In brief:

After months of researching my chapter contribution to an upcoming book on marketing to Digital Natives, it’s increasingly clear that mobile advertising companies – and their view of “consumers” needs — must evolve.

Mobile is a fiercely personal device and people – particularly empowered Digital Natives – want content and advertising on their terms. (I purposely mix content and advertising here because they are becoming one and the same thing.)

Another shift in the marketplace: our requirement to have a say in the content/advertising we are willing to receive. This came through loud and clear in the research/interviews I conducted for Mobile Advertising Research U.K. 2009 project, a research project endorsed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) to expertly document the state of the mobile advertising industry in the U.K.

Among the findings (based on 1,000+ consumer online responses and 20+ interviews with operators, enablers, agencies, and brands): only 32 percent of the 1,000+ consumers surveyed had a positive attitude toward receiving advertising messages on their mobile phone. However, that number rose to 64 percent, provided people were properly “incentivized,” and 70 percent if they were incentivized and “in control” of their mobile advertising experience.

Connect the dots, as an increasing number of mobile advertising companies and ecosystem companies have begun to do, and it’s clear that the capability to provide permission-based mobile advertising (with an easy opt-in/opt-out option) could become table stakes.

MOBILE PIONEERS

Companies such as BuzzCity’s myGamma and gofresh’s itsmy.com, mobile social networks turned mobile social ad networks, need little convincing. They made the strategic decision in 2007-08 to allow their verified members to choose the channel of advertising they would accept. Of course, this wasn’t just out of respect for the individual member. Opt-in also allows advertisers to better target their key demographic (example: sports enthusiasts with sports ads) and ensure members who receive a marketing message actually listen.

In my own mobile advertising road test/white paper (PDF) on behalf road test on behalf of Bango, a provider of mobile analytics solutions and MSG supporter, showed that this was indeed a plus for my own campaigns. In fact, I gave BuzzCity the highest marks overall because its opt-in allowed me to deliver effective mobile advertising. (Happy coincidence — I have an interview with BuzzCity CEO KF Lai next week and gofresh’s Vince Staybl has also just reached out to me from his NY trip to offer me a pre-briefing on some significant news, so watch this space.)

JUMPTAP CONSUMER INTELLIGENCE

Jumptap, a provider of mobile advertising solutions that also operates a major mobile ad network, aims to tackle these shortcomings. The company announced this week that is will implement a new feature in mid-year (translated: by end-June) that “enables mobile consumers to manage their own profiles for a more personalized brand experience.”

The focus is on permission-based advertising and on putting the consumer (individual) at the center of their advertising experience. In a nutshell, the feature will enable visitors to participating websites in Jumptap’s ad network to chose the mobile advertising content that interest them – and the choice to opt-out of the process altogether. (Specifically, all publishers in the network will be able to participate. Participating publishers will need to include a link to Jumptap’s profile manager.)

What’s the user experience?

People can choose from a variety of some 29 advertising content categories, including automotive, careers, chat & email, entertainment, finance, fitness, food & drink and games, as the slide below illustrates.

What’s at work (and how) in the background? And how does Jumptap avoid potentially presenting the same people with the same ads?

JumpTap operates a premium mobile advertising network with a penetration of approx. 50 million unique visits a month in the U.S. alone.

Predictably, Jumptap’s IP, which includes patented technology, mobile search algorithms and proprietary know-how around targeting and relevancy (which I have analyzed in this post), plays a huge role in delivering people mobile advertising they will likely find relevant and useful. The company counts unique visitors based on “distinct IDs we get from carriers, cookies, request headers and device IDs.” This can vary across network. “In instances where we don’t have a unique ID, we estimate the number of unique visitors based on page views/unique user that we see elsewhere in the network.”

INTERVIEW WITH PARAN JOHAR

Armed with this background I caught up with Jumptap CMO to learn still more about the nuts & bolts of this ambitious solution and what is says about the company’s wider mobile advertising strategy.

Q: Jumptap is one of a growing group of companies sharply focused on putting the consumer at the center of the mobile advertising ecosystem? Why is this important and what do you offer people?

A: What we’re now seeing is a new wave of mobile advertising right, with the focus on customer intelligence and really putting the customer at the forefront of the mobile advertising ecosystem. Many companies got lost and focused on other constituents: operators, publishers and advertisers. They are all important people, but we are putting the customer at the forefront of the mobile advertising ecosystem, and the way we’re doing that is allowing them to manage their own profiles in a really simple format. This also drives the relevancy of ads.

The concept of is revolutionary but because everyone else has been trying to satisfy other constituents. By driving customer intelligence you’re going to see a higher engagement rate. If you see a higher engagement rate, you’re going to see advertisers who are getting better ROI. If they’re getting a better ROI, you’re going to be able to charge them more. If you can charge them more, by default, you get a better publishing yield so you’re really taking care of all these other constituents by focusing on your core audience, which is the customer, and driving the customer intelligence.

Q: Other companies have a similar approach. And just last week Alcatel-Lucent broke on the scene with a mobile advertising solution that is the subject of a larger report I am currently writing. In it I argue that permission-based advertising is a good fit with messaging because you build a conversation that – in turn – can improve the customer data. But your focus is display….

A: Yes, it’s only about display and it’s not about behavioural targeting. What this is about is empowering consumers to choose their category of interest. That’s one component of the data that will drive the delivery of relevant advertising. It goes into the user profile. And then there might be a component related to context, a component related to carrier data, a component related to publishers’ data – or a keyword from a search. All these are components and the ultimate goal is to drive consumer relevancy through this focus on consumer intelligence– and the better we can understand our mobile ad network, the better we can serve relevant ads to consumers.

Throughout this process three things are critical. One is full-transparency. Two is respecting their privacy and making sure all this data is completely anonymous. And third is preference. We’re allowing them to tell advertisers ‘these are my categories of preference.’

Q: What’s the roll out and what are plans beyond the iPhone?

A: That’s a great question. We’re rolling this out at the end of Q2, and you’re going to get a link to a Beta site where you can go in on your iPhone – or any device – and just scroll through and change categories of interest to suit you. It’s incredibly simple. The idea was to keep it as simple as possible.

Q: It it’s for all handsets from the get-go?

A: It is for all handsets and all advertisers. It’s on iPhone and on mobile Internet, so it’s going to be limited at first. But, as it rolls out, it’s going to obviously develop [momentum]. The goal is ultimately to drive more relevant advertising to everyone on all handsets.

Q: I mentioned that other companies have placed some form of permission-based advertising at the core of what they do. Take BuzzCity. BuzzCity even surveys its members and shares this anonymized information with advertisers to help them target their audience. From an initial look at Jumptap is different because it offers the data to third-party publishers. This would perhaps be the differentiating factor. At the other end of the spectrum there is Alcatel-Lucent’s Optism solution, [a solution that harnesses permission-based advertising – specifically, text messaging – to improve targeting.] So, there are other flavors out there…

A: No one else is doing this the way we are. It is absolutely one of our key differentiators. We also have 80 percent of the carrier business in the U.S. AT&T works with two sales partners, right? One is Jumptap and the other is Yahoo. Needless to say, we’re in good company.

We also have the broadest IP portfolio of any mobile ad network. And we have our pay-per-lick performance marketplace that allows users to bid at a keyword level, category, handset or carrier. We’re the only ones who have all of that.

You bring up the mobile social networks such as BuzzCity. I think it’s a little bit different within a social media construct. That is one component that can be added to the user profile, certainly. But remember we are not taking a siloed approach. It’s not just contextual, not just consumer category information, not just behavioural, not just carrier information. It is all of these components aggregated across multiple forms of data to drive relevancy. That’s our consumer intelligence.

Q: Another part of this might be that you are a neutral network. You belong to a group of ad networks – including the likes of Millennial Media and inMobi – that is not in the Google or Apple camp…

A: I think that’s a great way to break out the marketplace now and there are three groups, so to speak. There’s a lot coming from Apple that I agree with — and there’s a lot that I don’t. On the one hand, Steve Jobs came out publicly and said that mobile advertising sucks and that he has this goal of driving relevancy right to his network. That’s something we applaud. It’s very much in line with our strategy of customer intelligence, so that I think is dead-on.

The piece I don’t think is dead-on is his approach. He’s almost creating a walled garden for himself, almost an AOL of the mobile Internet. Advertisers really don’t care where their ad runs. They care about reaching their audience, not the device. iPhone happens to be the sexy thing right now, but Android will be the next sexy thing – and it [Android] is already is starting to catch a lot of that limelight.

Imagine you were a TV buyer and you had to buy a 30 second TV spot and you had to be cognisant of whether your audience is watching television on a Samsung, Sony or Pioneer TV set. And then you had to worry about whether they were watching it over cable, satellite or a dish network. And then you had to customize your creative accordingly. And so on. It doesn’t make for an efficient marketplace and that’s where I think Apple is missing the boat a little bit. They’re becoming a walled garden in advertising, which I think is not good for the mobile advertising ecosystem in the long term.

Q: Finally, where is the excitement?

A: We’re doing a lot in rich media. Our Unified Rich Media Platform [which I detail further down] delivers the industry’s broadest set of rich media units – for both mobile Web and in apps – all from one network. And our rich media platform is completely open. So, if you’re a rich media buyer for you plug right into our system. We work with iPhone, Android, Palm, and Blackberry. We’re an open system and we help advertisers reach their target audience.

***

MY TAKE: Permission-based advertising sits at the core of a variety of approaches and solutions I analyze in my upcoming report for GigaOM PRO, a project that has evolved from a SWOT analysis of mobile advertising solutions (including Alcatel-Lucent’s Optism and JumpTap’s solution powered by “consumer intelligence”) into a wider discussion of the business value of permission-based (opt-in).

We have ample evidence that permission-based messaging delivers positive results and response rates. A messaging approach also allows brands and other companies in the ecosystem to build on this personal profiling data (with the individual’s permission) by adding questions to refine the profile. This way, an individual who has signed up for car ads (a broad topic) might divulge that they are more into Audi than BMW and even say why they prefer one over the other. All voluntary information an advertiser would no doubt value.

Display is a different. It’s more one-way than two-way, and there is a danger of “spamming” people with repeat advertising because there aren’t enough ads in a category – or because the ad networks can’t identify unique users (and therefore gauge whether an individual user has seen the same ad already, or not). Jumptap claims to have addressed the latter with its IP, technology and techniques that allow the ad network to identify 50 million uniques per month in the U.S. alone.

This week’s announcement builds on that foundation. The focus is to increase the value and relevancy of mobile display ads. (Thus, Jumptap does not compete with companies that focus on mobile messaging and direct marketing.) To achieve this Jumptap inputs the advertising categories chosen by the individual into a much larger, more sophisticated equation that includes data from carriers, searches and some context. This covers the bases to provide people a better user experience (provided there is a good supply of ads in each category), and that should certainly lead to high advertiser ROI and publisher yields. Of course, the proof is in the numbers. We’ll have to wait a while for those. In the meantime, Jumptap’s move can be read as an important confirmation that all advertising – not just messaging – is correctly evolving to provide people more of a say in what they get.

