Mobile marketing took another step toward the mainstream last week as noted advertising firm R/GA launched a division to address wireless phones.
The agency, which has moved aggressively to embrace digital advertising platforms in recent years, outlined an effort “to meet the growing demand for mobile marketing strategies, design and nontraditional advertising campaigns.” The company also unveiled an education-focused, in-house wireless advertising lab, where staffers can tinker with new mobile devices and gaming platforms.
“We felt the time was right to formalize our capabilities in this area and make sure we have the right resources in place to serve our clients,” said Bob Greenberg, chief executive officer of R/GA. “We’ve always been fortunate to work with highly innovative companies that allow us to explore and experiment in this area. The (new division) will allow us to push the creative envelope even further on behalf of our clients.”
R/GA’s clients include some of the top brands in the world, including Nike Inc., Levi Strauss & Co., Nokia Corp., IBM Corp., the New York Stock Exchange and Circuit City. The mega-agency also announced two new hires for the mobile division: Webster Lewin, who serves as co-chairman of the Mobile Marketing Assocation’s Strategies and Best Practices Committee; and Claudia Bernett, who has helped develop mobile enterprise applications for Hitachi Data Systems and Lockheed Martin.
The moves underscore a growing trend: traditional ad agencies are increasingly working with-and sometimes competing against-a handful of smaller, mobile-specific marketing companies including Third Screen Media, Action Engine and Enpocket. The new, wireless-focused firms are gaining substantial traction in the early days of mobile marketing, but many onlookers expect increased competition and substantial consolidation as bigger, traditional advertising firms move into the space.
Whether that’s good news or bad for some established players in wireless is uncertain.
“I think … the mobile industry right now is making it more fragmented than it needs to be,” according to Nellymoser Inc. CEO John Puterbaugh. Nellymoser develops technology to support multimedia mobile applications, and has teamed with Third Screen to offer an integrated advertising and media solution for content providers and network operators.
“(Traditional advertising) companies, the cornerstone of their business is advertising. They have ad sales forces and the infrastructure to deliver ads. I think they need to leverage that core infrastructure,” Puterbaugh continued. “Over time, (mobile-exclusive companies) will become more marginalized.”
That may be true, but pure-play mobile marketing firms aren’t shying from the competition. In fact, most don’t seem to view traditional ad agencies as competitors, but as potential partners for their mobile technology and expertise.
“We welcome (the trend),” said Anne Baker, vice president of marketing for Action Engine, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm that works to make mobile applications simpler and more user-friendly. “There are actually a lot of different players emerging in this mobile marketing value chain, including traditional media companies. What they are really focusing on-and it’s good to see-is creative advertisements that can be placed in the mobile space.”
Other mobile-specific firms are at least as much software developers as ad agencies. AdMob, which bills itself as “the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace,” claims to deliver 250 million ad impressions a month worldwide through technology that automatically connects mobile advertisers with publishers that have space for rent. Enpocket’s offerings include marketing and personalization engines that integrate push and pull consumer messaging in a variety of formats and track the effectiveness of such campaigns.
Even Third Screen-which presents itself as a creative agency similar to more traditional firms-leans heavily on its MADX Platform, an Internet-based wireless ad management and delivery platform that connects advertisers, publishers and network operators.
And while some mainstream ad agencies have worked aggressively to bring Web-based offerings in-house, they’re not likely to want to tackle the technological issues of mobile marketing on their own, given the wide variety of handsets and networks that must be addressed for any given campaign. Instead, onlookers expect the same sort of consolidation in the mobile marketing space that wireless is already seeing among game-makers and music providers. Larger mobile startups will snap up boutique firms, many believe, while any number of corporations-from ad agencies to media companies to handset makers-buy their way onto the playing field.
“I think it could go a lot of different directions … I can see some of the larger companies definitely starting to explore this space,” Baker said. “I think they’re starting to look to technological companies like Action Engine to give them guidance.”
