Another large area that use location data is of course augmented reality (AR) services. Layar is probably one of the more prominent ones. It is only with good use of positioning that we unlock one of the most hyped values of the mobile. So sorry for  uttering these words that would generate “boo!!” cheers and tomatoes if mentioned from the stage at any mobile conference. “The mobile is always with you”. Well, if the service knows where you and your mobile are, the service can do more for you. Pretty basic stuff. As often with new technology entertainment is the first area of application. Therefore we see gaming and online dating as the first obvious areas of application. Search is the first utility type application and it makes sense. (Try the wikipedia layer in Layar for instance and you will get a good WOW feeling!)

Many express fear of breached personal integrity with LBS services. That is often a misconception, especially with all the services I have mentioned so far. They are all location aware only and are not revealing to anyone else what your location is. As mentioned above, the service you use need to know where you are to deliver real value to you. This is all seamlessly happening in the background.

Take the dating scenario. For the user the end goal is to meet a new person in real life. With location in the matching algorithm you get more value. Now you know the persons on top of the list fits your criteria best and is nearest to you. If you want to send an invite to meet up for a coffee this afternoon it is likely you are near enough to make that possible. Disclaimer: I am the founder of Souldate, a full-blown dating service in your mobile with positioning.

Games and communities with location involved has a large potential. From the location information you can extend that thought to RFID and touch based things to prove you have been at a place or met a person. This opens up for scavenger hunts, detective/mystery games to mention a few. Stand alone titles/services in this area or even more interesting maybe is to extend this into advertising in sponsored games.

There are some impediments of course. The cost of LBS data from providers of the data, be it operators or aggregators. A cost per location request will kill most ideas. Companies building business model on monetising location data sold wholesale are doomed. Way forward via APIs to data from handsets with apps for positioning or GPS. Examples are of course Android, iPhone and Vodafone 360 API. This is also one great example why carriers do not have to become dumb pipes. They can be smart pipes by offering these APIs and others.

What are your thoughts on LBS? Is it still BS or will it really happen in 2010?

IPhone accounted for 66% of hte mobile internet impressions, but has the lowest CTR at 0.3%. So yes, the iPhone users surf a lot. If they are bettter targest for advertisers waits to be seen. This study was based on the US and 92 million impressions in total. I am sure there are various ways to cut this data. However, it supports the hypothesis that a blind focus on smartphones and iPhone in particular might not provide the best ROI for an advertiser.

Advertisers in most markets probably still get the best result by maximising reach to all handsets with a mix of banners and text ads using as much targeting as possible on a user level. Any service where the user has a profile of some sort offers the potential to provide gender and age which only that is a strong start for targeting. This could potentially also increase the value of the inventory at various social networks. Today they are typically not perceived as high value inventory. Strong media sites with editorial content only still seems to be what the big brand advertisers are comfortable with. Problem is the CTR expectations there are in most cases set too high.

The only advice I can give is to test, measure, test again, measure, test yet again to find your best mix as a mobile advertiser. Another thing to do is to negotiate CPO deals. If you and your adnetwork partner(s) are serious that is the way to go. Early days but I am convinced it will spill over to the mobile advertsing world as well.

Apple used to be the User’s White Knight. Always putting the user first offering unprecedented ease of use and beauty. This seems to have come to a grinding halt in the recent move to reject the launch of Google Voice in the AppStore. It woudl not be too much of a wild guess to assume that At&t has a part in this decision. In an open competitive market this should not really be possible. So how did they think? Why was Skype for iPhone approved?

An other question I find worth mulling over is; what is it At&t and Apple are so afraid of? Do they feel they have a weak position in the mobile ecosystem? Do they not believe in the strengths of what they deliver jointly and independently? If it was At&t pushing this decision, what is it Apple is afraid of? They cannot possibly be depending on At&t to sell and distribute the iPhone. With the current success I am sure any of the other US carriers would sign a deal with Apple and let Google Voice up on the AppStore as well. After all Google Voice is not the only player creating a disruptive change in telecommunications. Players like Rebtel and Skydeck are well at it togethere with scores more.

To me carriers risk ending up in the same reactice panic struck place where the record labels are today. They build walls (and dig their own graves) by protecting their old revenue streams by legal fights instead of deliver stuff in a way that consumers actually want it.