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter with a branded thought leadership presence on this website; Jumptap has been an MSG supporter and sponsored a series of podcasts.

Today MSG was formally named a top 50 influential tech blogs in a new report from Konector, a company linking digital marketers with leading bloggers to help promote brands to highly targeted audiences. The report, Top Independent Gadget Blogs and Bloggers, profiles leading tech sites and found that a whopping 40+ million visit the top 140 technology and gadget websites each month.

MSG joins an impressive roster of technology websites and blogs including CrunchGear, Crunch Mobile and ReadWriteWeb. Other important destinations not included in the top 50 but nonetheless listed in the top 140 tracked in the Konector report include: All Things Digital, Mobile Industry Review and Scobleizer. (Konector does not include corporate blogs or blog networks in the Top 50 list, which is why websites including Ars Technica, Gizmodo and VentureBeat are not mentioned.)

To deliver their message to their target demographic marketing, advertising and PR professionals must connect with quality audiences of influencers who will accept and – even better – amplify the brand message. To achieve this Konector uses a unique methodology to measure the quantity and quality of visitors. Ranking is based on reach, frequency and interaction. As Kingsley Maunder, a director at Konector, put it in a press statement: “We use our proprietary Online Impact Factor to measure how many people visit a blog, how often they visit that blog, the time spent on the blog and how active they are once they get there.”

TIPPING POINT

Being named a top 50 influential technology destination is the latest in a string of developments and accolades that has seen MSG extend its global reach and reputation through the production of highly-acclaimed white papers, market research, podcasts and editorial content for the mobile industry.

Working with the fantastic team at Tego Interactive, an experienced team of professionals helping to build businesses through converged Web and mobile solutions, MSG is extending its reach with new projects and new partners. In the next weeks you’ll see more thought leadership from leading companies as I formally take the wraps off a series of branded microsites – known as Briefing Rooms.

These destinations, accessible via the MSG homepage and mobile website, will promote ideas and insights from MSG partner companies and supporters including Tego Interactive, mobile payments and mobile analytics provider Bango, mobile search provider Taptu and mobile commerce and communications provider Netsize on topics ranging from usability and user experience to mobile industry mega-trends. I’ll announce additional partners in the areas of mobile marketing and Augmented Reality in the next weeks.

MORE AWESOME AUTHORS

MSG is also growing its roster of contributors and collaborators.

In addition to exclusive columns from leading industry executives including Colm Healy, Vice President of EMEA Services for Qualcomm Internet Services (QIS) and General Manager of Xiam Technologies, and Antti Öhrling, Co-Founder of Blyk, the messaging media that works with mobile operators to link young people with brands and other stuff they like, I’ve found a new author who shares MSG values and vision (!)

Eliza Dashwood will be contributing regular analysis of mobile advertising and social media, and commenting on key industry data points. She has a 10+ year track record in the online industry delivering digital strategy and execution for brands and accounts including Mercedes Benz, The White Company and Optical Express. She has also held a variety of senior positions at digital agencies including Ambergreen, a digital marketing agency headquartered in Scotland, and MediaVision, a media planning agency with clients throughout Britain, Europe and North America.

More importantly, she knows the industry and cares about the trends/shifts impacting it at all levels.

Eliza consistently tracks how social media, mobility and permission-based marketing combine – even collide – to change all the rules. But it’s not just about identifying the opportunities and challenges ahead. Eliza also architects strategies that allow brands and companies to connect with empowered people (consumers) who expect/demand a conversation and not a sales pitch.

I look forward to the ideas and insights she will bring to MSG and encourage you to reach out to her directly (elizadashwood at googlemail dot com).

KONECTOR REPORT

The Top Gadget Blogs and Bloggers report provides marketing, advertising and PR professionals with key data and stats on the most influential gadget blogs they should target to promote their brands online, helping them understand:

• Which blogs have the most impact in gadgets
• Which bloggers have the most impact on their audience
• Which bloggers have a captive audience most suitable for their target
• market (by demographic and location)
• Which bloggers promote and review products and services most suitable for their brand

The Top Independent Gadget Blogs and Bloggers report will also give marketing, advertising and PR professionals additional insight into promoting their brands on social networks, including YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, giving them an opportunity to increase their exposure to this wider audience.

A detailed overview of the report, including sample pages can be found here.
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Disclaimer: Tego Interactive, Bango, Blyk, Netsize, Taptu and Xiam (all mentioned in this post) are MSG supporters.

The firm adds that the mobile Internet audience in the U.S. is now a third of the size of the wired Internet market, with the gap narrowing by the early part of the next decade. Source

The bottom line: No big surprises here, but some good insight into US mobile usage – in particular, the mobile internet audience is already a big target market for content providers and advertisers.
***
DON’T FORGET BLACKBERRY WEB USERS, says mobile web firm Bango. The company says BlackBerrys now account for 14 percent of all mobile web traffic, pulling ahead of the iPhone. Given the length of time BlackBerry has been in the market, plus the fact that essentially every such device comes with an unlimited data plan, it’s perhaps a little more surprising that the iPhone was ever ahead of the entire BlackBerry range. Source

The bottom line: Once again, we’re reminded that the mobile web is a lot more than just the iPhone, and that users of other devices generate significant traffic for publishers and content providers. It’s also another reminder that fragmentation among devices and the multitude of mobile web browsers on the market isn’t going away anytime soon!

***
TWO-THIRDS OF TWITTER USERS ARE UNDER 25, says eMarketer – or at least they were in May – while a tiny group of the service’s users account for most of its activity. Just 1.1 percent of Twitter users update more than 10 times per day, while 85 percent do so less than once per day; consequently, 5 percent of Twitter users account for 75 percent of its activity.

There’s also a small class of the most popular users: just 0.68 percent have more than 1,000 folllowers, while nearly 94 percent have less than 100 followers. Going the other way, the same trends hold true. 92 percent of users follow less than 100 others, while 0.77 follow more than 1,000. Source

The bottom line: The usage figures throw a little bit of cold water on the idea that Twitter is a huge runaway hit among the wider web public, since apparently it’s really only heavily used by a small percentage of users. The 85 percent that don’t update daily also points to the service having a lot of dropouts or inactive users.

***
SMARTPHONE USERS WANT TO TALK TO THEIR DEVICES, says a new survey sponsored by speech-recognition vendor TellMe Networks. The survey says that three-fourths of people would choose a smartphone with speech-recognition and control features, while a similar majority wouldn’t be uncomfortable speaking commands into their phone in a restaurant.  Source

The bottom line: A survey sponsored by a speech-recognition vendor could hardly be expected to find anything other than interest in the technology, but as the features become more pervasive, awareness and usage would be expected to increase. There certainly are situations when speech commands make sense – in a car, for instance.

***

MORE THAN HALF OF SOCIAL NETWORK USERS HAVE BEFRIENDED A BRAND, says a recent report from eMarketer. Almost as many have said something positive about a brand on a social-networking site, while almost a quarter have said something negative.

The report casts some doubt on the widely held view that people don’t have a lot of interest in conversing with or “friending” companies, brands and products online. Source

The bottom line: While there’s a certain amount of apparent interest among social-networking users – or really, web users in general, in interacting with brands online, these figures shouldn’t be used by marketers as a justification to jump into social networking without a careful plan and strategy. This interest shouldn’t translate into free reign for companies to invade users’ personal online spaces, especially when there’s still a lot of room for them to damage their brands by doing so.

***

INDIA WILL BE A LEADING MOBILE CONTENT MARKET BY 2013, says analyst firm mobileSQUARED, generating $2.37 billion in mobile content revenues then, compared to $835.8 million this year. Additionally, the firm reports that the number of Indian subscribers will grow from 400 million now to 700 million by the end of 2010.

Leading the way in mobile content will be ringback tones, the firm says, with ringtones, graphics and wallpapers making big contributions. One major threat, though: Indian operators’ cut of content revenues, which the company says is normally more than 70% for on-portal content, or content billed through premium SMS. Source

The bottom line: The opportunity on the subcontinent is huge – but will the market move more quickly past the types of content listed above, and on to apps and ad-supported content?

Regular readers will recall that MSG was commissioned to conduct Mobile Advertising UK, a research project research endorsed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), to expertly document the state of the mobile advertising industry in the U.K. and identify growth opportunities in the emerging mobile advertising marketplace. The report – which combines valuable consumer insights gathered by ÆNEAS Strategy Consulting and Management (coordinated by my esteemed colleagues Tarik Fawzi and Atva van Zanten) and qualitative research based on 20+ interviews with operators, enablers, agencies, and brands contributed by MSG – will be formally released in July.

In the meantime, allow me to share some of the key findings and data points based on an online survey of 1,000+ UK mobile users. (And please follow along in the complete presentation below via SlideShare, and listen in to this audio interview via The Really Mobile Project, where I put some of the stats into perspective.)

At a glance:

• Today the mobile advertising market in the U.K. totals nearly GBP 30 million ($48 million).
• Mobile advertising accounts for only 0.16 percent of the total advertising market – which is where Internet advertising was in 1998.
• ÆNEAS Strategy forecasts that mobile advertising will see accelerated growth in four years and so account for a significant portion of advertising spending. Drivers include: A calculated growth rate of 99 percent in 2008 vs. 2007; the overall shift towards digital advertising; and increased demand for targeting, reach, and a medium that -like no other – allows advertisers to identify and track unique visitors. (For more on this unique capability and the benefits I encourage you to read my own road test of mobile analytics solutions.)
• Only 32 percent of those surveyed have a positive attitude about receiving advertising on their mobile phone. However, 64 percent said they would accept advertising is they are properly incentivized, and 70 percent said they would accept mobile advertising if they are incentivized AND in control.
• The majority of those surveyed felt 5 advertising messages per day was the limit of what they would accept.

Unsurprisingly, youth are most familiar with mobile advertising channels (specifically rich media such as MMS and in-game advertising (approaches we know from the likes of Unkasoft). What’s more a whopping 84 percent of youth surveyed has a positive attitude toward mobile advertising if incentivized. The bottom line: Acceptance of mobile advertising is right up there with TV and other more traditional media IF we can get our head around what incentives to offer and develop the mechanisms that put people in control.

No clue on the right incentives, but it’s not a given that companies need to offer cash to capture people’s attention. In the fireside chat I recorded with Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy UK Vice Chairman, we discuss the value of branded utilities and life-simplifying services. Will people accept advertising if the pay-off is less stress/more convenience? It sure looks that way!

Rory Sutherland audio interview

A highlight for both me and the audience was the entertaining and educational fireside chat with Rory, whose interest in -well – us and the finer points of behavioral psychology brought much-needed balance and big-picture vision to the discussion. As he points out in this recent opinion column in New Media Age: The job at hand is to use ideas to turn human understanding into business advantage. During our interview he made it clear that mobile is a medium perfectly suited to achieve just this goal. (Listen to the audio interview here. It’s 28:40 – but time flies when you’re having fun – and this sheer genius!

