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.

Mobile advertising continues to be a good news/bad news story. And your view seems to depend on the news you want to hear.

November was a stellar month for mobile advertising. Google paid an eye- watering $750 million to acquire 3-year old AdMob, a Silicon Valley-based leader in display and iPhone ad formats. Google is not one to waste money, so you can imagine what a huge opportunity mobile advertising really is (even if the rest of the industry is blinded to it) if a Web giant is willing to pay almost $1 billion for a company with mobile expertise. I wonder if we won’t look back in two years and say it was steal…

At the end spectrum, there are always industry pessimists who ask when mobile advertising will finally be big business. However, I must also note (with a grin) that many of these nay-sayers are large publishers (can’t name names) who are 1) amazed by the tremendous traffic to their mobile Web destinations and 2) clueless about how they might harness mobile advertising and monetise these eyeballs.

And let’s not forget the mood among traditional media players. Doom and gloom everywhere you look: newspapers, direct mail, TV, radio, yellow pages, outdoor, magazines and PC Internet.

In fact, the BIA Financial Network (BIA), parent of the Kelsey Group, forecast spend on these media to decline to $144.4 billion by 2013 from $155 billion last year.  But there are winners among the losers. With budgets under pressure and advertisers beginning to demand far more tangible results, traditional media – such as print – is likely to be hit far harder.

Marketers have long realised this trend and increasingly turn their attention to online and new media channels. Against this backdrop, online commands an ever-increasing share of spend. BIA has forecast the new media share globally to grow from around 9 percent today to over 22 percent by 2013. Moreover, a recent study from Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) predicts by 2013 the new media share of advertising in the U.K. will be around 34 percent.

Clearly, the advertising market is going to shrink and see a substitution of spend. It’s a trend that squeezes traditional media and spells opportunity for companies that either play in new media or migrate value to their online assets. Thus, your chances of survival are a measure of your willingness to rethink your media business models and refocus your operating principles.

MOBILE MATTERS

The media futurist Jeffrey Cole points out that the biggest challenge companies face is their own reliance on traditional advertising models. “The problem [is] people often believe there is enough life left in the ‘old advertising model.’” While many companies are still waiting for traditional advertising techniques to deliver, Jeffrey is convinced that the “big breakthroughs will be digital advertising developed by those who grew up their entire life with digital media.”

If Jeffrey is correct, and I believe he is, then mobile – a personal medium digital natives regard as an extension of themselves – is where we will see the meaningful innovation and positive business results.

Indeed, mobile continues to be the bright spot in a raft of recent industry reports. Then market outlook is even more buoyant when it comes to advertising approaches that successfully combine location and promotion.

The Kelsey Group, a research firm specialised in location-based services, expects mobile local advertising revenue alone to reach more than $3.1 billion by 2013, up from just $160 million in 2008. Meanwhile, Gartner forecasts total spending on mobile advertising to grow to $7.5 billion in 2012, up from $530.2 million in 2008.

Connect the dots in these reports, and mobile advertising revenues could outstrip anything that has gone before, making mobile one of the fastest growing advertising channels of all time. A remarkable feat when you consider that the overall advertising industry (traditional and online) will continue its decline. No wonder Google was so keen to snap up AdMob and stake its turf.

WHY WILL MOBILE GROW

In a word, mobile is different. While other media may be limited to a time or context in our daily routines (print in the morning when we read the newspaper on the train and TV when we get home in the evening), mobile is a 24/7 channel directly to us.

Look at it this way and mobile ticks so many marketing boxes that you ignore it at your peril.

• Mobile is a life-line for the 18 to 30- year old demographic, a very attractive demographic to marketers and notoriously difficult to reach.
• Mobile is a personal device and rarely shared, making one-to-one marketing a real possibility.
• Mobile is present at the point of purchase, providing marketers a channel to influence people’s brand choice and encourage the all-important impulse buy.
• Mobile is measurable, allowing marketers insights into campaign performance and their ROI.

However, for most brands and media owners, mobile remains one of the great untapped channels.

WHO WILL “GET” IT?

Not everyone is blind to the tremendous opportunities at the intersection of local information and advertising approaches. In fact, there is a staggering number of players across the ecosystem jockeying for a lead position. At one end of the spectrum you have the search engines and platforms: Taptu, MCN, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, just to name a few. At the other end, you have dozens of directory publishers (Yell, Pagine Gialle, Pages Jaunes, etc.). And let’s not forget the social networks, media owners, verticals, handset manufacturers and mobile operators all lining up for a slice of the action.

