Spotlight on: CNN mobile’s Louis Gump

ATLANTA–Louis Gump is a veteran in the mobile content space, having spearheaded The Weather Channel’s wireless efforts since 2001. In July, he moved to CNN –the No. 1 mobile news destination — to steer its mobile efforts. A visionary and all-around nice guy, Gump sat down with RCR Wireless News in Atlanta to talk about mobile content, consumers and CNN.
RCR Wireless News: So what is your mission?
Gump: We want to make sure that we serve consumers on mobile devices in an extraordinary way.
RCR Wireless News: CNN Mobile is already the No. 1 place for people to go for news. Why do you need to change anything?
Gump: We’re moving through different stages. We have a car right now that’s moving at about 30 mph and it’s a happy great thing because a few years ago it wasn’t moving. But this thing can go a lot faster. This is an opportunity to do a lot more in the mobile marketplace and in the process extend CNN’s brand, its content, to consumers and really meet the need of consumers better.
RCR Wireless News: How is CNN mobile going to vary from CNN online? And in the world of smartphones, is there a need for the mobile experience to differ from the online experience?
Gump: I think anyone who doesn’t understand the difference hasn’t really thought about mobile. It is possible to put an online site on a mobile device and have an OK experience. I think alot of us know that and in many cases that’s better than none at all. in the case of just about any media property I can think of – for that matter a lot of other things UPS, Coca-Cola, you name it – will benefit their own businesses by tailoring an experience on a mobile device to that consumer’s needs.
For starters the screen is smaller. Secondly and for the next couple of years, the bandwidth is a real constraint. It won’t be forever, but it will be for a good long time for a lot of people. Thirdly, there is this concept of location and what it means for content. Imagine stepping off of a plane at LaGuardia and just hitting ‘find me’ and getting the news in New York. And not just the sports scores and the weather but also any breaking news alerts. That’s powerful and should be very appropriate for a mobile device and generally speaking it isn’t that appropriate for an online experience. And advertising; there are a lot of different ways to implement advertising to make it more effective for mobile.
There are so many different ways to consume content. I’m pretty much platform agnostic. Within the mobile space, there are four major platforms, and in my opinion, each one of them is a separate business, or can be. The first one is mobile Web and it’s the hub. The second one is mobile applications and they are changing dramatically. Up until a year ago, applications equaled premium revenue stream only, typically billed through a wireless carrier. Now you’re seeing all sorts of things with the iPhone App store, the Android Marketplace, you see BlackBerry and others coming along. The third one is video. CNN has extraordinary video. I’m not exactly convinced we should run the same kinds of video on mobile devices that we should online and certainly not on air. There’s a lot we can do there. And last but not least, SMS. Even if you get your e-mail alert, SMS in many cases is going to be a much more appropriate and easy to consume medium, and so it’s all about the consumer.
RCR Wireless News: FLO TV had said the Michael Jackson tribute was widely watched on mobile TV. Ultimately, how do you expect CNN mobile’s experience to be different than CNN.com experience when we’re watching breaking news – worldwide events like the Michael Jackson tribute, for example. Will different ads be served up, with different pictures, different designs?
Gump : I think that question is going to be a lot easier to answer five years from now than it is today in terms of definitive statements. Some of the time the best video that we have is what’s showing on every platform. And anything less than that just wouldn’t quite relay the experience. On the other hand, just the content alone maybe consumers on mobile devices want the shorter clip. To me it’s the same thing, only it’s edited different. Maybe we take a different angle. I see mobile as a way to be a service to consumers and then we figure out what assets we put against it. Ads can clearly be different. Beyond that the ad units might be different but they might be the same. You might have the same advertiser with a slightly different piece of creative.
RCR Wireless News: Do you sell that as a package?
Gump: Overall, mobile advertising is growing really fast. A bunch of us are still trying to figure it out. There is real money there. The vast majority of the spend is going into mobile Web, as it should. However, for some properties video is the most compelling and valuable content they have. And so for those, there’s going to be a significant effort against it. Speaking for CNN, mobile Web is where it’s at today. That’s where the dollars are, that’s where our inventory is. We’re the largest news site and we’re the second- largest content news property, CNN digital news network, and that’s without as much coordination as we’re about to put into it. We’ve only just begun.