A few excerpts that made us think:

YES WE CAN!: Mobile can change people’s behavior – primarily because it takes the heavy-lifting out of doing things we might not do otherwise. Case in point: Charity. A moment of “epiphany” for Rory was the huge response to SMS campaigns asking for donations, although we have assumed that youth is not a demographic to give so generously. As he put it: “If this technology can change behavior that significantly, then who cares how good it is at advertising. Advertising is about changing opinions as a half-way house to changing their behavior.” The bottom line: If you can change people’s behavior from the get-go with mobile, then it deserves a top-notch spot in our campaigns.

LIFE-SIMPLYING: Rory’s message: Don’t dismiss branded utility because it’s unglamorous. Being brandedly useful is key. (And here is an example from Rory’s Twitter feed that illustrates this approach. The IBM Scout is a branded app that helps people get the most out of the Wimbledon 2009 Championships, providing live coverage of just about everything.

COUCH POTATOES: Let’s face it – many of us are. Rory figured this out when he was watching a line of cars at a drive-in ordering fast-food. Not one got out of the car to order at the counter – even though it was empty. Connect the dots, and it’s clear we are all a bit lazy. Apply this observation on basic human behavior to mobile and you have a powerful combination indeed! We will likely reach to the medium at hand (the personal device we have with us at all times) because it’s more convenient. “Channel preference almost trumps brand preference.” Some people may prefer Pizza Hut, but if they can order from Dominos by text, then they will likely switch for this reason. The bottom line: “Modality and modal preferences seem in a weird way to trump other things.”

WHAT’S THE POINT?: We have lost sight of what mobile can do. (A point that also came out in the research I conducted.) We’re hung up on old models and enamored of new technology, and we are missing some big opportunities. Imagine using text campaigns to encourage impulse savings instead of impulse buying. Or how about a brand that simply harnesses mobile to improve listening? As Rory pointed out: “Advertising is talking and listening. That’s a perfectly reasonable form of marketing, and mobile brilliant and you can do it in real-time.”

METRICS: We have become prisoners of our own metrics. To show us how ridiculous our obsession has become, Rory compares media buyers to alcoholics. “Alcoholics buy booze on a single metric: How much alcohol do I get per pound (GBP), and this is how media buyers buy media.”

MOBILE MATTERS:  “Mobile has been the medium of first resort and dangerous to neglect it which is probably why Google has been scared. Search has been the first place you go on the Web and mobile preempts this in some respects.”

By way of background, Rory’s bio:

Born in Usk, Monmouthshire in 1965, Rory read Classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before joining Ogilvy as a Graduate Trainee in 1988. After 18 months spent as the world’s worst account handler (as a desperate remedial measure he was once booked onto a time management course, but got the date wrong) Rory became a copywriter in June 1990. He has worked on Amex, BT, Compaq, Microsoft, IBM, BUPA, easyJet, Unilever, winning a few awards along the way. He was appointed Creative Director of OgilvyOne in 1997 and ECD in 1998. In 2005 he was appointed Vice Chairman on the Ogilvy Group in the UK in recognition of his improved timekeeping.

By an amazing stroke of luck (his brother is an academic) Rory first used the Internet in 1987. Hence he had the advantage in 1994 of knowing what it was and what it might do a few years ahead of many colleagues. Most people would have combined this knowledge of marketing and technology to make a fortune; not Rory. Instead he became the first Briton to have his credit card details stolen online, thereby losing £22.45.

In his spare time, Rory collects self-aggrandizing job titles. He was President of the Direct Jury at Cannes in 2007, and was elected President of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising in 2009. He is also the Technology Correspondent of the Spectator, the world’s oldest English language magazine. At quiet moments in the proceedings over the next few days you may like to pay a furtive visit to his blog at http://snipr.com/da9bq

Rory is married with twin daughters of 7 (Hetty and Millie) and lives in the former home of Napoleon III in Brasted in Kent. Unfortunately in the attic.

Listen to the podcast here.

In his view, mobile advertising is a form of mobile marketing that has many forms – all of which must be relevant to us. “The key across all platforms and forms of advertising – search, SMS, banners, and barcodes – is the relevance and the ability to target. Is mobile another screen, or the fourth screen, as some say? I would say it is the first screen. It’s always-on and always with us, and that means we can learn a lot more about the visitors [but not individual visitor] to a site or an ad campaign. We can know more about the people who interact with advertising, and we must use this to give them advertising to interact with.”

Put simply, relevancy rules (!) The message isn’t lost on MSG. Almost five years ago, I wrote the first report on mobile search and content discovery, where I preached the importance of delivering the right content to the right person – better yet in the right context. And that has been my message ever since. (Also reflected in the MSG strapline: At the intersection of content and context.) It’s where the action is!

And if you think it only applied to mobile content portals, then I have one word for you: App stores. This well-written and thoughtful column from Mark Lowenstein speaks volumes. He makes a plea for more personalization in application storefronts, and companies would do well to listen.

“I think the most important way to differentiate in this growing but increasingly crowded market is to deliver a more personalized, contextual applications experience. In most cases, all users launching an app store are presented with the same menu. There have been some early stage attempts to enable users to do some content configuration on operator or third party portals, sort of a wireless version of My Yahoo. But if we’re dealing with tens of thousands of apps and a small screen device with limited input capability, we have to get a lot smarter about what is presented to the user, with the magic being done in the background rather than relying on the user to self-configure.”

Where’s the connection with Blyk? The answer is evident when we consider (in my view) a  milestone quote/observation (below)from Antti Öhling, Blyk co-founder and CEO U.K.

Relevancy, as I illustrated above, plays a major role in content/app promotion and sales, and it will play an even larger role in mobile advertising.

I made this point in my advertising webinars (in fact, I used Blyk examples and slides in each). And I also addressed this issue in my Q&A with Antti, working it in between the questions that had to be asked following the controversial announcement last week that Blyk, the world’s first ad-funded MVNO, was moving to an operator partnership model. Why is Blyk making the switch? How can operators become media companies? And Why should they be wary of Internet players? These are just a few of the questions we explored in the following Q&A.

Q. First – let’s go back to the NewMediaAge article that started it all. I read your statement. My question is why?

A: We announced already in November 2008 that Blyk will change from MVNO to operator partnering model.  So this is not a new business strategy, just the next step in Blyk’s evolution.  I was surprised by the New Media Article.   The problem is that talking about media as we do is confusing for a lot of people, the NMA included. People fail to understand that being an MVNO is not important; it’s merely a means to an end.

When Blyk started out, the aim was to make mobile advertising work. And if you look in the traditional media, there isn’t a media in the world that wouldn’t somehow include the consumer of that media into the value chain. So you look at mobile and ask where is the consumer in the value chain? Because mobile companies come from a telco world, they were thrilled about the idea of inventory.  They think: Wow, we have inventory, let’s use it.  Well, there is plenty of inventory in the world. But inventory doesn’t make it a media. We looked around and said OK, we’re moving from an MVNO business model into a partnership model in order to roll our consumer offering out to a much larger audience and much quicker.

People have asked what is going to happen to our member [subscriber]  base. We spent a lot of energy and time creating a community of 200,000, so we are definitely going to take good care of our core assets. Everybody who works in the media industry understands how valuable an audience is.

Q: I would like to know what happened to the MVNO model and the ambitions behind it. You are not going to be an MVNO in the other markets in Europe…

A: Blyk’s goal is to become the biggest youth engagement media in the world.  The U.K. is a proof-of-concept. It works, and now it’s time to shift up a gear in expansion. We are switching from the MVNO model to operator partnerships in the U.K., Europe, and Asia. Blyk is currently validating the different options, and active negotiations are underway.

Why the switch? An MVNO means that you have to make up-front heavy investments. We needed to do it in the U.K. in order to get the whole machinery working. We needed to have access to all the tools that the operators have in their server rooms. Now that we understand how to use it [technology] we know how to help them. We know exactly how they can combine operator infrastructure with our ad engine and campaign management. We can make every campaign pixel perfect but what’s more important is that they [campaigns] are extremely relevant to the receiver. We saw the MVNO model as too slow for growth. If we partner with operators, we can triple or quadruple the speed, and reach the scalability that many advertisers are looking for.

Q: A question via Twitter from mobile advertising maven Helen Keegan. Let me confront you with what’s being said out there in the market place. For one, people are leaving Blyk. What do you have to say?

A: I’m not dismissing it.  We have never denied that we have streamlined the organization. That’s the modification we’ve done, so we are now steering this with a similar volume, but with a much lighter ship, which makes sense, especially in the current financial situation. We are seeing month on month growth in our advertising revenue, which in this environment is very promising.

Q: Tell me more about the partnership model.  How does the model function in practice and how many operators are you looking at in each market?

A: Blyk is a simple end-to-end proposition that covers everything from ad platform, campaign management, user experience, and audience management to technology.  Sometimes when I discuss this with operators, I say think of Blyk as a Coke as this example makes our role easier to understand. We have the recipe and we have the brand. People understand Blyk; young people understand what it means when we come to a country.  The recipe is how you make it work.  The operators have the factories for making all the refreshments they need, and they have their existing distribution channels. Basically, they have the works. But if they bring Coke in there, they can get so much more volume and so much more value. It’s a lot more interesting – and lucrative – to have Blyk as part of the operator offer. In other words, they can expand their reach to offering another well-known product.

Blyk is a brand focused on young consumers and our goal is to become the biggest youth engagement media in the world. We have deliberately chosen to target this audience, but it doesn’t mean that operators couldn’t work with us to make a similar offer to a different segment or to their entire customer base.  But then it wouldn’t be called Blyk at that point. As part of this partnership model, we’ll most likely choose to partner with one operator per market. Using what we bring is the fastest way for operators to get ahead of the game before their competition.

Q: Speaking of competition and competitive edge, who are Blyk’s competitors now that you are making the move from MVNO to mobile ad enabler?

A: The competitive landscape is actually the online Internet giants. It’s the companies we know from the Internet who are now wanting to make the operators dumb pipes, just selling data tariffs, so that they [the Internet giants] can deliver [their services/content/advertising] on top of that. If you think about the user experience, it’s not really a great model and it doesn’t create any value for the operators.  They [the operators] have no reason to be there and no role to play. But, if we add the engagement media, as we call Blyk Media, then the operators will have all the tools, all the bells and whistles under their control. They have it all.  We just show them how it needs to function in a way that no online player can replicate, a way that works more efficiently and creates a much better user experience. The Internet giants are treating mobile as part of their online offering – this will not work.  In Asia, for example, ‘online’ hardly exists, whereas mobile is widely used. Mobile really is the 7^th mass media.

Q: What does Blyk concretely bring to the table?

A: We have a full sales force, full understanding of how the media works, how it should be sold, how the campaign should be managed, and how you drive traffic to app sites.Based on 18 months’ research before launching in the U.K. in Sept 2007, and because we were a full MVNO with many specific custom-built functions, we have gained unprecedented expertise on how  [mobile advertising] works end to end. We call that magic dust, because it’s not enough to have just the hardware. You need to have a special understanding of the marketplace. Some people in the industry say Oh, we’ve bought this ad platform so now we are a media company.  No, you’re not. You might have a platform that can send stuff to people, but that doesn’t make you into a media company.

