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.

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.