DIGITAL MEDIA

In 2007 brand advertisers including Ford Australia, Toyota, Citibank, Nokia, HSBC, Diageo and various film companies dipped their toes into mobile advertising. The campaigns are growing more complex and knowledge is spreading, backed by a significant level of hype, but there are still fundamental issuesto be overcome before mobile advertising goes mainstream.

The number of Australian phones that are connected to 3G networks – and hence that can view the mobile internet and advertising – is around six million. Mobile advertising (primarily banner ads and pre and post-roll ads on mobile video) is estimated by Vodafone as being worth $200m over the next three years.

The numbers are sufficiently compelling to make carriers, agencies and some advertisers take notice. In late 2007 for instance WPP Group formed Mobile Alliance, a partnership between various subsidiaries to identify and exploit mobile opportunities.

The larger internet portals have also increased their mobile services, with both Ninemsn and Yahoo!7 creating independent mobile sites. In August Yahoo!7 announced its first local mobile advertising customer, Nokia Nseries, followed by Tooheys New. Technology companies are lining up to get involved, with Nokia acquiring mobile advertising company Enpocket. Its strategy is yet to roll out in Australia. The sector is also strong enough to support a raft of start-up mobile marketing and advertising solution providers, including companies such as Communicator Interactive, TigerSpike and Axis Media Communications.

The hype around the potential of mobile advertising has been palpable, fuelled by the unique capacity of mobile phones to deliver personalised messages based on knowledge of the consumer, and – should they wish to provide it – their location.

But so far consumers’ engagement with mobile advertising has been minimal, with the majority of activity on the mobile web taking place in the internet portals (also known as ‘on-deck’ sites) of the major carriers such as Vodafone, Telstra and 3 Mobile. Many consumers are simply not aware that there is significant mobile content to be visited ‘off deck’, and carriers have also tended to charge high rates for data consumed when surfing outside of their portals.

TigerSpike’s chief executive officer, Luke Janssen, describes much of what is happening today as experimentation. “The big media companies and a lot of clients we are talking to are saying they really need to get into this,” Janssen says. “They don’t know what they want to do; they just want to get into it.”

Common questions from advertisers revolve around the range and scale of opportunities that mobile holds and how they can be exploited. He says brands want to know whether to work within a carrier’s portal or develop their own ‘off-deck’ site. TigerSpike’s platform now serves banner advertising on Fairfax’s Drive mobile site, and has also engaged in trials with Telstra in conjunction with Publicis, working with clients including 20th Century Fox.

But early adopters are emerging. Axis Media’s joint managing partner Leigh Monti has one client that has moved a large portion of their advertising to mobile because of its measurability.

“The beauty of the mobile is we know every single time someone interacts with that brand’s mobile experience,” Monti says. “We are not relying on a panel of five thousand people to determine the habits of two million every night on TV. We will know actual day-by-day, minute-by-minute, person-by-person response rates.”

Monti believes the personalisation of mobile advertising puts pressure on advertisers to ensure that their message is relevant, and that the customers see a real benefit. Good mobile campaigns start with understanding how people consume mobile media, including where they are at various times of the day or week. The consumer must also know exactly what they getting. Finally, the creative must be designed to be consumed on a small screen.

“It can work if you’ve got very good creative and you can create a viral opportunity,” Monti says. “But if it is just a normal old TVC, it is not going to work on the mobile.”

But deploying a mobile campaign means working with the carriers, which forces advertisers to potentially work with four different parties to deploy a campaign effectively.

According to the strategic marketing manager for mobile solutions at the mobile technology maker Ericsson, Kersten Leins, the lack of afree flow of information is an impediment for agencies.

“There is a real disconnect today,” Leins says. “From an industry perspective the big gaps are collaboration between the providers, the operators and industry entities that actually own that that customer data.

“We are talking to various people about what can be done to try and promote that collaboration. It’s not a technical problem; it is an acceptance of the fact that if you want to play in the advertising space you are going to have to share with others and you can’t do it all in house.”

Vodafone’s general manager of mobile advertising, David Green, says the carriers have already built up a wealth of experience in what the consumers will and won’t buy into, and it is up to them to share some of those lessons with the brands and agencies. Vodafone has taken a leadership stance in standardisation, aligning the industry realeasing a comprehensive charter in late January.

"Mobile advertising is a dynamic market, evolving at a rapid rate, so it was essential that we worked closely with the entire industry as best practice, including AIMIA, ADMA , relevant government bodies and consumer protection groups to ensure The Charter was and is fully aligned. We have not looked to replace existing regulations, laid down by the likes of AIMIA, the intention was to go one step further and detail our commitments in the mobile advertising space - our commitments to both customers and advertisers,” Green says.