Q: What else do you need?

A: You have to start with an opted-in audience; you have to start with your full capabilities of profiling these people.  You then have to create a media environment where the people are happy interacting with the message that you are sending or the messages that they get in order to get the responses, and there you can use the profiling methods, there you can use the whole enrolment method.

You also have to bring something good to these people; a concept that they feel it is valuable to be part of. This personal value can be a free offer or it can be something else, but it has to be there to make communications relevant.  You have to get something out of that equation.  Getting a banner to your phone which you have not ordered gives you nothing.  If it’s not even profiled, that becomes spam and that leads to churn

Today, the way most of the mobile advertising works is not media.  We’ve been able to show that if you make it work, it becomes unprecedentedly efficient, with an average 25 percent response rate. This is what mobile can deliver, provided that – and again I repeat – you have an opted in audience, you have made them understand why it’s beneficial for them by profiling, by providing them relevant advertising which starts to feel like a service. By enhancing the user experience and making it richer than anything else, you achieve high response rates and you can call yourself a media company. That’s been completely missing from the telco industry because operators don’t think of themselves as a media, they think of themselves as a utility company providing a service.

Q. Just curious here. Why the focus on advertising campaigns when I have it from other agencies that search is red-hot?

A: Mobile search. Yes, that’s one revenue stream, obviously. But it’s not going to be the whole equation. It’s all based on a mobile Internet concept which, though it can provide information and all sorts of other things, hasn’t proven to be a great revenue generator per capita, and that’s important because click through rates are low and they will get even lower the more you have similar types of offerings.

In Japan, for example, a country that has had mobile Internet for four years, the lack of relevancy means the market is still under $1 billion and it’s a 120-million people market.  It’s dismally small because the click-through rates are so low, the value is low.  In the Blyk model, you get high response rates, and the value of any single customer is multiplied. A telco may think it needs to have 100 percent penetration. But we are a media company. A media company with say 3 or 6 percent of the entire U.K. population following it is still considered to be a big media player.

Q: I want to talk about your move to mobile portals. I’ll cover this further in my podcast with Leif [Fagelstedt] next week. But why don’t you just walk me through what you are doing and why…

A: We wanted to apply our methods to the traditional content business, which is suffering from the fact that service discovery and content discovery is so poor. Even in the iPhone App Store, the content is great but the problem becomes how do you find it? We know the importance of personalization and engagement from mobile advertising, and we felt the impact would be positive [on discovery] if we could push [suggest] content to people based on this [what we know about them]. And the numbers bear this out; they are very good.

We tested different types of offers and when we changed our consumer offer from the original one to the GBP15 a month allocation, the requests to join the network went up by 30 percent. That was a surprise because it normally doesn’t happen.  You make a lower offer, not a higher one, and people get more interested. With this new member offer, we gave people the flexibility to use Blyk as they prefer – voice, text, or data – and this gives us the opportunity to start testing data usage and finding how that correlates if we then begin to use our engagement media and start to push people to content. So, right now it’s about understanding all of the mechanics of this. We’re still building it, we’re still learning it, but we want to bring some new rules into that game as well.

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter.

The webinar dovetails well with my mobile advertising projects, including Mobile Advertising Research U.K., a research project MSG has undertaken to expertly document the state of the mobile advertising industry in the U.K., identify growth opportunities in the emerging mobile advertising marketplace, and benefit stakeholders, shareholders, and consumers worldwide.  It draws upon primary research, including in-depth interviews with 15+ mobile executives, agencies, and mobile networks, including an interview this week with Freddy Friedman, Mobixell Head of Advertising. With my MSG hat on I will also request a later briefing with Mobixell (for MSG) to discuss recent news, new customers, and the role of mobile in a multi-channel advertising strategy.

I’ve also wrapped up my contribution to a series on audio-visual presentations on mobile advertising produced by Henry Stewart Talks (HST), which will likely go live in early June. HST, a company with a 35-year tradition, provides access to world class seminars by leading thinkers and authorities from around the globe in one online resource.

The company commissioned me to summarize the findings of both volumes of my extremely popular mobile advertising white paper series (sponsored by Bango): Mobile Advertising for Newbies, which provides a how-to guide to mobile advertising and analytics; and Mobile Advertising For The Masses, which examines the market opportunity for running campaigns in a mobile social networks.

I am pleased to have the opportunity (as part of HST’s Marketing & Management series) to educate the marketplace about mobile advertising and the pivotal role of mobile analytics.

I’m also honored to join the impressive roster of mobile advertising executives and thinkers including: Harald Neidhardt, CMO, Smaato Inc.; Michael Becker, EVP of Business Development, iLoop Mobile; Gerry Christensen, CTO, Zoove; Diane Strahan, Vice President of Mobile Services, NeuStar; Chris Torbit, Vice President of Mobile Services, SmartReply; James Darcey, Senior Vice President, Single Touch Interactive; G.D. Ramkumar, Co-founder and CTO, SnapTell; Ramin Vatanparast, Senior Strategy & Business Development Manager, Nokia; Saul Kato, Founder, Qwikker; and Phyllis Reuther, CTO, Archipelago Network.

I’m especially excited to learn more about Phyllis’ new endeavor, and will keep you posted on MSG. (By way of background, Phyllis was previously CTO at Mobile Content Networks (MCN)-a company that began by providing a platform for federated mobile search and has since extended its reach to provide a combination PPC content promotion and vertical paid search program.) I also encourage you to download her talk for an expert overview of mobile search and advertising.

The individual HST presentations cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from an overview of the burgeoning mobile content market, and the barriers to success and challenges faced by content developers and owners to establish long-term customer relationships and revenue streams, to an in-depth look at the emerging practice of consumer-centric marketing, detailing the opportunities and challenges arising from its adoption.

A particularly interesting talk reviews the use of current opt-in methods – like the Common Short Code – with new mobile enabling technologies, such as Bluetooth alerts, “StarStar” (**) dialing, interactive voice response, 2-D (or QR code) image recognition, content-embedded techniques, and location-based services.

I still have the opportunity to take your views and perspectives into account, and I would welcome your input to this defining work.

If you have an interest in being considered for an interview for MobiAD World Focus, please contact me directly or send an email to my assistant Andrea Henninge (andrea@msearchgroove.com).

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter.

This could be the week that Apple chalks up its one-billionth iPhone application download, according to this post at MoCoNews. Principal Correspondent Tricia Duryee does the math and figures “about 100 apps are being downloaded every second-that’s 6,000 every minute, 360,000 every hour and 8.6 million a day.”

It’s a flood of apps that pegs the needle, and no doubt plays in favor of companies that recognized the potential of the Apple App Store early on. I’m thinking here of mobile ad marketplace AdMob, which just launched Download Tracking for iPhone applications, allowing advertisers to accurately monitor App Store conversion rates, (detailed in a separate post based on an exclusive briefing with Russell Buckley, AdMob VP Global Alliances); and Taptu, a mobile search company gearing up to solve the search/discovery problem in the “Touch Web” and become a leading App Store mobile ad network in the process (an ambitious plan I discuss tomorrow’s exclusive Q&A with Andreas Bernstrom, Taptu COO).

The iPhone has helped to unleash a new interest among consumers in the mobile Web, but it nonetheless represents a tiny subset of the total mobile market. To date Apple has sold 17 million iPhones worldwide (a total Nokia generally tops in a fortnight). Garter puts it in perspective: It concludes that smartphones account for a small percentage of handsets (11-12 percent of all handsets sold globally), and iPhones account for an even smaller percentage of total smartphones (8.2 percent of handsets sold globally).

Another keys data point comes from comScore. It reports that more than half (54 percent) of app users are in households making at least $75,000 per year. If your end-goal is about reaching a mass-market audience with apps, ads or marketing campaigns, you’re well-advised to think beyond the iPhone.

Before jumping on the iPhone bandwagon, we should also take a closer look at new stats from AdMob and Bango, numbers that both confirm and deny iPhone’s leading position.

First, the monthly AdMob Mobile Metrics Report.

It lists the top smartphones in its network (market share AdMob calculates “based on the percentage of requests received by a particular handset” for the ads its serves), and found that smartphones generated a whopping 33 percent of worldwide traffic in February 2009, up 26 percent from six months ago. The real surprise: iPhone generated 33 percent of all smartphone traffic worldwide and half (!) of all traffic in the U.S.

Wow (!), iPhone is where the action is – or so it seems…

New data from Bango, a provider of mobile analytics solutions, tells a different story. The Bango Top 20 handset list (likewise based on February stats) puts the Nokia 3110c in the number one spot; iPhone comes in at number 24 (!). By way of background,Bango data looks at the activities of major brands and businesses as their consumers browse to mobile websites (measured by Bango Analytics) and buy mobile content and services (as measured by Bango Payment).

How can iPhone be both a leader and a laggard?

As this well-written/researched post from mobiThinking points out: It depends on where you sit. AdMob counts the number of mobile adverts it serves to different types of handsets, not unique handsets. “So, if iPhone users surf more (aren’t the majority of iPhone users on unlimited data plans?), then iPhones go to the top. So, from AdMob’s perspective iPhone is indeed the only game in town.

Bango, because it can identify and track unique visitors to its customers’ sites, has correctly identified a diverse range of handsets browsing the mobile Web. It’s a more representative sample of the devices surfing the mobile Web, with smartphones accounting for 30 percent of handsets in the top 20.

My take: The existence of two conflicting views of the handsets that matter most (to advertisers/publishers) underlines the importance of employing analytics tools that provide a more holistic view of what customers do and the devices they use. Focusing only on the iPhone or only mass-market handsets is a sure-fire way to short change yourself and your customers. It takes two, baby!

But it’s not just about big-picture anayltics; it’s about how brands and publishers approach the mobile Web.

As Boris Fridman, Crisp Wireless CEO, points out (via the company newsletter): ” For everyone thinking about investing in an iPhone app, I say, kudos – but don’t do it at the expense of a mobile website.  Our recent Crisp Wireless Index shows that iPhone usage for mobile browsing across our network has grown significantly from 9.1 percent to 22.98 percent.  However, Blackberry browsing still holds a significant share at 23.98%. Furthermore, recent studies from Pinch Media show that as novelty wears off, iPhone app usage drops significantly after 90 days. Mobile has become a crucial channel that requires a multi-pronged approach.  Our own Tom Limongello recently stated it best in his blog post pointing out how maintaining a mobile or iPhone-optimized website to complement iPhone apps is key to maintaining discoverability and addressing a broader market.” (More from Crisp Wireless  in an exclusive interview next week.)

I’m reminded here of an interesting debate during a recent industry conference, a discussion I would like to open up to MSG readers. Does the popularity of the iPhone among this demographic and the continued hype around the iPhone (one that sees many companies invest in the iPhone as their only mobile play) combine at some level to create a new kind of iPhone-only affluent mobile Internet (as opposed to a mass-market mobile Internet for the rest of us)? What do YOU think? What’s more, is there a danger this will increase fragmentation and move us one giant step away from the One Web vision Steve Bratt, Chief Executive Officer, World Wide Web Consortium, outlines in this excellent presentation?