As if the Google Voice decision is not enough. Apple also wants to more or less criminalise “jailbreaking” your iPhone so you can install other apps than the ones on the AppStore. Threat to the national security is the reason in a letter to the Copyright Office. Supposedly base stations can be knocked out by cyber terrorists. Why not do as we have done with the internet so far? Protect what needs protecting instead of shutting down the internet?

It will be interesting to follow the story as it unwinds. Next case will be the very much anticipated Spotify client for the iPhone. It is ready to go, just waiting for that rubber stamp from Apple.

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/events/ctia/app-store-the-new-black/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://www.mobiletribe.com/events/ctia/app-store-the-new-black/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:56:52 +0000 pfhagermark http://mobiletribe.com/?p=225 In the aftermath of MWC and the build up to CTIA you would certainly think App Stores are the new black. Apple set off this me-too avalanche of announcements. After Apples app store we have seen Blackberry app world , Android Market, Microsoft\’s Marketplace and Nokia\’s Ovi etc. Will this be a game changer? Maybe. Maybe not. 

The thing is though, you gotta have good stuff in them stores. And guess what, there are only that many different apps and derivatives of them you can market. In this great post  by Timothy Hay we see one side of that. The funds set up about a year ago to fuel the growth of apps have slowed down the investment pace. This makes perfect sense. Since these funds are normal VC funds and not government grants they will not fund any guy with an idea and the iPhone SDK downloaded to their laptop. Matt Murphy at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the other VC guys are still in the VC game. Finding the next Google or twitter. Not clogging the pipes in these various app stores with more of the same. 

What effects can we expect then? The loss of the near monopoly position in distribution that the mobile carriers have had is becoming more obvious. Just in the last few weeks more of my partners at the big mobile carriers content groups are talking about widgets, on-device-portals, preloaded app with attached flexible billing more than the portal. Off the record comments like \”I don\’t care about the portal anymore. It is all about getting stuff in front of the consumer in all possible ways\”, are on my record. 

App Store the new black? No, but a great catalyst for the next phase of the mobile content/app/web/expereince industry.

Had some time over the holidays to walk through the AppStore with my iPhone. Found a few gems. This is not a “best iPhone apps of the year” post though.

My point is how smooth and easy the entire discovery and purchase experience is. There is second to none of all other channels for mobile apps that can compete. This makes me excited if we can get better discovery and shopping experiences for all mobile handsets. After all the iPhone ecosystem is a pretty closed system. Herein lies my skepticism. 10 m handsets is little in a world of 4 billion mobile users. How do we expand this to the “free mobile world”?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Devastating rumor puts Sprint’s Palm Pre at $399 at launch
• The Incubation Period for iPhone Apps is Declining

For my own businesses though I find it much more useful to run a few off the charts what-if scenarios. Then you are ready when something whacky happens. So these days I think in terms of “so what if so and so happened out of the blue, what would we do? What would Superman do?”.

Here are my  five scenarios  to be prepared for in 2009. If you know what you would do if any of these things happened you are little better prepared than the rest of the pack.

1. Nokia looses the top positions in handsets to Android and open source OS based phones (and yes the iPhone as well of course).

Well, I consider Palm and maybe even Motorola already dead. Call me a cynic if you like. Even by picking Nokia this one is almost qualifying as an extrapolation of current events and maybe the least bold scenario. The real effect here would be increased competition in the mobile entertainment space. The reason being that it speeds up the convergence between “the two Internets” – the mobile and PC experienced internet. Since competitive advantage in our industry is based on skills in how to overcome the fragmentation in technologies and non-compatibilities. I.e. we have learnt how to tweak and short cut in an ecosystem that is very rudimentary no to say flawed. As the ecosystem improves and turns into a normal operating space as the Internet for PCs is already alot of our special mobile skills are worth nothing. Zero. Zilch. So make sure you can offer experiences that stand out when the user experience shoots up. Get the customer base to grow fast so you have a tribe of loyal followers.

