After the prior post with the free mobile marketing concept, time has come to mobile advertising. At the moment it is delicate situation for banner advertising: Advertisers are being fleeced and publishers are not making enough money. That does not sound like a very good setup does it? I guess ad networks with good sales force and cost control are making money. Media agencies are throwing some crums at them often masking mobile campaign as “online” in the reports back to the big brand advertisers. It keeps inflating the value of the inventory big publishers has.

Here’s a case from Sweden I have been part of myself as the advertiser. Publisher: Aftonbladet (largest tabloid in circulation and also top 10 in Sweden in terms of unique visitors on their mobile site). Initial offer: CPM 28USD list price. This was negotiated down to 4.65 USD. Negotiation tactics was mainly to say no and be slow in responding to emails. The campaign started but CTR was far below what the publisher had stated.  Break even would have been at around 2 USD. What can be done?  Devaluate entire inventory. Yeah, right. Like hard pressed media companies would do that. Prices will come down eventually when publishers get comfortable with long-term partnerships and yearly budgets from its partners instead of having to chase a multitude of advertisers for test campaigns at inflated prices.

The craft of susccessful ad campaigns is the same as for online advertising. It requires good analytics and close attention, adoptions and changes. Many versions of banners and copy, clear call to action, mix in many channels. Mono-channel campaigns can be a high risk. On the surface two channels might look very similar, yet perform very differently. Two operator portals with same placement of ads can be hugely different.

Search advertising in the mobile is coming of age. In many cases it has tremendous performance in CTR, but currently many markets have too low volume to be the main driver. However it is a growing force and it is good to start working this channel already now. Google seems to have somewhere above 5% of their searches from mobile devices now. This can only grow.

Business models are slowly becoming transparent and spreads the risks in a better way than CPM deals where you pay for a number of showings of an ad. This as opposed to the “Google-model” where you only pay when someone click on your ad. Even better, and common on the web are CPO deals where you only pay when you get an order/purchase/sign-up or whatever you define as the actual event where the consumer becomes valuable to you as an advertise. These type deals can ease the pain for advertisers and might be the road to build a steady volume of recurring ad buys in mobile channels.

Targeting can also be improved. Here the source of the targeting data can vary. If the publisher has data in terms of registration or profile data like age, gender and interestes etc. this can be fed through to the ad server in real time. More and more ad networks are capable to make use of this targeting data now. It is also an area for the mobile carrier to be part of the advertising value chain. They have user data as well that adds value at the ad serving moment. One is the position of the phone for instance. Other data are customer data and behaviour. This of course requires consent from the consumer to have its personal data used in this scenario. If benefits can be communicated properly to the consumer opt-in should follow.

There is a caveot with location and advertising. Location data is often touted as the holy grail of advertising. In many scenarios it is questionable. Just because O2 knows that my phone is in my pocket as I walk down Kings Road in London, they don’t know where my mind and body is heading. Is it the Starbucks on the corner? The Barclays bank branch office there? The Boots next to Starbucks or the H&M store across the street? Opt-in local advertising is one solution that might be more powerful. Sign-up with stores/shopping centers where you usually shop and get offers from them at an agreed frequency. This allows advertisers to run micro-campaigns with huge returns. The small independent watch store can target a campaign for a Saturday to sell 4 more watches and turn a profit on that. It also allows for flash campaigns – sell out of overstocked items. This last example fits well with the mobile loyalty club 2.0 presented in the post last Friday