Disclaimer: AdMob has been an MSG supporter; Bango is an MSG supporter.

Just two weeks after release and my new white paper (Mobile Advertising For The Masses) counts 500+ downloads. (Again, I am honored that Bango (white paper sponsor) refers to me as a “mobile guru.”) I always endeavor to communicate complex ideas in a way that everyone will understand, and am told people enjoy my accessible and entertaining writing style. But the real reason behind the popularity of this hands-on analysis of campaigns across three mobile social networks (BuzzCity, itsmy.com, and Peperonity) is timing. Mobile social networks are on the rise (a recent Informa report counted 200+ of them) and open for business.

Where is the money?

I was fortunate to speak at Mobile Advertising & the Rise of Social Networking: What does it mean for Brands, Agencies and Service Providers?, a Knowledge & Networking Seminar organized by AIME (the Association for Interactive Media and Entertainment) last week in London. I enjoyed the opportunity to network with mobile professionals in a casual atmosphere and will most definitely participate in future AIME events. Andrew Darling, AIME Director of Communications, tells me upcoming events/topics include: WAP publishing, mobile payments, mobile coupons, and mobile widgets.

My session looked at the nuts and bolts of mobile advertising in social networks, and the real results, revenues,  and strategies first-mover companies such as pioneer mobile flirting service Flirtomatic and brave consumer brands (via full-service mobile marketing agency Inside Mobile), have to share.

As I am currently conducting my own mobile advertising research, I was particularly interested to learn from Eric Mugnier, Inside Mobile Product and Innovation Director, that the agency has also done its homework in the form of an in-depth survey of 80 key decision makers in the global mobile advertising value chain. The report won’t be released for a few weeks/months but Eric, who is also interested in my input and ideas, has promised MSG will have it first. (Thanks Eric!)

In his presentation, which included video interview excerpts from a selection of interviews, Eric outlined a few clear trends/requirements for effective mobile advertising in a social network. Mobile advertising must be targeted and relevant; the industry has no shortage of good ideas, but it must address issues around scale; and finally, brands and agencies have built the proper foundations, and  now the priority must be to create a toolkit approach that will allow more companies to execute on the lessons they have learned.

“Killer app”

Where are the brands?

Further along than I thought if we consider the example of a major sporting goods and sports apparel company, an Inside Mobile client gearing up to release an iPhone app that combines creativity, communication, and community to deliver a compelling advertising experience that users can make their own.

In a nutshell, the app allows people to customize their shoe and share it with their friends. In the next phase, people will be able to buy what they created with their phones, share what they created with the community (and this is where it gets really interesting), geotag their creation to add another dimension to the discussion (this is what I created and where), and have the ability to post their creation as part of their Facebook profile. (More next week when MSG has the exclusive on this innovative campaign.)

As Eric put it: Allowing people to customize, share, and – most importantly – make the end-result a part of their own digital persona paves the way for effective and enthusiastic viral marketing. He’s right!

It was refreshing to hear Eric describe the campaign elements in these terms. I read it as proof the advertising ecosystem has moved a giant step forward in understanding that: 1) The emergence of empowered individuals, the advance of so-called digital natives (individuals who have grown up with the Internet), and the abundance of applications designed to give consumers more of a say in how they create, access and enjoy content have transformed communication and, more specifically, the business of advertising; 2) Advertising has become content, and brands and agencies must find ways to turn their one-way pitch to “consumers” into invigorating and effective two-way conversations; and 3) Advertising in a social network is all about active participation in the community and developing ways to interact with members and enable them to interact with each other.

My take: The principles I have discussed and debated with Jonathan MacDonald, mobile advertising activist and close friend/colleague for almost a year now, are no longer just ideas; they are the building blocks of ideal business models. Well done (!) – I’m sure Jonathan’s many presentations, trips, and workshops play a role somewhere in this transformation.

Mobile metrics

Speaking of progress, Henry Stevens, Director of Media and Entertainment, GSMA, updated us on the Mobile Media Metrics (MMM) initiative to use independently aggregated and audited metrics from operator network data to develop a common methodology (what to measure) and common process (how to measure). Agreement on these key points would enable media owners to measure performance of their media properties across mobile networks, and help media planners better understand audience trends and behavior.

Where are we now?

As we know, all five U.K. mobile operators are on board. Now the GSMA is well on its way to a commercial launch in the U.K. (the feasibility study is complete) and working with operators in other European markets to duplicate this across other regions. A technical solution for the anonymization and aggregation of operator data (allowing a persistent and unique ID), as well as integration with other relevant databases and third-party demographics, top the agenda.

But the real news is how all this can be integrated into existing reporting tools. The GSMA is currently seeking the input of brands, agencies, and media owners to ensure the process meets the long-term objective of the organization to drive the growth of mobile as a multimedia platform.

Another presentation that underlined the pivotal importance of analytics in the scheme of things came from Nandi Gurprasad, VP of Alliances, Bango.

In a case study of Tapatap, a Bango customer that was recently acquired by women’s social network LimeLife, Nandi showed how the social gaming community used analytics to measure the success of its mobile Web ad campaigns and refine advertising pitches and presentations to target countries, networks and handsets which it determined (through analytics) yield the best conversion rates. Accurate tracking of response rates across different ad networks also allowed Tapatap to better plan campaigns and, more importantly, determine customer acquisition cost.

As Nandi put it: The example shows how and why companies should leverage tools that “give them an edge” – specifically, tools that provide real-time and reliable information on users – and which provide answers to the all-important questions: Who (are my customers)? What (did they look at)? Where (did they come from)?

Vendor spin aside, mobile social networks are here to stay and grow. They offer opportunity for advertisers and drive demand for analytics solutions. (As I point out in my white paper: When the end-game is all about getting a big(ger) picture view of what you achieved and where you missed the mark, then a more comprehensive analytics solution is a must. In practical terms, the two (offered by mobile social network ad networks and independent vendors) are complementary – not competitive.)

Flirtomatic’s phenomenal numbers

Saving the best for last, a real highpoint was the inside track on Flirtomatic, a combination mobile social network and mobile flirting service with the ability to monetize mobile users through conversation with content such as virtual flowers, chocolate, and kisses.

Matt Dicks, Flirtomatic Commercial Director, reported the community counts over 1 million U.K. users and outlined how Flirtomatic turns people with a passing interest in flirting to spending customers.

The trick is retail 101 all over again: Delight the customer.

In a nutshell, Flirtomatic “makes newcomers feel welcome when they come in.” Some 55 percent of daily new users go active and send a Flirtogram (signaling they want to flirt); some 20 percent of users go on to spend with Flirtomatic on items such as virtual gifts or features to enhance their own profiles. Flirtomatic chalks up revenues of $10 per month per spending customer.

At the other end of the spectrum, Flirtomatic counts “over 100 million WAP impressions per month.” Where does mobile advertising pay dividends?

A whopping 84 percent of page impressions are generated on-portal (where Flirtomatic essentially plasters operator portals with banner ads). Next are ad networks with 12 percent, followed by paid search with 3 percent (a category Matt said shows significant growth as more users go off portal and explore mobile search services to get where they want to go).

So, operators have the volume now, but will this continue? Matt expects operators will rule the roost for another 2-3 years. After all, operators are the gatekeeper and the billing agent. An envious position between the content company and the customer indeed!

Flirtomatic has also made the move from virtual gifting to the real thing (overcoming a logistics nightmare to let members give the objects of their affection chocolate and sexy underwear). The results: 500 gave chocolates and 300 gave underwear. More important than the numbers, the experiment proves members are willing to give and receive real gifts using their mobile phone.

Read between the lines, and this behavior bodes well for brands and advertisers.

As Matt pointed out: It’s a golden opportunity for brands to get involved. Think of the sponsorship and sampling opportunities. Encourage members to send flowers (and plug Interflora in the process, for example.) Cross-sell and up-sell chocolates (you just sent your loved one Cadbury Creme Eggs, have you thought of trying a milk chocolate bar?).

The possibilities are endless – and the conversions can peg the needle. Matt walked us through the example of an early experiment Flirtomatic conducted with a popular brand of cider. Members could “shout a pint” to their buddies using their mobile phones. The recipients got a voucher on their mobile phone for a free pint of cider and the location of the nearest pub that would redeem it. The results: 348,000 members sent a pint to their friends over a two week period; CTR peaked at an impressive 10 percent.

Should mobile advertising stop at delivering a message? Or should it seek to unite the virtual and physical worlds (a topic I also examine in detail in the Netsize Guide 2009 on offer in the MSG sidebar)? The jury is out on this one, but the discussion will continue at MSG.

What do YOU think?

BTW: Matt kindly invited me to visit Flirtomatic during my next trip to London, an offer I will gladly take him up on. I have long admired the company and Mark Curtis, Flirtomatic founder and author of this  well-known book on disruption culture, whose views I also hope to capture in a thought-provoking podcast. If there was ever a mobile social community success story worth telling, then Flirtomatic is it!

Disclaimer:  Bango is an MSG supporter.

It’s early days and there are no easy answers – all the more reason to attend Mobile Advertising & the Rise of Social Networking: What does it mean for Brands, Agencies and Service Providers?, a Knowledge & Networking Seminar organized by AIME, (The Association for Interactive Media and Entertainment), this Thursday in London.  The seminar provides the perfect opportunity to explore key learnings with industry pioneers and network over drinks. (The event begins at 6:30 p.m. and wraps up around 11 p.m. More details on the program and venue here.)

One company I look forward to hearing is Flirtomatic, a pioneer mobile flirting service that has had great success monetizing mobile users through conversation with added fun and great content such as virtual flowers and kisses. The company recently extended its reach to enable members to give the objects of their affection real gifts including chocolate and sexy underwear. As Matt Dicks, Commercial Director for Flirtomatic, put it in an interview with AIME’s Andrew Darling: The approach to mobile advertising is about marketing entertainment and content services as part of its mobile social network. “It’s about integrating ads and brands into the fabric of a social networking service – enabling premium gifting between users and using advertising to support content.”

Other speakers on hand to share their experiences/vision include:

• Nandi Gurprasad, VP of Alliances, Bango
• Dusan Hamlin, Joint Managing Director, Inside Mobile
• Mark Brill, Chairman Mobile Council, DMA
• Henry Stevens, Director of Media and Entertainment, GSMA

I’ve been invited to present the results of my new-release white paper (Mobile Advertising For The Masses). In it I road test the mobile ad networks offered by three mobile social networks and document the results. (Look for the free download later on in the week.) I also conclude with my three principles for interacting with mobile social networkers on their terms. (After all, those are the rules here!)

1) Make the most out of mobile analytics offered both by the ad network and an independent vendor to match your marketing message/campaign with the community.

2)Consider virtual gifting and other schemes to provide something of value to users and their community.

3)Participate actively in the community and interact with members to build relationships and enable them to deepen their relationships with each other by providing tools that will let them do what they are there to do: Keep in touch with friends, connect with people who share their interests and share content and feelings with the community.

If you want to meet up or catch-up during the seminar, then please reach out to me directly, or contact Andrea Henninge (andrea@msearchgroove.com) to schedule a briefing.

