But I’m back. The plan I have in mind is to dig further in the areas where I am very excited about the potential there is for mobile centric solutions. One is completely and utterly entertainment related and one is life changing. Yes, I like extremes and do not see a contradiction there either. There is much to learn between different verticals.

Anyhow, the first area is online dating, where we will see an explosion in the mobile channel. In Europe during the last 12 months mobile access to online dating services has grown by 50%+ according to Comscore. Go figure. Disclosure: I run a company in this field – Acemob.

Secondly, many types of social business are well suited for strong mobile components. One thing I have done during my blogging break has been to study social businesses more. It has been very interesting and rewarding. I will develop some themed here over time. As a warm up go have a look at Ushahidi for a brilliant example of what can be done.

Stay tuned!

A few years back I had the same expeience when Openwave analysed another US carrier’s deck. In that study the community Lifestylers was deemed the most sticky service on the entire deck. 

So communities/social networks hit it off with the mobilistas. Unfortunately the advertisers are slower to warm up to the mobile social networks. The big brands, and marketing budgets, are not comfortable with an environment they do not control. By definition you do not control a place built entirely on user generated content and interactions. This limits the options in business models somewhat. If you have eCPMs below 1 USD it is difficult to carry a company entirely based on advertising. It can be done, but it’s a struggle. 

Do we need braver advertisers or should we accept the current state as a fact? The very involved user in a social network might be hard to reach with ads at the moment they are engaged in communicating with others. However, if the brand or product can become part of the conversation we have a totally different ball game.

At the moment I think what we lack the most is good creative work in the campaigns that the advertising gurus come up with. This will not change until mobile becomes an integral part from the start in a campaign. There has to be a story and interaction features that speaks to the users. A high frequency exposure in a mobile social network can become a “scavenger hunt” part of a broader campaign for instance. When mobile is seen as a value adding component that can make a difference in a campaign we will start to see very powerful campaigns. We will also see ad-funded mobile services flourish.

Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Acemob, the company behind Lifestylers.

There were a few thems the I picked up. Mind you I went to CTIA with my mobile social networking, advertisig and multi-player poker glasses on. That was my mission to learn and sell. As you might know I am one of the founders of both Acemob and Souldate, and these ventures are what pay the bills these days. Here we go:

1. Business models

Everywhere I went, the theme was business models. On the panel I sat in on, on the show floor at the parties at night, business models where a common theme. What’s happening here then?

One big change is the on/off deck distinction is about to fade away. On-deck is not the only way to get distribution these days. Operators are realising this and are opening up for easier access to their portals. They can thereby also cut some staff costs as well.

The effect of this is that the content provider will have to carry more of the marketing cost and get the full responsibility for discovery. It also means the operators will have to stop milking their abuse of the billing monopoly they have. Stealing 30-40% for a transaction that Visa charge 5% for is not viable in the long run and is hampering innovation and growth. Please read this great post buy Steven Spencer on this subjet and app stores etc. 

2. Advertising

Advertising is cool, but in most cases will not be enough. Additional revenue streams with virtual goods or freemium is needed. There are probably some arbitrage possibilities or rather timing gains to make to go build a user base in a virgin market when CPCs are very low but rising. However you are then banking on that you keep the users long enough to make money on them when the advertising market is more valuable. A risk, but it might work. It’s about timing and guts I guess.

3. Role of Social networks

In our panel we had some interesting exhanges about social selling. Both Glu and iPlay see the social networks as a distribution channel. Nothing is more powerful than word of mouth, so they try to tap into social netoworks or use social networking infrastructure to give their fans the tools to sperad the word. One cool service I came across here was mpowerplayer. Baiscally it is a social seling tool. Web based play of java games with community features built in to facilitate spreading the word. iPlay use this for their recent launch of their Fast & Furious game. With links to the portals and decks where the game can be bought. This drives revenues and is one way to facilitate discovery, one of the main challenges in selling stuff in a small screen world.

4. Health

I also noted mHealth being a trend. This came from other reports (and here) and comments from people I talked to in Las Vegas. Unfortunately this was an area I missed to cover entirely personally, but hey you can only do so many things. The good thing is that it is now on the radar. My personal belief is that it is a huge area where mobile really can make the world a better place. The formation of the Wireless Health Institute in San Diego is one milestone.

With these words I will head for the ol’ egg hunts and whatnot. See you after the weekend!