The market is crowded. But, if companies continue with their current approaches, then a shake-out is imminent.

To be clear, only a handful of mobile players have what it takes to be highly successful. The barriers to entry, the complexities of the mobile channel and challenges of distribution and discovery make this a game for deep-pocketed players. But other companies have an equal chance (even if they don’t have equal budgets) if they use mobile in a smart and meaningful way to deliver real value to the consumer.

WHAT WILL MAKE A WINNER?

The winners will be the companies that have much more than content (such as local listings, for example). It will be those players that have the capabilities mix to deliver mobile consumers a contextual, relevant and tailored offering. This presupposes the know-how to deliver to the device capabilities, provide consumers the features they expect, enhance location information, support social and viral distribution and add value through marketing and advertising.

It may sound simple, but why are so many companies still getting it wrong?

In my view, they lack focus and an understanding of the mobile channel.

In contrast, companies succeeding in mobile are those players that have recognised the gaps in their knowledge of new media and brought in professionals that do. (Even better if these professionals are themselves digital natives with an instinctive grasp of mobile and its impact on every aspect of our daily lives.)

Leading digital agencies such as AKQA and Ogilvy, and progressive media owners including the BBC and Sky have long had dedicated mobile teams in place. Now other companies are following their lead, dedicating more resources to mobile or buying in skills as they need them (either because they believe in the true potential of mobile or because they have been pushed into mobile by brands who understand how important it is to engage with consumers on their personal device).

If you doubt that mobile demands experts with a different skills set, then consider the real reason Google acquired AdMob: it’s easier (and cheaper) to buy skilled people than make the investments and risk missing the mobile advertising opportunity altogether.

While many agencies and media companies have a long way to go (and a lot to lose), it is encouraging to see so many brands moving full-steam into mobile and reaping real benefits. The list of successful campaigns is impressive: Guinness with its ‘Passport to greatness’ campaign, British Airways with its ‘Mobile check-in’, HSBC with its ‘Business banking’, Sky with its ‘Remote record’, the BBC with ‘BBC mobile’ and the New York Times with their NY Times iPhone app. It is interesting to note that all these companies have dedicated teams or experienced agencies that understand usability and what makes mobile different. Even if these brands appear to experiment or treat mobile as a separate business, they are serious about mobile’s position as part of the digital marketing mix.

WHERE ARE THE LOCAL CONTENT OWNERS?

Brands are leading (not all – but we have more solid case studies than last year), agencies are learning and everyone else is at least talking.
So, where are the director publishers? They are the only players with content and vast experience in traditional advertising who have yet to make the most out of their digital assets. They should have a natural edge over their competitors, but, as I pointed out in my last column for MSG, they are leaving money on the table.

Indeed, directory publishers are best placed to deliver compelling local mobile services and – importantly – commercialise them through advertising. After all, they have existing customers and a powerful sales force to sell advertising products.

It appears that directory publishers are so focused on the business challenge that they can’t see the opportunity mobile represents. This, unfortunately, leave the  door wide open to Google & Co, companies that “get” mobile and understand the value of listings.

WHAT DO THEY NEED?

To close this gap directory publishers must stop thinking of mobile as a technology and understand it is a utility. The mobile device has evolved into a multifunctional tool. It is our social organiser, our information resource, our boredom filler. Basically, it supports our lives. Directory publishers have content that is a perfect fit provided they also plug it into the equation to simply or enhance our daily routine.

Directory publishers must also acknowledge that mobile comes with a whole set of new rules. Granted, the industry has yet to figure out these rules, but borrowing ideas and approaches from traditional media will not work. A good starting point is to answer three core questions: how are you going to approach mobile?; why is your offer relevant?; and what do you expect a consumer to do?

My takeaway: As a marketing medium mobile is only set to grow in value. Providers that get the basics right and forge partnerships that allow them to unlock the potential of mobile, monetise their digital assets and deliver features that add value to our lives will be well-equipped to compete against rivals and win.

Editor’s note: Martin’s next column will focus on what companies (specifically, local media and directory publishers) should to deliver contextually relevant mobile advertising based on location.

Martin Wilson has been involved in digital media for over 14 years, during which time he gained a wealth of experience in the fixed line and mobile Internet. In January 2008, Martin established Indigo 102, an independent consultancy, to assist organisations (including leading advertising agencies, directory publishers, media owners and online service providers) take their brands – and value propositions – mobile. In this role Martin has supported the development and launch of six mass market mobile services across three continents. You can contact Martin directly (martin@indigo102.com) and follow on Twitter (@indigo102).