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG sponsor.

I’m also pleased to report that the interest in my series of mobile advertising white papers is going strong. While I’ve just wrapped up Vol 2, my earlier white paper (Mobile Advertising For Newbies) will soon be making the rounds as part of a package of audio-visual presentations on mobile advertising produced by Henry Stewart Talks, a company committed to providing access to world class seminars by leading thinkers and authorities from around the globe in one online resource. The company commissioned me to summarize the findings of my first white paper and so educate the market about the pivotal role of mobile analytics in all we do. The more digital we become, the more the data matters…

Location is another topic high on my agenda, so I am looking forward to a F2F meeting/podcast with Dan Harple, who is responsible for leadership, and strategic and operational growth at GyPSii, a super-cool company leading the race to deliver us mobile experiences that combine information, entertainment, social networks, and location/navigation. A passion for multimedia, real-time interactive communications, collaboration, and social media runs through Dan’s bio like a leitmotif.

Prior to joining GyPSii he was Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Context Media, Inc., an enterprise software firm that was acquired by Oracle. Before that, his efforts centered on media research in Context Labs, a company he co-founded with Artist and Producer Todd Rundgren. Cool!

If you want to know more about the company and its future roadmap, then click on the screen in the MSG video player and watch the interview I did with Shane Lennon, Vice President, Marketing & Product Development, during Mobile World Congress. It’s the video interview I chose to showcase this week, and you can read more in my column for bnetTV’s weekly newsletter here.

I’ll follow up on those conversations next week. For now, all attention is focused on Mobile Advertising For The Masses, my new-release white paper timed to CTIA and an essential read for marketers who want to tap into mobile social networks (and the ad networks they provide) to drive positive results. This time I evaluate the analytics capabilities offered by three ad networks: BuzzCity (BuzzCity), itsmy.com (itsmy.biz), and Peperonity (AdMob). I also compare the depth and breadth of analysis they provide, and examine the need for an additional comprehensive mobile analytics package to connect the dots, fill in the gaps, and give me the big picture view of what my campaigns achieved and how I might use this insight to plan and target future campaigns.

It’s among my best work and worth the all-nighters during and since my stay in New York to put in the final finishing touches. I won’t go into the details here (for that you’ll have to download the free white paper), but I can say BuzzCity came out on top, allowing me to visibility into who my customers are (gender), where they are (location down to the U.S. state level), and handset make and model, for a start.

itsmy.com also allowed me to hone my campaign to target my key demographic, but outdated order and payment systems dampened my enthusiasm. Peperonity also had a few highpoints, but hasn’t quite reached its full potential.

I look forward to catch-calls and briefings with senior executives at both networks. My mobile advertising experiments cued me into some interesting features and functionality in the pipeline and I am anxious to learn more, insights into their ad networks, which  I’ll be sure to share on MSG.

BTW: I’m also pleased that I have been invited by Andrew Darling to speak on mobile advertising, social media and my key findings during Mobile Advertising & the Rise of Social Networking: What does it mean for Brands, Agencies and Service Providers?, a Knowledge & Networking Seminar organized by AIME, (The Association for Interactive Media and Entertainment) that will take place in London on April 2. (More details on the program and venue here.)

All attendees will receive copies of my two best practice white papers – “Mobile Advertising for Newbies” and “Mobile Advertising for the Masses.”

Speakers include:

• Nandi Gurprasad, VP of Alliances, Bango
• Matt Dicks, Commercial Director, Flirtomatic
• Dusan Hamlin, Joint Managing Director, Inside Mobile
• Mark Brill, Chairman Mobile Council, DMA
• Henry Stevens, Director of Media and Entertainment, GSMA

Key themes to be explored:

• Is advertising content?
• Brands in social media advertising – listen first, then join in the conversation.
• If social networks have become the new ‘water coolers’, incubating new micro audiences with differentiated tastes, what makes advertising too intrusive in this new environment?
• What’s the ‘next big thing’ in mobile advertising – mobile for the masses?
• Is it just about advertising messages? What kinds of mobile services suit mobile advertising?
• Measuring success and understanding how important targeting is. Which types of campaigns work?
• Are social networking services the ultimate channel for the ‘long tail’?
• What is ’social currency’ and how do you convert it into revenue?

As I illustrate in my white paper, mobile social networks have the inside track on their growing membership. Opt-in procedures, often requiring users to register and fill out detailed questionnaires, put mobile social networking companies in the enviable position of being able to not only collect valuable customer data, but also provide advertisers a breakdown of customer segments by gender, location, make and model of handset – and much more. It’s valuable information brands can harness to fine-tune and plan future campaigns.

But, as I show in my final analysis, you can do one better if you also employ a more comprehensive analytics solution to measure success, failure, and how well your campaign really achieved your business objectives.

A comprehensive analytics solution represents a perfect complement to the solutions provided by mobile social ad networks, giving advertisers a more holistic view of their customers and allowing them to answer the critical questions every advertiser and publisher needs to know: Who are my customers? What did they look at? Where did they come from? What were the results? Did community members convert to the campaign goals?

My take: To maximize results on a social networking site, it’s critical that advertisers follow these three principals.

• Make the most out of mobile analytics offered by both the ad network and an independent vendor such as Bango to match your marketing message/campaign with the community. Social networking sites generally require members to register, which raises the bar in terms of interest, motivation, and qualification. This puts your message in an environment where members are predisposed to relevant messages. In a best case scenario, people should view your marketing as an extension of their mobile experience, rather than spam.

• Consider virtual gifting and other schemes to provide something of value to users and their community. After all, the goal here is to encourage user interaction, cultivate a two-way conversation, and boost brand awareness. This is not an environment for marketing pitches and product-pushers. Success stories include Flirtomatic, a pioneer mobile flirting service with the ability to monetize mobile users through conversation with added fun and great content such as virtual flowers, chocolate, and kisses. The company recently extended its reach to enable members to give the objects of their affection real gifts including chocolate and sexy underwear.

• Participate actively in the community, and interact with members to build relationships and enable them to deepen their relationships with each other by providing tools that will let them do what they are there to do: Keep in touch with friends, connect with people who share their interests, and share content and feelings with the community. More importantly, keep in mind you don’t need whiz-bang technology to engage with members in a meaningful exchange about your brand. Text ads and banner display ads are a great way to start. Besides, they are going to be around with us for a while yet to come. The innovation is not in advertising formats, but how we use them.

In a market where two-way conversation is the end-goal, and where traffic on mobile social networking is on the rise, brands that lend their voice to the conversation wil most likely deliver their advertising message loud and clear.

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter.

The findings are based on Bango’s birds-eye view of browsing behavior and mobile transactions across 1,811 devices and 208 countries in February 2009. (By way of background, Bango provides real-time mobile analytics and collects mobile payments in over 150 countries worldwide.) For a complete list of the top 10 countries in both mobile browsing and mobile payments for February 2009 (hot off the presses!), check out the Bango Briefing Room here.

Speaking of stats, this recent blog post underlines the pivotal role of mobile analytics in developing truly targeted mobile campaigns. As it points out: Most analytics products only update publishers/advertisers on traffic trends daily/weekly/monthly. But that doesn’t cut it when it comes to uncovering the hour by hour breakdown of traffic, granular detail that can mean the difference between campaign success and failure. Indeed, hourly access to analytics also allows advertisers/publishers to fine-tune their campaigns, and change content throughout the day based on the time of day.

Keep looking for more stats from Bango in the Briefing Room – and watch for Vol. 2 of my series of mobile advertising how-to white papers (sponsored by Bango). The next in the series, Mobile Advertising For The Masses, documents mobile advertising campaigns across three mobile social networks.

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter.

BuzzCity’s keen focus on serving the “unwired” in developing countries – people whose only access to the Internet is their mobile phone – made business sense from the start, allowing it to chalk up 3+ million users across 80 countries (as of December 2008). But it’s the company’s clever approach to mobile advertising that makes it the one to watch. Expect a raft of announcements kicking off at Mobile World Congress (MWC), allowing app and content providers to get more reach (and thus more revenues). This is all I can say under NDA, but think ’social graph meets viral-marketing’ and you’re definitely on the right track.

As KF puts it: “It’s about critical mass, and we have reached a critical mass in myGamma today that has become attractive to developers who want to tap into our community and soon beyond [these] members to friends of friends of myGamma [members].”

To this end, upcoming announcements will emphasize “improvements to our ad network and ad serving system so that it delivers value to advertisers and publishers.”

For now, let’s just say announcements pave the way for application developers to better distribute and monetize their content via the myGamma community and wider network of off-portal publisher sites and destinations BuzzCity has built through partnerships and as a result of the $10 million investment it received last summer from South African media group Naspers.

By way of background, the investment boosts BuzzCity’s profile, powers its expansion plans, and cements Naspers’ position as a formidable force in the evolving media landscape. The key here is convergence, and there’s clear evidence of a business model that could potentially blow other mobile social networks out of the water.

Naspers is a multinational media company headquartered in South Africa, with principal operations in electronic media (including pay-tv, Internet and instant-messaging subscriber platforms, and the provision of related technologies) and print media (including the publishing, distribution and printing of magazines, newspapers, and books). Naspers’ investments include: ACL Wireless Limited, a major provider of mobile value-added services based in India that offers community applications such as chat, IM and social networking, as well as mobile services; Tencent, a provider of Internet and mobile value-added services in China with the largest IM community in China – QQ; Sanook!, the leading Thai language portal in Thailand; and Mail.ru, ranked as the number one email service for Russian speaking users with some 30 million unique monthly visitors, and over two billion monthly page views (according to the website).  And the list goes on…

The goal is to expand the BuzzCity mobile ad network. But there are no plans to manage mobile advertising campaigns. For that, KF would rather team up with companies such as Top Space, the media arm of Sanook!, and be the mobile part of the pitch the company makes to clients. As he puts it: “The idea is to complement the existing offer these companies [in the portfolio] have and extend that reach into mobile.” BuzzCity is also not interested in content creation. “At this stage we have decided that we will not take a stake or invest in a company that develops original content. We want to work with these [content development] companies, allowing them distribution and marketing through our community and [Naspers] portfolio companies.”

Excerpts from the Q&A:

Q: Who are your competitors? We know it’s AdMob when it comes to ad networks – but who are the players that compete against BuzzCity at the big-picture level?

A: Looking at the competitors, I can say we will be the first one in the space to create a real ecosystem. We have community and a complete monetization path, and there’s more to come. [In comparison] the App Store doesn’t have the community, and it doesn’t run ad networks.  App Store is a pure transaction mechanism.  It leverages on the number of people that use iPhones to provide a transaction-based monetization path. So a comparison with Apple is possible, but not accurate. We’re closer to Facebook. It offers a developer platform, allowing developers to build the applications on Facebook and popularize them by offering them to [Facebook] members, but the monetization path is not so clear. Likewise, the ad network isn’t in place to help publishers and merchants monetize the traffic. We have all that, and all the developers have to do is figure out how to make their applications popular. Once they are popular, the way is clear to make money out of them. Then the question becomes: Do I continue to offer it for free, so that I can charge for advertising? Or do I charge for my application? Both options are supported by BuzzCity.