“They also have to see it for themselves as well. We can explain it to them and share the case studies, but the reality is that experience is the key to locking in their knowledge and their creativity. We are at the first kind of hurdle on that at the moment.”

Vodafone is running a series of training programs and roadshows, helping agencies understand what mobile can bring to campaigns. The carrier has also recruited ad sales partners in Media Me and Ninemsn to help sell its inventory, and has run about 15 mobile campaigns already.

“It is very exciting, but there is a certain amount of awareness that needs to go on in the marketplace get both the agencies and the brands to understand what mobile brings,” Green says. “The media buyers need to be able to work on the return-on-investment models. The brands need to understand how it works in conjunction with other advertising media they have.

“We have run quite a few campaigns so we’ve got some good insights, but it is a joint effort really for the media agencies and the brands and the mobile phone networks to work togetherto make sense of how this whole thing works together.”

Advertisers that had dipped their toe into mobile advertising have been rewarded with click through rates that dwarf those achieved online. Ninemsn reports click through rates of between 5% and 10% are not uncommon, and have been recorded as high as 16%. Vodafone has been reporting click-through of around 6% for campaigns on its portal.

Rates will not be sustained at that level indefinitely, but they should remain higher than on the internet due to the personalised and immediate nature of the medium. But with rates varying so wildly, knowing the true cost-effectiveness of mobile advertising remains the great unanswered question.

Monti believes that until brands are willing to come forward with case studies, it will be hard for anyone to compare cost versus result.

“Until we can get a whole pool of data where we can understand the impact, the click-through rates or the conversion rate or store visit or whatever, we won’t be able to understand exactly what those costs are,” Monti says.

Steps towards standardisation and knowledge sharing are occurring however, led in part by Ericsson and also by the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association’s (AIMIA’s) Mobile Industry group.

AIMIA has released its Australian mobile advertising guidelines and a consumer awareness campaign, around the theme “You can on a mobile”.

HAVING THE RIGHT OFFER: MOBUX

One rule that is becoming very apparent is the need to provide a strong offer as a reward for getting a mobile consumer’s attention. And people like nothing better than free money.

Sydney-based company Mobux’ Adbux system rewards consumers who click on advertising on the company’s website by giving them mobile phone credit, creating a click-through rate of 3%. It has also run a successful giveaway campaign in conjunction with Pepsi.

Managing director Scott Wenkart says he is keen to translate that success into mobile-based campaigns, but says the audiences are yet to appear.

“Even when we interview our Mobux.com.au customers, only 35% of them have ever actually been on the mobile internet, and that includes carrier portals,” Wenkart says.

Going off-deck: Ninemsn

Ninemsn is jumping off-deck in a big way, creating a mobile version of its regular web portal, dubbed mobilise, and carrying traditional Ninemsn content from National Nine News, Cleo, Ralph and the Your Time products.

“It is still early days with relation to building an audience, but we’ve got some really interesting strategies,” says Ninemsm mobile’s sales director Matthew Costello. “Numbers are currently sufficient to be interesting to the first set of advertisers without posing significant risk in terms of cost. Although the audience isn't yet significant when compared to web, response rates at this early stage certainly make for a compelling proposition.”

Ninemsn has also begun providing content to Hutchison and Optus, and selling advertising on both these portals, and on Vodafone’s.

“We are looking to how we can best use the nuances of the device to run some really interesting stuff,” Costello says.

“We’ve probably run half a dozen campaigns now, starting with Citibank just before July.”

The Citibank campaign saw it sponsoring restaurants in conjunction with Ninemsn’s Your Restaurants guide. “When you clicked on the Citibank banner it took you to a landing page where there was a click-to-call function. So if you didn’t have a Citibank card you could get connected directly to their call centre, and if you did have a Citibank card, then you could type in your postcode and it would deliver you the list of restaurants that had the Citibank card offer that were within your area.”

Costello says the click-through rate for the campaign averaged 16% at its peak. He can’t reveal the volume of traffic.

Letting consumers loose on the mobile web: Vodafone

Vodafone has long operated a broad-based portal called Live, but is now repositioning that around core offerings such as music and television, with partners such as Google to handling other services.

According to Vodafone Australia’s general manager of mobile advertising, David Green, the goal is to position Vodafone Live not as a gateway to the mobile internet.

“We are not trying to do everything ourselves,” Green says.

“There are other companies out there that can build other services as well, and we should be allowing discovery of those. Consumers are far more sophisticated than they were two or three years ago. Now they do want to go out and search the internet. A few years ago there weren’t that many off-net decks to go and discover, but now there are quite a few and a

lot of the bigger players are starting to create sites.”

Vodafone is also inserting advertisements into its mobile television content, but this is a different exercise to traditional television advertising.

