the mobile Web. But while some players have begun experimenting with eye-popping technologies and cutting-edge applications, text remains the most effective way for most marketers to reach consumers in wireless, Marriott said.

“We still have issues in regard to interoperability and choice in terms of what format companies are choosing to go with — for example, MediaFLO vs. Nokia’s standard — but we are absolutely seeing pre- and post-roll branded integrations within campaigns,” she explained. “But I think text continues to be the predominant channel because it’s ubiquitous; it targets 99% of the mobile population. The mobile Web continues to increase in terms of overall adoption, and as we get interoperability with MMS, we’ll start to see greater uptake there. But I think SMS-based advertising gives the best means to target a broad range of consumers and really do very simplified applications and advertising.”

But while traffic on the wireless Web is certainly ramping up, the industry must make the space more transparent for brands looking to advertise on it, Marriott warned. A host of companies offer analytics services that can tell advertisers how effective their pitches are on certain sites and through certain ad networks, but the industry has struggled to come up with a universal platform to track wireless Web advertising as a whole. And the lack of such standards may be a debilitating vulnerability as the economy forces brands to pinch pennies in their media buys.

“I think as an industry one of the key things we need to be doing collaboratively — and the MMA is working in this area — is around measurement and metrics,” Marriott observed. “If we cannot clearly and simply tell a brand how their campaign is doing from a quantitative perspective — for example, I’m going to invest $50,000 in mobile and I’m going to see this number of interactions — how are they going to continue to invest?”