At first, the endgame was about boosting personalization to improve the mobile operator portals (that forced us to navigate through multiple menus) and cut the clicks to content that we genuinely appreciated. Typically, operators implemented personalization tools to bubble up cool content to the idle screen, taking the hassle out of finding and buying content on the device.

Fast forward, and on-portal is no longer where (all) the action is. The explosion in the number of app stores — software applications supermarkets run by handset makers, operators and independent players such as GetJar – increases our interest in finding stuff we like, and the sheer abundance of apps turns up the pressure on companies across the emerging ecosystem to make finding cool stuff a no-brainer.

By way of background, the content discovery dilemma was expertly outlined in a recent post by Alfred DeRose, who heads Tego Interactive, a Web and mobile product and services company specialized in integrated solutions for converged businesses determined to get more out of their digital assets. Working with clients to address a variety of issues around content discovery has allowed Tego to create a series of “cheat sheets” and white papers describing the problem and offering suggestions/solutions. So, watch this space.

PERSONALIZATION FOR THE PEOPLE

Put another way, content discovery is back at the top of the agenda and interest in personalization/recommendation technologies (to expose people to apps they are likely to appreciate) is also on the rise.

I know this from my interviews with vendors and operators, and from studying a raft of recent stats confirming (through app downloads) that we do indeed want more mobile stuff than ever. However, a disturbing hole in the argument has been (until this week) a lack of insight into what the people want.

Indeed, the underlying assumption has been that poor discovery (and even more miserable mobile search, as this in-depth post from my last mobile search master class shows) frustrates us (because we can’t find what we want) and forces mobile companies (operators/content owners and now developers) to leave money on the table.

So – how serious is the content discovery dilemma, really? Are people really frustrated? And would they buy more if it was easier?

NEW SURVEY

Thanks to a new survey of 2,666 mobile users in the U.S. and the U.K. — conducted by research firm TNS Global on behalf of Xiam Technologies, a Qualcomm subsidiary providing discovery and recommendations solutions to mobile operators – we finally have some thought-provoking stats.

The key data point: 80 percent of people experience some sort of problem getting stuff. The three biggest barriers: stuff is hard to find, phone and interface issues are a pain and the content is just plain irrelevant.

MOBILE SEARCH DOESN’T CUT IT

People are relying on mobile search to discover content, with some 68 percent using search engines to find what they want. 58 percent type in the URL. But – when it comes to effectiveness – people report URLs (83 percent) and bookmarks (89 percent) are the best ways to find content. Mobile search comes in a close third. Interestingly, 67 percent said the handset manufacturer portal was an effective way to find content; 67 percent said operator/service provider portals were effective.

Overall, people complained they are unsuccessful in accessing/purchasing (!) content they want 27 percent of the time.

WOULD PERSONALIZATION HELP?

In principle, it would. Assuming it was easier to find personalized stuff, almost 60 percent would spend more time accessing content and almost 40 percent would spend more money. Would people accept customized recommendations to find stuff they like? Approximately half of people survey in both the U.S. and the U.K. would accept suggestions.

HOW MUCH MONEY CAN BE MADE

Specifically, people said they would spend over an hour a week (55 percent increase) more accessing stuff with their mobile phones and over $8 per month (148 percent increase) if finding and buying was a no-brainer.

In addition to these consumer insights, the report is chock-full with interesting stats about the type of content people download (apps lead the pack) and pay for (games); top mobile sites (service provider destinations/portal trail the likes of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and the BBC); and the gripes people have about their providers (too pricey, too difficult to use and un-cool content).

MOBILE SOCIAL FUTURE

My personal thanks to Martin Clancy, Xiam Marketing Manager, for bringing my attention to the report (in a pre-briefing) and for arranging an interview with Colm Healy, Xiam CEO, to connect the dots. Naturally, much of this analysis is reserved for my report.

However, one exciting observation I can share is the pivotal importance of “significant others” (peers, friends, like-minded people) in the content app suggestions we can expect moving forward.

As Colm put it: The space is “in the eye of the storm.” App stores up the ante and force companies across the ecosystem to focus on personalization and recommendation as means to expose people to the stuff they are likely to appreciate and – ultimately – purchase.

App stores are the place to go – but what is going to keep us coming back for more?

Colm believes that social discovery will provide that stickiness. As he puts it: Recommendations from our friends will be the way we find apps.