I am honoured and humbled to be asked to join the likes of Karen Webster from MPD, Ajay Madhok from Equals, Scott Derringer from GLU, Jeremy Wasser from Virgin Mobile (joining from the Helio team) and Mike Breslin from iPlay, part of the online casual gaming giant Oberon Media. And myself representing Acemob.

So the mix is really good. Karen will moderate this panel where we have the carrier, huge global publisher, the niche social networking player  and the the social network aggregator among other things. I hope to learn more as the days pass by. Hope to come back here with some interviews with my fellow panelists.

What we hope to cover are questions like:

• What is driving the increased use of social networking via the mobile?
• Does it vary by geography?
• Do we find the same user both on PC and on mobile or are there different segments?
• What does the mobile phone allow in terms of experience that the PC cannot do?
• What are the challenges?
• Who are doing great stuff?

I am really looking forward to this. Hoping we will get to the core of a few burning issues, and maybe kill a darling or two? Please feed comments, thoughts and questions to me here or on twitter @pfhagermark.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to interview one of the founders Steve Manning, co-founder and chief product officer. I’d like to share his story here.

Mobiletribe: What is AdMarvel? It seems many confuse you with an ad network

Steve: AdMarvel is a mobile ad manager – we help mobile publishers manage every aspect of their mobile ad traffic including:

1) Remnant inventory management: integrating and optimizing multiple ad networks to get the best pricing on remnant inventory

2) Preferred ad network management: dedicating specific traffic profiles and inventory volumes to ad networks that commit a campaign or eCPM floor

3) Direct campaign management: selling inventory directly to advertisers and using our ad server to host, implement and track ad campaigns for advertisers

4) Advertising analytics: generating robust statistics about the performance of a publisher’s ad traffic across ad networks, devices, regions, operators, etc.

It is very important that we are not an ad network – we are ad network neutral and do not employ an ad sales team.  This means we can focus entirely on managing a publisher’s inventory towards the best measurable performance across all ad sources.  We also provide complete transparency.  Publishers can view the relative fill rate, CTR and eCPM performance across all their ad networks.

Mobiletribe: What about competitors? Who are they?

Steve: We don’t see anyone else in the marketplace directly competing with us. Our position of neutrality makes it possible to partner with ad networks and publishers to attain best performance.

Mobiletribe: What made you focus on your niche?

Steve: The founding team of AdMarvel launched Jamster in the US – we saw firsthand the difficulties publishers face in monetizing mobile content.  These challenges ranged from integrating with multiple billing systems to tracking revenue trends at a granular level across a vast content catalog.  As we saw the bulk of the mobile content market moving from premium to ad supported we realized that an entirely new type of platform was needed to solve these complexities for advertising.  Multiple ad networks need integration, and revenue tracking must be granular so publishers can respond quickly to ad market pricing.  We are very excited about the potential for a profitable ad supported mobile web, but we believe publishers need a platform like AdMarvel to reach the true advertising revenue potential.

Mobiletribe: What are the trends you can see based on your traffic?

Steve: One of the main trends we are seeing is the explosive growth in iPhone traffic.  The iPhone provides a great platform for rich customer engagement with advertising.  More and more advertisers are dedicating their creative teams to this channel and we will see a lot of evolution in the ad unit format in this medium.  We are also seeing some of the web ad networks start to experiment more in mobile.  They see mobile as a great growth opportunity and are starting to bring their web advertisers over – effectively becoming new mobile ad networks in the marketplace.  Many of them contact AdMarvel asking to integrate with our publisher base.

Mobiletribe: Why will you be on top of the world at the end of this year?

Steve: Everyone knows that the ad market in general is getting very tight – putting more and more pressure on ad networks to find campaigns.  This is combined with an explosive growth in overall mobile traffic – WAP, in-app, SMS, etc.  It is becoming more and more necessary to aggregate multiple ad networks to get the payouts that mobile publishers want.  Also, as mobile publishers become smarter about their customers and traffic, they are in a great position to sell inventory directly to advertisers.  AdMarvel provides an easy to use platform to manage both publisher goals.

I would like to hear what experiences you have with ad serving and optimising your inventory. Please share your stories here. The promise of mobile advertising is in many cases substantial and can be a much stronger channel than other digital and physical advertising channels. I do believe the promise of advertising is overstated though. There are not enough advertising dollars around to feed all free ad-funded models out there. With an ad server working efficiently the chances to make it work will increase though. But consider to combine the ad revenues with other monetisation models as well. To be sure to be sure, as my Irish in-laws would say.

