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

Yes, we have heard it before: the mobile device is a personal portable billboard! But it is more than that. It’s a dialogue tool. It is not only the bearer of a digital coupon. It would be a shame to reduce the mobile to a direct response medil channel only. The retail industry has a great opportunity here. A  360 view is needed. If you weave several contact points and reasons for interaction with your customers into a mobile concept, there are opportunites abundant.

So here we go – a free concept for food retailer – a customer loyalty card in the mobile. Remeber, you read it here first.

Customer benefits are immediate and you will be a hero. No more card to remember and carry in the wallet. The phone is there already. The phone number is the unique identifier. As a member you get real value from day one: a starter package including access to a mobile service and app were adequate information, recipes and food tips live together with several dialogue channels with the store – local and centrally. The beauty is that you most likely produce much of this content anyway in a physical magazine and flyers.

Into this you feed in your featured items and discounts. See Whole Foods’ and Jamie Oliver’s iPhone apps for inspiration. Allow searches on produce so you can go shopping and in the store look up suggestions for what you cook based on those chicken filets you have at home in the freezer. Build in shopping list with various grouping options like, by aisle, by recipe etc. – Put barcodes on your shelves for customers with camera phones. They can then look up deep product info by scanning barcode with their own camera. If you are a chain have directions services using location data. If you run a bank like many food retailers in Scandinavia do allow banking and payment via mobile

Finally, yes of course coupons and direct mail type offers as well. They are after all transaction drivers. But now you can combine opt-in and develop this to suggestions based on what purchases the customers have made before.

With this interactive portable store card you have an entire platform for communication, information, sales but also feedback from your customers. A majority of your customers are happy to give you advice on everything from the store layout, your selection of baby food to the price of milk. Allow the creation of consumer groups and forums. Why not experiment with dynamic pricing to optimise your inventory or to drive stora traffic? Send out time sensitive price offers to your moble loyalty club members.

“Nice, who pays for this then?”, is your thought now. Your customer by shopping more and telling there friends about your great service and your suppliers. The latter already pay you for shelf space. The mobile is the digital shelf. The recipe and shopping list service and app is not expensive to build. You build it once and distribution cost is near to zero. Data fees is on the customer.

The main challenge to all this is the minds and set ways the marketing director and other decision makers in a project like this are stuck in. I am willing to run a set of workshops pro-bono with a top management team in any retail company just to get the ball rolling. Any takers or tips on people who should take this opportunity? Let me know.

That is if you made it all the way to the end of this post and is not already working on your mobile consumer club concept. If you want to make a difference you should be.

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.

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.

Big brands trying mobile marketing need to be aware of that they are about to invade the most private and intimate screen in the world of marketing. As MobileYouth point out the strongest position you can get is if you provide a social fabric and a lot of bang for the social currency buck for your customers.

Get out there, participate instead of pushing broadcast marketing messages. This will put marketing and communications departments in tailspin, since you need to be 100% transparent as well. The marcom departments have often taken the gatekeeper role here. Mobile internet offers the world’s largest and most powerful  direct response machine. Twitter, texts, Facebook mobile and Bambuser are only the tip of the ice berg in terms of tools the consumers have to talk with, about and to you.

As you can see I am warming up ahead of today’s panel at the mobile marketing seminar here at CTIA. It will be fun. You will read more here about it as it happens.

The typical mobile community/social network has a high number of page impressions per user. So your total inventory could be pretty impressive. But can you make money from it? Probably not enough. 

Advertisers want to reach many unique users rather than high frequency of the same messages to the users. When I ask around it also becomes clear that many advertisers are not happy to advertise on peer-to-peer and user generated content type sites. They prefer a strict editorial site with a big brand. That is poor code for that they want a seriously controlled environment. They do not trust their prospective and existing clients in a free social and interacting environment. That distrust is of course questionable and subject of a whole row of other posts. I leave them for now. At the end of the day, the advertisers do not fancy mobile social networks all that much.

But even if you have a great site and everything figured out there are too many business plans chasing very few advertising dollars. On that note there is a great article in the recent Economist. Read it here. And one of the editorials as well in the same issue. Read that one here It’s a summary over that last six years in Silicon Valley at large but applies very well to this. 

So,what to do then? Premium subscriptions, microbilling, advertising? The key here is to think critically about what you really are offering and why. The only rule is to have the guts to ask your users to part with their money (or enough attention so an advertiser wants to pay). But hey, your service is great, right? Then your users would value it enough and feel they get a bang for their buck. So go ahead. Ask them for their money. If you don’t you are running a charity without a cause and I am afraid I have to call you reckless.

Don’t forget the option to mix models. Free ad-funded with a few extra features you have to pay for. I guess this is what many call “freemium” model. Again, here you have to have some pretty good features that you know enough users will pay for. This is when you should count yourself lucky. Because you are in the mobile world. The mobile phone have some unique features that beat the PC. Things like it always being on (the number of people never turning off their mobile is increasing by the day), always with you and always there at the moment of inspiration are features you can monetize if you package it right.

Then you have to pick your fights of course. Don’t be the umptieth service of the same kind in the same market. Speaking of market. The current chaos in the world can be your best friend. Your services are probably not that expensive so make them fun and relevant enough for your users and they will stay with you and bring in new customers for you. In a downturn people seek low cost rewards, treats, closeness to others and comfort. Why do you think sales of chocolate bars, lipstick and condoms seldom dip in a downturn? Some companies will go bust and others will scale back marketing budgets. This means you have less noise to cut through with your campaign, viral guerilla stuff or whater you call your sales and marketing.

So what will you do? Take a brutally honest look at your business. Adjust it. Look your customers in the eye and ask them kindly to put their money on the table if they want to play with you. Hope to see you around this time next year.

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-advertising/in-the-spotlight-bipbip/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://www.mobiletribe.com/mobile-advertising/in-the-spotlight-bipbip/#comments Fri, 20 Mar 2009 07:40:45 +0000 pfhagermark http://mobiletribe.com/?p=226 As I state in my mini blurb at the top of this blog I think the mobile phone is a great link between the digital and the physical world. I just came across a service that has the potential to be one building block in that world. BipBip is a simple service best described with their own words: Create your wishlist, set the deal you are willing to accept and then get on with your life waiting for the SMS with the deal info once it is found by the system. Sort of a Pricerunner with notifications. The difference is it is a highly targeted advertising channel. The service is not trawling the net for your deal. It signs up retailers to offer their goods and bipbip charge for each received notification about a deal. This is the business model – highly targeted advertising. The upper end of the value ladder in advertising for sure. In here lies the main challenge for bip bip. They obviously need to sign up a large number of advertisers/retailers to make the service attractive, and in order to do that they need to have many users to get the attention and ultimately the deal from the advertiser/retailer.

Story of my life in the mobile content world, I can’t help thinking here. There are plenty of great concepts out there. Reaching the critical mass or the tipping point is the real crux on the way up. As soon as you have to involve parties from outside the mobile industry it tends to become a teaching/preaching mission. This is time consuming and can kill a company faster than you can say “update the sales pipeline”.  I hope bipbip makes it up the slippery slope to the pass of critical mass.

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?!