“The viewing time of mobile (content) is only about three minutes and 40 seconds,” Green says. “You don’t want to be running 30-second TVCs – you really want to be down at 15 or 10 second short puncture TVC’s.

When they [creatives] are cutting the TVC’s they really want to edit a version for mobile now.”

Getting to know you: Sensis

Sensis has been adding location-based awareness combining to its mobile directories business to create special offers for consumers. The head of mobile products at Sensis, Gregan McMahon, says five advertisers have been recruited for the trials, and the results have been promising.

McMahon says one of the key principals of the campaign has been ensuring the advertising is relevant to what the users are searching for. For example, when searching in a food-related category, they may receive a special offer from a nearby Pizza Hut or KFC restaurant.

Click through rates have been in the range of 6% to 7%.

“What we are seeing is a strong indication that contextual and geographical relevancy is driving significantly higher click-through rates than we have been seeing either in online or our original untargeted banner advertising trials,” McMahon says.

Traffic volumes have not been released, but are expected to grow quickly now that Telstra has abolished data charges for Sensis and BigPond content on the Next G and 3G networks.

Keeping it relevant: 3 Mobile

The company with probably the richest background when it comes to mobile advertising, 3 Mobile, has extensive experience through working with the cricket and various film promotions. 3’s general manager of content and services, Mira Bashi, hopes to take the knowledge that 3 has accumulated and start broadening its advertising activity. The key she says is relevance for the consumer.

“So rather than bombarding them with any information we are providing the most personal gateway of services to our customers, and as part of that we are aiding in that navigation of getting them access to information that is relevant to them.”

3 is able to provide advertisers with information on the consumer’s gender and postcode, as well as information on whether the consumer subscribe to any other content, creating a blind profile of the consumer.

Like Vodafone, 3 has unveiled a more partner-centric model, leaving it to third parties to provide more content for consumers. “Our customers will start to realise that there are services that they had been familiar with from the traditional internet, and they now are actually able to access them on the website,” Bashi says. “Now for those Facebook addicts there is always the ability now to keep in touch. So we are really looking at partners to broaden that experience and give our customers access to what is relevant and personal to them.”

An advertiser’s perspective: Toyota

Toyota got its start in mobile advertising in 2005 with a campaign integrating both online and mobile technologies for the launch of its Yaris model. The company also trialled downloadable brochures at the Australian International Motorshow in Sydney last October, and is involved in an M-site campaign which uses push technology to send details such current retail offers to mobile handsets, in conjunction with drive.com.au and carsguide.com.au.

Public relations officer Roxane Persehais says mobile provides a timely information service that allows the consumer to take content away with them.

“Mobile technology provides access to a specific target market, not accessible by other means; or to complement other marketing collateral,” Persehais says.

News Limited

News Limited has also dipped its toe into creating an advertiser-funded mobile internet site for news.com.au (at m.news.com.au). According to News’ director of corporate development, Sue Klose, the company already has experience with mobile advertising on its Carsguide mobile site, which has been sponsored by Toyota, and with the Truelocal site. The plan is to give a small group of advertisers prominence on the front page, backed by category-specific advertising for sections such as IT, business or sports.

“We have actually taken it (M) to a fairly wide range of advertisers and agencies as part of an integrated sales offering, pulling together online and mobile,” Klose says. “They are very receptive to this. We definitely think this is a smart and ultimately profitable little business for us.”

Klose says she is confident that consumers won’t mind paying the data charges.

“We specifically designed the site that it is very navigable with a very short number of clicks,” Klose says. We have done everything that we can do to minimise the data charge for the consumer.”

The solutions providers

Mobile solutions providers are swiftly releasing applications to enable simplified creation and deployment of mobile ad campaigns, cutting out the need for specialist mobile development agencies. m.Net Corporation has launched a public Beta program for Campaign Mobile, a platform for web developers and digital agencies, allowing the construction and optimisation of campaigns via the web. Configurable using a web browser, it can deliver mobile campaigns to over 6500 mobile devices in over 170 markets. The product is a result of market research and customer trials. M.Net CEO Horden Wiltshire says: “Now developers and agencies can focus on the important aspects of creative expression and campaign planning, confident that their technology requirements are covered by Campaign Mobile.” Meanwhile, Dialogue Communications has released its toolkit for the creation of professional mobile sites and storefronts. The mobile site builder has a simple interface designed to drag and drop text, images and other components onto the screen. The tools can be accessed via a web browser without the need for technical knowledge. “Entering any web space brings with it a myriad of obstacles, mobile internet is no different. When looking to go mobile, it really is back to basics with layout and functionality. Animated graphics, along with lengthy pages of content will only hinder the consumer’s experience,” says Dialogue Australia head of new media sales Chris Elson. It also has the capability to run viral marketing campaigns.

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