Mobil Marketing -
Media Maze: Getting Ready for Mobile
June 01, 2005
By Jim Meskauskas
In this week’s Media Maze, Media Strategies Editor Jim Meskauskas opens discussion on how to start preparing for media’s coming “third screen.”
In the last two weeks I’ve listened to more talk about the possibilities of mobile marketing than I have in the last five years.
There is a great deal of excitement in the advertising industry right now over mobile marketing and the brave new world of advertising it will enable.
There has long been talk of the power of marketing messages carried on mobile devices. Since the very late '90s, musings over the ability to deliver advertising messages right into the pockets of unsuspecting millions launched myriad advertising offerings from both established media companies and newly formed companies focusing exclusively on the mobile platform.
From Mobliss and enPocket to Lycos and ESPN, mobile advertising was suddenly being touted as the great next frontier.
And there were plenty of reasons to be so excited about the prospects of mobile platform advertising. Millions of people were carrying cell phones or PDAs -- or PDAs that were cell phones. People are constantly using them to keep in touch with friends, family, loved ones, work, home and school. The device that enabled relationships has a way of becoming part of that relationship; what better device for carrying advertising than one with which audiences already have an emotional connection (albeit a sublime one) that the messages appearing on it can benefit from?
Also, foreign markets were seen to be very big adopters of the primary format under consideration for mobile marketing messages, SMS. In places like Japan and Finland, people were doing everything from talking with friends to ordering coffee via texting while sitting at a table in a café. If people were so enthralled with communicating using text, why not just slip some ad messages in? People would be sure to see them without feeling put upon because those messages could be delivered without much interruption of a user’s “flow experiences,” so to speak.
And let’s not forget targetability. By using information on customers of wireless mobile networks, advertisers are able to target based on all manner of criteria, including highly specified geographies.
But what happened, then, to all the text message marketing we were supposed to see?
Well, it didn’t happen. Not to the degree that the industry itself felt it would. It turns out advertisers didn’t take to it the way that those who sell advertising to advertisers thought they would. The format wasn’t very appealing to advertisers operating outside the spam circuit. Sure, Cheapcigarrettes.com would blanket a metro like New York City with the equivalent of SMS spam shortly after Bloomberg’s high taxes on cigarettes went into affect. But auto dealers never were too excited about sending the equivalent of SMS flyers touting car deals, and McDonald’s never got too excited about location-based triggered couponing.
What was old is new again
There is now renewed enthusiasm over the marketing possibilities offered by the “third screen.” Talk is once again fervent about delivering ad messages over a wireless platform. Only this time the sanguinity is driven by the promise of 3G networks’ delivery of high-res video content coupled with the fact that even more people across even more demographic segments are carrying even more advanced mobile devices and using them more often.
Again, like the days of yore, there are plenty of reasons to be excited about the possibilities offered by wireless mobile platform marketing. Most of the reasons given and evidence proffered for this are the same as before: penetration of the devices among the population, adoption in overseas markets, the connection persons have with the device carrying over into the ad messages running on the network. Added to the list of pros are quality and variety of ad format (graphic images, video) beyond just simply text.
Beware "rational" exuberance
Once again, agencies and media companies risk overextending their enthusiasms for this emerging media platform. As I stated above, there are ample justifications for such thrilled unrest. But the advertising industry has a tendency to overstate the case for new messaging channels to those outside of the business and entrance itself with its own hyperbole.
Ever since traditional agencies and marketers missed playing a role in the commercial web as it emerged, they have been frantically effusive about any electron that moves through a new emerging media platform, channel or vehicle. For fear of missing out on the next ‘next’ thing, agencies are paying large fees to tech-trend watchers (or large salaries to those playing a similar role on staff) instead of hiring entry-level work horses to deal with the existing burgeoning workloads.
And of course media companies hype potential opportunities to a point where their own sanguinity makes them near vampiric. There is always a great deal of enthusiasm among those who sell advertising for new places to place advertising and, therefore, for new advertising to sell.
But we need to be cautious in what we sell in to clients and how we allocate real resources to the plethora of emerging media platforms. Although mobile marketing is often being sold as wholly baked, in reality the yeast has yet to even rise. As Jeff Minsky with OMD -- one of the leading thinkers on emerging media platforms -- said at the recent iMedia Agency Summit, it is pretty much day one, 1995, when it comes to advertising with mobile media.
So much is still unknown, untried, untested and untrue that we have to be careful about how far out we go with expenditure of resource. So many things need to be kept in mind while developing strategies around emerging media platforms. The first thing to remember, of course, is that these platforms are called “emerging” for a reason. It means they have not arrived, yet. They are “emerging,” not “emerged.”
It’s also important not to use trends in foreign markets as signs of certain success in this one. Just because the Japanese like to SMS all day or the Finns would rather order a latte from their café table using their cell phones than go up to the counter does not mean the U.S. mobile ad market is bursting with ripeness.
Something else Minsky has pointed out is that, when talking about how and why people use media, it is very important to keep in mind the cultural differences present in an environment where a phenomenon has been successful and the environment into which some seek to import that phenomenon. The homogenous cultures of the Japanese and the Finns are hardly the heterogeneous patchwork quilt the United States is. For example, electric underwear or reindeer meat might be popular in those two markets, respectively, but haven’t really translated here.
Also there are still a great deal of technological and distribution limitations to the kinds of marketing opportunities that are touted for mobile. Carriers are not media companies and do not have practice being thus; mobile marketing networks still have some work to do to get carriers and themselves on the same page in order to enable the kinds of things that are possible. 3G networks, which are essential for carrying the kind of quality content many of the current spate of marketing opportunities being discussed will require, are still some time away from gaining adequate audience penetration necessary for attracting advertisers.
And finally, lest ye forget the consumer, let me remind you about the consumer. When it comes to advertising and marketing, you don’t get anywhere without audiences. The question that must be answered before too much time and effort go into developing a mobile marketing strategy is: Will consumers respond to this kind of marketing? When running video on a mobile device becomes facile, will audiences be amenable to receiving (or opting to receive) video ad content? I’ve said for many years that among the books all marketers and advertisers should read (aside from "Ogilvy on Advertising" and the "Cluetrain Manifesto") is "Frankenstein," because the morale of the story is just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. If people who have mobile devices capable of carrying multimedia don’t actually make use of the multimedia, the marketing opportunities are limited. Or if they do and they grow to resent the advertising that's finding its way onto their phones, the mobile platform will hardly be a successful marketing channel.
I am a believer in the future of mobile network marketing. Although I may not be a fan of the idea of looking at content on a 2”x2” screen doesn’t mean millions of others won’t be. Young people who today, at the ages of 10- or 11-years-old already can’t live without their cell phones because they live through their cell phones, are going to one day be adults with purchasing power for whom multimedia content served up through all manner of media platforms will be de rigueur. Marketing to them through the plethora of devices available to them will be normal. But for now, agencies and marketers need to pace the development of their emerging platform media strategies to be just a bit ahead of the market. That way they can extract the most value from those channels already in use and allocate resources accordingly while at the same time being prepared for that next ‘next’ thing that really turns out to be the next ‘next’ thing.
Jim Meskauskas is iMedia's media strategies editor.
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