Charging : from free-content to new business models
Relevance : user profiling allowing intimacy and privacy,
Trust : social dialogue between brands and consumers
Monetizing free-content with new business models
Mobile Youth marketing is about winning the heart and mind of the youth and content, music for example is a great way to succeed. It’s one reason iPod brand is such a reference. We talked about brand that fell such as Levi’s ® (from 50% market share in 1996 down to 9%) as they lost their sexy / rebellious shrink-to-fit image [yet they launched an award-winning mobile campaign promoting user-remixed ringtones and 501 jeans in 2005]. What’s the business case for free content and capped data plans ?
Music : some great examples of the free economy. Fans downloaded Radiohead’s new album Rainbows at the prices they wanted, 38% paid a total rumored to amount 9M$. Similarly, Prince's album Planet Earth was released as a freebie but the 21 London concerts sold out for 23M$. Gerd Leonhard calls this the “tap water music” vs. “bottled music” and published 3-years blog history : Music 2.0. Damien Saunders, head of music at Vodafone agreed there were lots of opportunity to monetize mobile music. But he made the point that it is about creating user experiences with lead users and rather than promoting content with advertising which is counter-productive. Video : there was less buzz on mobile video but Rhys McLachlan of Mediacom reminded us that youth still consume 3 hours/month of TV. Other panelists saw a smaller opportunity there. [yet 3 UK had 600’000 subscribers downloading 6 million video clips sponsored by advertising and announced a sponsored music video service – and 32 million have been downloaded on 3’s SeeMeTV and O2’s LookAtMe!, from 60,000 user-generated submissions].
Graphics : an order of magnitude of mobile entertainment revenue was given by Tal Dagan, from Comverse (ring tones 10B$, ring-back tones 5B$, graphics 3B$, other 0.5B$) [I attempted to complete the picture with other publicly available figures from MEF(25B$), IDC (highest revenue from ringtones, ringback tones, mobile television and video services, 2011 forecast of 40B$), Portio Research (music 9B$, games 3B$, video 1 B$, others 17B$)] By comparison, eMarketer estimates mobile advertising at 2.8B$ [growing to 19.1 B$ by 2012 ]. As an example beyond ringtones, Comverse’s Klonies is a solution to push avatars during call establishment (J2ME client software) instead of the CLI / phone address-book user interfaces.
User profiling driving relevance and protecting privacy
My presentation in the user profiling panel triggered lively discussions. : how far should we drive user behavior analysis and targeting ? I explained the potential for dynamic profiling with network information : your phone address book is your social graph, call and location history, presence and device information are additional dynamic profile information’s typically available in databases such as HLR/HSS, XDMS etc… And dynamic device detection can help adapt to the preferred format and channel.On the pro side, user profiling serves both advertisers and users. Jupiter surveys that 50% of 16-25 year old youth are happy to be targeted by advertising in exchange for free content and Blyk’s 100’000 subscribers are a testimony of this. Jack Wallington of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) representing over 86% of online advertising in the United States, gave views on the normalization of the mobile advertising profile data and related metrics.
On the opposite side privacy protection is key to maintain trust with consumers. The audience recalled the controversy around Facebook’s social advertising and Beacon Facebook Ads, an engine for sharing profiles with advertisers that lead to 50’000 users joining the MoveOn.org group until explicit permission and opt-out was enforced. On the privacy issue, IAB best practices include the opt-in opt-out facilities to give control to the user. In addition strong authentication profile should assist in enforcing child safety, such as mobile operators code of practices brokered by the European Commission to prevent bullying [15% of under 16] , access to pornographic [ #1 destination is adult, peak usage time 9pm-11pm] and violent content, and inappropriate use of camera phones and location services. I was asked about authentication mechanisms beyond USIM and passwords – my belief is that only biometric (fingerprint, face recognition) authentication can properly identify a child using a device. A related issue is SPAM which affects 80% users with 23 billion messages/year.
Matthew Snyder, now CEO of the consulting company ADO strategies has a great experience in this mobile advertising industry and provided some comments on how advanced profiling can practically be implemented with multi-channel ad-serving platforms. From the discussion I attempted to list some of the main aggregators and players in this new industry.
Nokia’s media network (Nokia’s ad Business led to the acquisition of Enpocket in 2007, a mobile campaign management with multi-modal SMS, MMS, WAP, and video delivery with analytics).
Google’s Adwords for mobile
DoubleClick Mobile (works with ad networks to deliver combination ads, road blocked ads and jump pages)
Microsoft’s subsidiary Screentonic (early leader in mobile ad serving technology for European operators)
AOL’s Platform-A Advertising.com , Quigo (content-targeted advertising), Tacoda(behavioral targeting), Adtech (online ad-serving), buy.at and Third Screen Media (platform and mobile advertising network)
Admob (home of evangelist Russell, co-author of MobHappy)
Amobee(dynamic ad insertion in multiple channels : videos, music, messaging, games, WAP)
Trusted social dialogue between brands and consumers
Can mobile social networks enhance customer relationships ? The question was debated in the panel led by Ged Caroll from Waggener Edstrom and blogger who said that customer insight can be obtained with a mix mobile marketing and traditional PR+advertising. He’s a professional advocate of blogging for marketing as he explained in a video.
Helen Keegan, from Beep Marketing raised thie issue that as of today, those who master "the black art of communication and persuasion" at major brands cannot justify the ROI of mobile marketing. How much do Brands really benefit from this ? Truth and honesty are universal values that consumers recognize said Ed Homes from Haygarth. You have to decode the responses and non-responses of customers, for example in Twitter feeds. That’s the value of on-line community moderators such as Dominic Sparke’s company Tempero which also provide information tagging. Looking for successes, everybody agreed on Japan’s mobile social networks :
Moba-ge-town by Dena [statistics : 10M mobile users, 65% 0-19, 28% 20’s, 18 B PV/month, members earn virtual Moba-Gold from watching ads, FY07 sales of 15B¥ ~ 144M$] and
Mixi [statistics : 14M users, 63% early 20’s, 22 hours/month, 20’000 advertisers, mixi mobile advertising since 2006, 8B PV/month at 0.05¥ on mobile out of 13B total, at 0.1¥, FY07 sales of 10B¥ ~ 96M$]
I commented on this in last blog . For further reading, Helen edited Tanla Mobile’s excellent guide that you can download here, she blogs on mobile marketing and runs Swedish Beers mobile gathering.