Q: You already have developers offering apps and content to the community? What are the hot items?

A: The most popular applications are ones that allow users to have some fun and express themselves. For example, there is a Tarot card [app] that tells your future and lets you share Tarot cards with your friends. Another popular application is called Hug Me. It’s just a simple hug, and users can give each other virtual hugs and show each other they care. Virtual gifting is very big, and we expect to see quite a number of virtual gifting applications moving forward.

(BTW: This response dovetails well with Tim Green’s observations over at Mobile Entertainment. He points out that virtual gifting is part of a successful monetization scheme for BuzzCity. What’s more, he wouldn’t be surprised “if, a few years from now, Facebook decides the best way to get a presence in mobile in certain geographies is to advertise on BuzzCity’s network.”)

Q: Let’s talk about the release of the BuzzCity Mobile Advertising Index, a report that tracks the growth of off-portal mobile Internet use in more than 200 countries around the world. For Q4 2008 the index shows almost 50 percent growth in paid banner advertisements in the U.S. Specifically, 382 million mobile banner ads were served in the U.S. in the last three months of 2008, a 47 percent increase over the previous quarter, and a 209 percent increase for the year. In a press statement, you said this is an indicator of the resilience of mobile advertising in the face of the current economic downturn, as well as the exponential growth in mobile Internet use among U.S. consumers. Can you elaborate? And what are you seeing now?

A: In the fourth quarter of 2008, just over 7.5 billion advertiser banners were delivered across the network, representing quarterly growth of 40 percent, a slight increase from the previous quarter’s growth of 38 percent. According to our data, we actually only service about one-third of the advertiser demand.  In other words, there is another two-thirds of advertiser dollar [budget] on the table every day that we’re not spending. We have advertiser dollars waiting to be earned, if developers are able to develop compelling applications that users find interesting. We have a board meeting this morning, and I can say I have very happy shareholders today.

Q: Is it the focus on the Long Tail that allows you to profit in a recession?

A: Yes. When we put our Long Tail mobile ad network together, aggregating around 2,000 smaller sites, it was about capturing value offered by the smaller sites – sites that otherwise would not be able to attract advertising on their own. It was also about allowing advertisers to reach a diverse audience. After all, if you want 1,000 people to respond to your offer, you’re more likely to succeed if you try to attract 1,000 people from 1,000 different sites rather than 1,000 visitors to a single site.

In fact, the financial crisis has so far has turned out to be a net positive for us.  We expected two things to happen. We expected venture-funded companies that were buying traffic to drive the downloads would likely reduce their spending because they were worried they might not be able to raise the next round of funding because of financial crisis. This did happen, but the financial crisis hit the U.S. and U.S. companies harder than the rest. Elsewhere, companies that were spending on ad networks to buy traffic have not reduced their spending. In addition, we expected mobile value-added service providers to cut back advertising spending, which also happened. But these [VAS] players appear to have moved larger portions of their advertising budget into mobile Internet, which benefits us. We’re also seeing a rise in spending coming from more traditional businesses, such as financial services. They have increased overall mobile Internet and advertising spending because it’s more controllable and measurable [than other media buys].

For example, in India, advertisers are reducing their overall budgets by up to 50 percent. In fact, [publications like] Hindustan and Times of India are reporting 75 percent reductions in the ad revenue. But, in reality, a shift is taking place and advertisers are moving money from online to the mobile Internet.  So, BuzzCity profits from the financial crisis. You have seen that from quarter to quarter we grew about 40 percent, and from November to December we actually grew 40 percent as well, month to month. In January, we see that the trend has continued and we are quite hopeful that in this quarter [1Q2009] we will report either a similar growth rate or an even bigger one.

Q: Speaking of India, you recently launched a feature that enables brands in India to target ad campaigns to four regions around four major cities: Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and Kolkata. How is demand for that?

A: It’s getting very good response from advertisers. But most advertisers are looking for reach and don’t only want to target individual regions. Overall, India has been growing quite well over the last months, with a number of more traditional companies taking their campaigns to mobile.

Q: Can you provide examples?

A:  A lot of activity from banks. In the last months we’ve seen Sri Lankan Airlines advertising to Indian customers. We have also seen campaigns from Toyota, Dell, Renault – and other big brands using mobile to reach Indian consumers. In fact, activity has increased so much over the last six months that we increased our team there from two to five [people]. We are also planning to roll this feature [being able to target regions] out to two more countries over the next six months. We are deciding the countries and I’ll let you know closer to the date.

Q: You recently announced a deal with MCN in Thailand, where you use its MobileSearch.net platform to power content discovery and mobile search for your myGamma community there. I’ve seen other mobile communities embrace search as well, I’m thinking here of the deal between itsmy.com and Taptu. How are members using mobile search?

A: From my initial observations, it doesn’t seem that users like to search as much as they like to discover new things. We’re talking with MCN about how they could use the social graph to make mobile search much more of an activity involving user recommendations. Of course, we will leave the mobile search technology to providers and not develop our own search service. There are a couple of other initiatives that we are pursuing right now but we’re not ready to announce details. I can also say that we are looking at launching keyword search functions in our ad network, letting advertisers target the advertising based on the user query.

***

NOTE: I’ll also have more about the nuts and bolts of BuzzCity’s ad network in my upcoming mobile advertising white paper, set to be released in time for MWC. As I wrote earlier, BuzzCity understands advertiser requirements for spending control and improved targeting. More importantly, it walks the talk, providing advertisers a balanced mix of mobile analytics and post-campaign demographic data (based on a representative audience sample). In fact, click analytics from BuzzCity (I ran banner ad campaigns across three mobile social networks, including BuzzCity) showed my audience was predominantly male, with over one-third of my clicks in the U.S. coming from the state of Mississippi.

My take: It’s potentially valuable feedback for advertisers wanting to target campaigns to variables such as gender and location, and a clear competitive advantage for BuzzCity over other ad networks.

Disclaimer: The MSG series of mobile advertising white papers is sponsored by Bango.

The groups claim deceptive practices throughout the mobile advertising industry and ask the commission to launch an investigation into the privacy implications of marketing practices targeted at mobile phone users.

While the 52-page document highlights some valid concerns, it also exaggerates the intent and ability of the some 50 vendors listed in the complaint to threaten privacy and consumer welfare.

This hyperbole is unfortunate as it seriously compromises the credibility of the complaint and clouds the core issues that the mobile industry must address, such as improved citizen education about the costs and benefits of providing personal data.

Searching for answers
Take the example of ChaCha, a people-powered search service I have tracked since it launched its mobile service and subsequent mobile advertising solution last year.

The complaint charges that this mobile search is guilty of a “covert approach” to mobile advertising. It bases this observation on ChaCha marketing material which states: “There’s no complicated opt-in process-users are part of ChaCha when they ask their first question, and your valuable message or offer is integrated naturally into the answers they receive.”

Read the rest of this guest column on Mobile Marketer

Disclaimer: I am a Collaborator with Every Single One Of Us. AdMob has been an MSG supporter; Bango is an MSG supporter.

Bango has visibility into what over 20 million users browse and buy on the mobile Web across 150+ countries. How does it know this? Bango’s technology allows it to assign each individual a unique user ID based on information Bango gathers from browser analysis, session information and its long-established billing relationships with mobile operators. This unique user ID – often referred to as a digital fingerprint – enables Bango to distinguish between new and repeat users and therefore quantify precisely the number of unique visitors to a given website.

Here, in the MSG Briefing Room, Bango will take this all a step further, connecting the dots between clicks to provide a comprehensive profile of individual users. As Sarah Keefe, Bango VP Communications, puts it: “It’s not about look-ups; it’s about what real people do on the mobile Internet.” The sharp focus on individual actions across sites and destinations fits well with the industry’s new awareness that volume is good, but individual customer insight is better.

Download the whitepaper here.

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter.

Download the whitepaper here.

In fact, Michael Becker, EVP of iLoop Mobile and editor of the MMA International Journal of Mobile Marketing, has asked me to write an article based on my findings. I am honored to be a contributor to this high calibre publication and very pleased to report that a Vol. 2 white paper is also in the pipeline. This one (slated to be released about Mobile World Congress) will document mobile advertising campaigns I will run in three mobile social networks (which I will choose at random).

A special thanks to my esteemed colleague Maria Sanchez, a multi-talent who just today designed this wonderful holiday edition white paper cover. Maria is once again on board to help develop the campaign and document the results on the official Mobislim blog. (Regular readers will recall I chose to set up the campaigns covered in Vol.1 using Mobislim, a small-scale mobile site created by Bango, and post the raw data at Maria’s blog.)

Maria’s blog is always a good read – but there’s an extra-special reason to visit the site over the holidays – and bring your best content/ideas with you! Mobislim is collecting content for future campaigns, so please feel free to send your ideas/images/jokes/recipes directly to Maria at maria@bango.com. Bango will host the content (promoting content and running campaigns on your behalf free of charge) and track the results using Bango Analytics, allowing content contributors a chance to see the results. In the spirit of the season, Bango will donate all micro-payments it collects by selling content on the Mobislim site to the charity, Save the Children. Bango will also match the money it collects.

It’s good fun for a good cause, and I encourage you to do your part and get involved.

Warm wishes for a wonderful holiday season and a successful 2009!

Disclaimer: Bango is an MSG supporter. Maria Sanchez is a blogger and Bango marketing manager.

Regular readers may recall that my mobile advertising white paper (Mobile advertising for newbies) documented how I (together with my esteemed colleague Maria Sanchez) set up the campaigns using Mobislim, a small-scale mobile site created by Bango. The white paper also examined the depth and breadth of mobile analytics solutions offered by AdMob and Bango. Today’s post will take that all a step further, providing an analysis of the performance of the three ad networks I chose at random. (BTW: You can read the raw data on Maria’s new-look Mobislim blog.)

I had assumed that made-for-mobile ad networks, with mobile at the core of their competitive DNA, would naturally deliver superior results – or at least shine when compared with Google. (After all, Google, an Internet company, has had a tough time recently delivering mobile sites in their mobile search results and displaying mobile advertisements the way publishers/brands meant them to be. For more background, I recommend you read this MSG post which documents Google’s poor search experience and results.)

But the numbers delivered by AdMob and Bango tell another story. One, Google limited my campaign to the U.S. and U.K. as I had specifically requested. Two: Google delivered mobile traffic from mobile users (as opposed to traffic from users on their PCs) to my site.

In my view, Google “gets” mobile advertising. (Ironically, this view is mirrored in an informal survey of 79 customers conducted by Bango. In it, 86.7 percent of respondents named Google as their number one choice in mobile ad networks. Yahoo came in second with 26.7 percent, and Adultmoda/Admoda came in third with 21.7 percent. Multiple answers were allowed.)