2. Major mobile network operator goes bust.

Why not? There are some serious refinancing of debt needed this year among many MNO’s in Europe and North America. Will they manage to get through the year? We have heard abot cost cutting and staff reductions for the last three months now and I take it that we will hear more. When it comes to government bailouts, I truly hope there will be none if a telco knocked on the government’s door. There is a difference from saving a vital function in society (moving money around) from saving a company that makes less than it can produce the service for. Especially when there are eager competitors in every market that could provide the service without interruption (almost), should a player go bust. Implications? You might loose that lucrative MNO contract when your customer goes bust, and they might drag you down as well if they have large unpaid bills they owe you. This is more or less practice by the large operators to first of all have 90 days payment terms and then pay late on top of that. If you are in a growth situation with a MNO and your service/game sells really well and expands, the light in the end of the tunnel might be an oncoming train. That revenue you booked might not materialise. Action: Clear up your accounts receiveable and get paid or pull the service. At least play hardball to let your customer understand that they must have mistaken you for a bank.

3. Research reports really prove that mobile phone radiation is a real health hazard.

No we are getting into the real earthquake-like scenarios. Say that the NIH or some other serious institution can prove that a) the radiation from phones and base stations are seriously altering human tissue and b) old research has been tampered with driven by commercial interests and some of the manufacturers’ CEOs will stand trial for this deception. Implication: Severe drop in mobile phone use. Fixed broadband explodes.

Fixed telephony revival. We start to plan our day again instead of “I’ll text you when I’m there” lifestyle we live today. Mobile phones with an airplane mode are still used for off-line things like playing games once downloaded or transferred from PC to phone. Action: Start a recycling business for mobile phones.

4. All mobile content becomes free before the advertisers are ready to pay for the advertising needed to fund the industry.

Back to a safer prediction maybe. We have seen alot of free ad-funded models for mobile in the last 6 months. In my business I have tested a few myself. It is defenitely a model that makes sense and will prevail. The problem is that we have been double-whacked here. The big advertisers were not convinced at the time when the financial crisis reached its climax in the autumn of 2008. So now there are sites, services and ad agencies chasing very few ad dollars for their things. Some had already made a 100% commitment to the consumers for a free service. Implication: In 2009 you can probably not run a profitable business on a free ad-funded model. Action: If you have the financial strength, optimise the business and hold on to the cash as much as you can. Evangelise the advertising world. Join up with ad-agencies and ad networks to to this. If you need to make a profit sooner rather than later to survive, add premium features, find banner swaps for no-cash customer acquisitions, Evangelise as mentioned above. Or, call it quits and start from scratch with the money you have left. Maybe a credit collection firm?

5. A major government is overthrown  by a grassroots movement using the mobile phone as primary tool.

If Obama could win an election with digital media as a large piece in the puzzle, why not do the opposite. Here I think of much of the developing world where we easily find a few governments that should go if the countries in question are to thrive. Common to these countries is that the penetration of mobile phones are far higher than PC internet access penetration. Implication: Revival of democracy and citizen engagement and empowerment to organise, debate and finally make their will heard. Action: Pick a country, go there and start building the service and team. Might not pay your mortgage today, but if you can live off your savings for a while you are in for something to talk to your grandchildren about. It is all about leaving the world a tiny bit better than you found it.

2009 is already a week old, are you prepared?!

Let me know what you think. But make those contingency plans first. Make up your own what-ifs and make sure you know how to act if they become reality.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Android app market gets down to business
• Monetizing Mobile Applications: Turning Mobile Audiences into Revenue
• Mobile World Congress next month: any prediction for mobile on 2009?!

For this very matter we have been very slow in developing any apps over at Acemob. We focus mainly on browser based services to be able to offer the right balance of great experience and a viable model for us. Being bootstrapped we have to earn the money we want to spend, and we have rents to pay and families to feed. But I would love to release cool apps as well but that takes some guts these days. If there was more transparency and clarity around the AppStore process and average cost to launch something there it would help. I agree with Michael as well that a proper ecosystem would probably give a huge boost to invention as well.

Happy Friday all!

So what great moments did mobile services give me? Google maps on the iPhone is the winner. If you are in a packed car with 3 small kids caught in serious rain and thunder it is pretty good to be able to hit the Current Location button and get directions to the B&B.

On the entertainment side the revival of the Classic Labyrinth on the iPhone was a great discovery.

Other than that texting, voice calls and a few wap sites for news and weather was what I did.

Seems like sms and voice to a large extent still are the killer apps. So time to get to work and change that this autumn.

Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om mobil media, annonsering, sociala nätverk