MomoLondon: Mobile Advertising

Tonight’s Mobile Monday London was themed on Mobile Advertising. There were presentations from Mindshare, Vodafone, Admob and Bango, plus the usual panel discussion.

The overall feel of the evening was that mobile advertising is possible and a reasonably attractive target, but that companies were not yet spending particular amounts of money purchasing advertising space.

I spoke with Simon Maddox afterwards, and he had the same impression — Spoken have Bango ads and are not getting a very wide variety of advertisers. We have the same issue with 4th Screen adverts on Kizoom.mobi.

Vodafone — Shan Henderson

Some crucial quotes:

• “There isn’t too much of an appetite at the moment … for all these different criteria”
• “Money follows measurement in media”
• “We’re at the early adoption stage at the moment, with smallish budgets — but don’t confuse these early budgets with commitment”
• We need metrics in order to plan and measure performance, with express intention to drive further spend
  • Vodafone is working as part of the GSMA Metrics Study

Vodafone work with Yahoo to make it easier for people to buy ad space (using the Yahoo ad serving infrastructure)

Admob — Russell Buckley (MD, Europe)

• 24 billions ads since started (now 2.5 billion every month)
  • of which slightly under 200m per month are served in UK
• AdMob now have a large range of companies advertising with them
  • US is slightly ahead of UK in terms of advertising revenue available
• WAP Push now supported by 90% of admob requests
• “It’s what happens after the click that’s the most important”

Russell’s personal blog: http://www.mobhappy.com

Bango - Ray Anderson (CEO)

Some other mobile ad services:

• mads
• amobee
• mkhoj

Operator portal search with paid-for results led to increase in ad purchasers revenue

“It’s all about measurement” — want to measure unique visitors, which is difficult on mobile

Showed sample screen of Bango Analytics — seemed to be targeted at people who run campaigns via Bango.

He suggests that you collect the phone number and permission to send further information, so that you can encourage people to come back later.

Panel Session

When will the GSMA Metrics study come to fruition?

• Later this year

When will ad spends grow from big companies?

• Claire: We have to convince them…
• Reuters: Can target advertising to smart phones & iPhone

Do operators plan to put advertising on transcoded pages?

• Vodafone: being discussed internally, but no decisions been made as yet

When will location-based advertising happen?

• Russell: not now — even if possible, advertising content would be very difficult to put together
  • small local businesses would be very expensive to sign up
  • large franchises don’t get enough of a cut from a voucher
• Claire: what is the action after the ad? No infrastructure in place yet.

Where is the ad space inventory available? Existing brands or new ones?

• Russell: new ones have more traffic
• Voda: new ones may be only specific people generating lots of traffic
• Claire: Desparate Housewives — drove people to WAP site at end of show
• Reuters: have to avoid getting mobile adverts being shown on PC, and vice versa

Should the customer pay for advert downloads?

• Russell: Fixed rate data costs drive ad revenue
• Claire: there’s a lot of work to be done to explain

Future events

• 2nd June: Future of Mobile Applications

  • Panel session: BBC, Fjord, etc
  • looking for sponsors

• 14th July: as yet unknown…