Geography:

AdMob shows me I have 21 visits from Google – all from the U.S. (Hmm. I wonder: Are users in the U.K. surfing less than they do in the U.S., or is the U.K. a white spot in Google’s ad network footprint?). Granted, Google’s 21 visits may seem low when compared to 323 from Decktrade and 127 from Mo’Jiva, but don’t be blinded by the numbers. A closer look shows that 70 visits (or 22 percent of my total traffic) coming through Decktrade came from countries I did not target (and also did not budget for).

Bango – which reports Google gave me 18 page views from 17 unique visitors, with 83 percent coming from the U.S. and 11 percent from the U.K. – shows Decktrade delivered me 270 page views from 184 unique visitors and six countries, including India, Indonesia, and Nigeria. Again, that is four more countries than I (literally) bargained for.

But it’s not just Decktrade that delivers a high proportion of traffic from countries I did not specifically target. AbMob stats tell me 127 visitors came to my ad via Mo’Jiva. But my top three countries were India (82), the U.S. (19), and Nigeria (10). Put simply, only 15 percent of the traffic generated was actually relevant to my campaign. Bango reports Mo’Jiva delivered 81 page views from 72 unique visitors across 4 countries, including India, and Iraq.

As I wrote in my white paper, it’s great that users around the world are surfing the mobile Internet on their phones. But mobile advertising is a business, and clicks coming in from countries I did not target in my campaign are quite frankly a waste of my budget.

My take: Mobile ad networks must do more to ensure proper geographic targeting, and limit the number of users elsewhere who just happen upon my ad. Do more to control this – or risk losing advertisers (like me) to ad networks (like Google) that can. While Google did not deliver a huge number of page visits, it was nonetheless able to deliver traffic from countries where my ad message would be both relevant and effective.

Finally, a word about the split between mobile and PC users.

To be clear: Mobile advertisers want to reach mobile users.

They have creatives that match the medium, and campaigns that have been fine-tuned to target users on their phone. Put simply, mobile is the medium, the message – and it should be the audience.

So why do PC users account for a significant share of traffic coming from Decktrade and Mo’Jiva ad networks? How do I know this? AdMob and Bango mobile analytics identify iPhones, and also provide visibility into devices accessing my site via a Wi-Fi connection that appear as PC users. I can say with confidence that PC/laptop users are indeed accessing my mobile ad campaign.

According to AdMob and Bango, Google traffic comes from a mix of smartphones and devices from manufacturers including Blackberry, Samsung, and Motorola.

Not so for Mo’Jiva. AdMob reports the number two device accessing my site via Mo’Jiva is a Microsoft PC (using IE). Bango tells me 31 percent of traffic from Mo’Jiva came from users on their PC. Likewise, PC users make up much of the traffic coming in via Decktrade from countries I didn’t target in the first place.

My take: This is serious. It’s early days and we accept that all ad networks have bugs to work out. But I have to wonder how many mobile advertisers want, appreciate or would be willing to pay for traffic from PC users. Put simply: Mobile ad networks must take steps to ensure the lion’s share of visitors they deliver to mobile sites are indeed mobile users.

UPDATE: Maria and I are gearing up to do another series of campaigns (this time starting with AdMob and Admoda), which we will document on our blogs, so I encourage you to check out both sites. JumpTap has reached out to solve a glitch in the sign up process that prevented us from running a campaign using its ad network. Wish I could say the same for Yahoo and Medio Systems. Both have yet to answer our emails. In the meantime, the overwhelming positive response to my first white paper has inspired me to write a “Vol. 2″ explaining in simple terms how to set up and run campaigns on mobile social ad networks. It is slated for release during Mobile World Congress (MWC), so watch this space! And finally, I repeat my open invitation to other mobile analytics companies (thinking here of  Mobilytics, for example) to contact me directly for a briefing.

Disclaimer: AdMob, Bango and JumpTap are MSG supporters.

The press and positive response to my white paper on mobile advertising Mobile advertising for newbies has been overwhelming. Hundreds of practitioners and professionals have already signed up at the Bango site to download the white paper, confirming my view that mobile advertising is a market waiting to happen. The impetus clearly came from major brands and agencies that got in on the ground floor with mobile marketing campaigns as early as 2000, but the real action will start when the Long Tail of advertisers gets on board. For this reason, the singular focus of the paper is to provide these newcomers a blueprint and make sure we are all on the same page. The purpose of this hands-on research – a how-to white paper covering the basics of mobile advertising and mobile analytics – is to give readers the inside track on the procedure to set up and measure the results of three mobile campaigns. I chose to use a small-scale mobile site created by Bango called Mobislim, which offers a light-hearted look at weight-loss tips.

Download the whitepaper here.

Disclaimer: Bango and AdMob are MSG supporters.

Why did I include a section on Blyk in my white paper?

Because the company has had phenomenal success with SMS/MMS campaigns, reporting an average 25 percent response rate to campaigns that harness the messaging technology to enable a conversation with users. No doubt this success is linked to Blyk’s bleeding-edge approach to mobile advertising (no spam – no way) and customer profiling (drilling down to deliver the right ad to the right person). However, in my white paper I also argue Blyk stands as an example of what a well-executed mobile advertising campaign can achieve – and one that mobile advertising newbies should note.

The bottom line: Strategy matters. If we accept advertising is content, then it’s clear advertisers/publishers can get a long way if they use existing technologies (SMS/MMS) and focus energy on crafting creative (and engaging) messages. As my dearest and most disruptive colleague Jonathan MacDonald points out: Advertising is in need of a re-think. It’s not about selling hard; it’s about listening harder to what consumers want. Jonathan (ex-Blyk) has obviously left his mark because Blyk excels in delivering advertising as content in a two-way conversation with customers. (For more background on Blyk, please check out this earlier analysis on MSG.)

Against this backdrop, it’s excellent timing to continue with part two of the audio interview marking Blyk’s first anniversary, which I conducted during a recent analyst briefing with Leif Fågelstedt, Blyk COO.

A message that comes through loud and clear: Blyk is not about warm-and-fuzzy business models. It is a serious and successful company that systematically collects and wields analytics (customer data and feedback) to drive high performance. Mobile advertising is just one area where Blyk’s approach pays off. In fact, Leif and I mused that the real money may be in Blyk’s ability to reality-check brands’ preconceived notions about what youth thinks, likes/dislikes, and will likely recommend to their friends.

Listen to the podcast here.

Before I deep dive into Leif’s views and my take, allow me to direct your attention to a recent research note from my esteemed colleague, Marek Pawlowski. (His thought-provoking analysis of mobile usability and user experience issues sets the bar, and his events attract some of the brightest minds in the business.)

We attended the same briefing, and have come to some similar conclusions. While I hint in my earlier post that Blyk should be considered as something other than an MVNO, Marek goes straight to the heart of the matter. He asks: Is it still appropriate to call Blyk an MVNO when the company’s real focus is on being a leading youth media?

While you’re making up your mind, some key figures tell us Blyk has long achieved this status. Some 100 brands have run some 1,000 campaigns on Blyk, reporting an average response rate of 25 percent. The response rate to some campaigns is much higher.

Seeing is believing (and also understanding why the campaigns struck such a chord with youth), so I asked Blyk to create a space where you can check them out for yourself. My personal thanks to Dan French and his colleagues who made this great graphic and the revolving carousel of mobile advertising case studies. Enjoy!

KEY STATS: ARPU isn’t relevant to Blyk and neither is CPM. The performance measurement that matters is Cost Per Response (CPR), which Leif says is “around 50p [pence] for Blyk. If you compare that with other media channels which our advertisers are looking at…[our] Cost Per Response is industry-leading.” Leif notes that other advertising channels cost much more if you want the same impact. The range is GBP1.50 (a figure he mentions in the podcast) to GBP2.20 (a figure Blyk presented during the analyst briefing). The point is: Blyk measures engagement (response), which is what counts on a personal device like mobile.

ADVERTSING MIX: Blyk sells each advertising SMS for GBP0.07 and each MMS for GBP0.22. “So the cost is 7 [pence] to send out the SMS and then 7 [pence] for every individual that is replying to your message.” The power of that two-way conversation is what allows Blyk to measure performance in CPR rather than CPM, a term “irrelevant to what Blyk is practicing.” Blyk assumed the lion’s share of pitches would be push-campaigns, but that has changed. “Probably 95 percent of everything we are doing right now is a combination of SMS and MMS, and [that] it can be linked to different websites….There are a lot of advertisers that have spent a lot of money creating their web portals and everything for mobile, and they want to drive traffic there.”

ROADMAP: Blyk is purposely targeting the countries where brands already spend the most to get their message across: Germany, Spain, Belgium, and The Netherlands. But prepare for some surprises from Blyk. “The first aim is to become the biggest youth media in Europe, and that is what we have communicated and that’s [what] we deliver. We are also looking to other kinds of opportunities outside Europe as well, but that’s not something I can reveal today.”

FREE SELLS: Blyk is ad-funded (hence, free to users). But it’s not an easy act to follow. Rivals would have to make significant investments in analytics tools and target the right growth markets. “We have invested a lot of money in profiling, ad engines, [as well as ways] to do booking and planning [of ads], and so on.” Leif also reports Blyk has “more partners than competitors right now in the marketplace.”

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Shortly after this interview, Andrew Grill, MSG friend and frequent contributor, posted on a new ad-funded model called Tomato Plus from Croatian mobile operator Vip, a me-too Blyk model he strongly suggests we monitor moving forward. (You can check out the full post at London Calling here.)

By way of background, the brains behind this ad-funded model is global mobile advertising company Out There Media. The company has launched Mobucks, which it describes as a cross operator, cross advertiser marketplace, matching demand and supply for advertising over mobile phones. Mobucks effectively enables the creation of ad-funded tariffs for MNOs and MVNOs.

From the press release: “This mobile advertising marketplace enables consumers to sign-up, share their data, and receive targeted mobile SMS and MMS campaigns – which is exchanged for free airtime.” Out There Media reports response rates of “up to 75 percent.” Matthias Grundböeck, Vip Residential Marketing Director, is upbeat about his decision to launch an ad-funded sub-brand. “Mobucks AdFund by Out There Media gives us the opportunity to offer genuinely interesting, relevant and useful information to our customer base,” he said in a press statement.

I sent an email to Out There Media requesting a more in-depth briefing to answer key questions: What are the nuts and bolts of Mobucks and who is involved to date? How is customer data collected and what visibility does it provide into user preferences? How many ads, in what form (SMS/MMS) and from which brands? And the list goes on.

In the meantime, you may want to check out this related discussion at MobHappy.

My take: Blyk is a tough act to follow because it understands the business and the pivotal importance of customer analytics. Does the advance of similar models represent competition? Not in the markets that top the Blyk agenda. There, Blyk can protect its turf. However, the advance of ad-funded models such as Tomato Plus sends a clear message to mobile operators that they must choose their course.

To borrow from my esteemed colleague Chetan Sharma and his must-read mobile advertising book, Mobile Advertising: Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market: Mobile operators must decide soon whether they wish to be access companies (pipes) or audience companies (media companies). If the goal is the latter, then they would do well to borrow a page from Blyk (and others) and focus on enabling an engaging advertising conversation with consumers (thereby gaining users’ trust and access to some key customer data) before other companies (search companies, social networks, media brands etc…) beat them to it.