]]> http://www.mobiletribe.com/business-models/one-way-to-optimise-mobile-advertising/feed/ 0 http://www.mobiletribe.com/mobile-apps/note-to-self-user-user-user/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://www.mobiletribe.com/mobile-apps/note-to-self-user-user-user/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:54:23 +0000 pfhagermark http://mobiletribe.com/?p=207 The starting point for developing a mobile service starts in the same place. Everytime. The User. Period.

It is obvious and common sense. Not in the mobile industry though. I am glad to see there was a “whistleblower” in action at MWC09 the other week. Steve Bell ex-Motorola is pretty bold but right in his statements. Read them here. Thanks Steve!

I feel like broken record sometimes, but this _is_ important. I feel like tearing every mobile service I have been part of creating apart and start all over again. Not a very rational feeling I know. Better maybe to work with what you have and listen to your customers. Make sure to pick up the important hints and ideas they give.

At Acemob , one of my companies in this space, for the last 18 months all changes made to one of our key services Lifestylers are based on support mails from the users. Feels risky at the time, but it is quite satisfactory to be able to offer services our users actually want. Sure, we mess up sometimes and have to reverse some changes. But that is done quickly since we pick up that sentiments pretty instantly since all check customer support mails every day. One risk is knowing if there are enough users out there wanting the feature in question. But that is the smaller of the risks. It is far riskier to sit in your ivory tower and produce what you think is cool. That’s not cool.

SIME08 Eva Berg Winters – Markets and Media, where is everything going? Video

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It was not helped by some of the dressed up data that PwC used. Graph stopping with first half of 2008 to be able to show a growing trend. I would like to see Q3 numbers (and Q4 when they are available). The message was to make us believe that some markets in Europe are still going to be growing in 2009. I understand and agree with the safe harbour and cost efficiency drivers. Unfortunately mobile advertising never proved its case in either category. It should have been said as a disclaimer almost. Instead of a “don’t try this at home” something like “don’t try this in mobile!”

My only advice to someone who would like to build a business based on mobile advertising is – don’t do it! Unless you have nerves of steel and you are extremely well funded with very long term view on profitability.

I wish I could advice differently but I can’t. I am firmly convinced that ad-funded models is the only thing that makes sense for many mobile businesses. The simple reason is that consumers are already used to this model when they do stuff on their PC. So why should it be any different accessing sites with the mobile? So the correct advice I should really give is do it, but find something else to pay the bills in the meantime and maybe put it in the roadmap 12-18 months out.

I based this advice on first hand experience from the UK, Nordic and North American markets. Banner and text ads on mobile sites has come to a grinding halt. Unfortunately mobile advertising is behind online advertising on the maturity curve. Until September advertisers had only experimented with campaigns. Several with great returns. But with the financial crisis as the scapegoat test campaigns did not turn into continuous use of the mobile channel.

At Acemob we work closely with 5-6 advertising networks, both auction based and networks with a sales house selling each site in their inventory. They are all struggling now. I just got the disheartening message from one North American partner that 60 pitches had so far generated no new business.

So, don’t bet the house on mobile advertising right now. Remember that you read it here first.

Fragmentation is a major hurdle in this case. Young small (and often quite weak financially) developers try to conquer a world that is dysfunctional. The paradox is quite simple: On one hand you can create a much nicer end-user experience with an application. But on the other hand the distribution of the same application is close to impossible in many cases.

In the case of java applications you need to port to all sorts of devices and all the handset specific quirks. Already there even a tough use of the 80/20 rule can cost you more than the application will ever make. Then you need to get placement on handsets and portals for your app. That will cost you even more.

The harsh sounding conclusion made by Mr. Mace and his fellows is that you have to go with the solution that has the best working distribution and business model. Not the best product/offer to the end user. It is a fairly sad fact, but a reality if you have the notion of living off your hard development work.

This is a rule I have lived by for quite some years with the odd exception. The main thing is that it works most times. In my recent venture, Acemob, we have been cash flow positive from day one in our 1 year long life.

There are niches where you will have enough buyers or motivation from other parties to make a java application work. We see this in the gaming segment, even though many companies in that segment struggle as well.

Well, to finish off on the bright side (it is the end of the week after all and I would hate to ruin your weekend) – WAP/xhtml works these days! The mobile internet experience is not bad at all and flat rates are being offered by most mobile operators. So with the mind sharpened by the restrictions inherent in developing browsing services for mobile phones, there are plenty of opportunities out there. Go get them!