But the challenge is not just in harnessing rants and raves from our peers to complement personalization and drive discovery. The real work is in creating recommendations that will work across the plethora of app stores coming on line. “There are unique challenges related to app store fragmentation. If I’ve discovered a great app on an iPhone, obviously what I want to do is let my friend know about that great app. But – if they have a different phone – then the question is how to direct them to the right app for that particular phone.”

Another trend high on Colm’s radar: apps to discover apps. As Colm sees it: Smartphones are chock-full of features and functionalities — clever technology that providers could/should harness to sell us on the wealth of apps at our finger tips. It’s all about taking advantage the interface and features such as location, the compass and the accelerometer (to name a few) to help people get to apps they would likely appreciate.

My take: Personalization has been at the center of mobile since the start. First people bought content (such as ringtones) to personalize their devices. Then companies implemented technology to deliver personalized suggestions and idle-screen takeovers as a way to help people navigate the avalanche of content and cut the clicks to content. It’s work in progress. Now the explosion of app stores pushes the content discovery issue back to the top of the agenda for operators, handset makers, developers – everyone. As this report shows, people would spend more time and money accessing stuff on their mobile phones if it were easier to do. Moving forward, people will likely not only appreciate personalized recommendations (particularly if they come from their peers). They may even come to expect them.

Disclaimer: MSG relies on Tego Interactive for the creation and integration of its online and mobile destinations/strategies. Xiam has aligned with MSG to publish a sponsored series of thought leadership columns and contributions beginning in December 2009.

Imagine a living room where a large flat screen wirelessly attached to a set top box hangs from the wall. You enter a personal code into the set top box that recognizes your profile; the screen welcomes you to a portal where there are no channels only menus with links to personalized content and apps that range from social networking to commerce to premium content and entertainment.  A blinking icon reminds to you to record Wimbledon while an ad from Wilson invites you to view their latest rackets.  As you click the record button, you slide out the keypad on your remote and navigate to the Wilson site where you purchase a new tennis racket.  Payment for the racket is included in your monthly cable invoice.

Sounds like science fiction?  Hardly.  We are on the cusp of next generation iTV (interactive television), services that will elevate our viewing experience. Advertising will also be transformed,  paving the way for two-way communications that enable brands to target households according to key demographics and other information collected by the set top box (STBs). Mobile devices, widely regarded to be the remote control of our digital lives, will surely play an important role in this scenario. (Mobile already has a central spot if we consider how people reach to their phones to cast their vote for talent shows, follow sports and read the gossip during soap operas.)

The promise of being able to access the wide open Internet and everything in between on your TV may be a while away, but the battle for the living room, the one that will decide who monetizes our content consumption and who cashes in on the commercial messages we consume, is being fought now.

Best positioned in my view are the cable companies, who have the trump because they own the signal into the home and have a trusted relationship with subscribers. They also benefit from established business partnerships with broadcast and cable network programmers, that receive billion-dollar fees for entertainment content.

But there are other players lining up to stake their turf. For example, Tier 1 service providers in North America and Europe are rolling out high-speed connections into the home as part of their multi-play strategies to deliver premium content and advertising services via IPTV (TV via the Internet). While the viewing experience for consumers might not be radically different, the opportunities for brands to deliver targeted and relevant advertising could get a boost since multiplay is about creating a holistic view of the customer by monitoring behavior across channels including mobile.

Little wonder that Internet giants are also lining up to own the living room experience. Navic (acquired by Microsoft), gives broadcast and network programmers a unified platform to distribute premium content and advanced advertising services across disparate cable systems.  And let’s not forget Google. Through its relationship with Dish Networks and Visible World, Google is  geared to provide brand advertisers with expanded reach and more precise demographic targeting aimed at satellite and cable subscribers.

These companies have their eye on the prize: knowing the customer first and best. But it’s not an easy goal to reach. Operators concerned about privacy issues are predictably reluctant to release STB data to marketers and industry partners. What’s more, cable’s legacy architecture presents a host of interoperability and scalability problems that must be overcome in order to provide brands national reach across regional cable companies.

So what is cable doing to overcome these challenges?

Although the space is crowding and the privacy/technology obstacles are significant, cable companies are nonetheless next positioned to win the battle for the living room. But how well prepared are they for the struggle ahead?

The cable industry along with CableLabs, the industry’s research and development arm, has developed several key initiatives to usher in the age of iTV. These efforts, already well underway, provide the standards and interfaces that will allow brands and publishers to conduct business via cable and better target their audience demographic.

To get the inside track on work in progress I recently spoke with Paul Delzio, Director of Business Development and Product Management at ARRIS, a provider of infrastructure and advanced advertising solutions to cable. As Paul put it: ARRIS and other solution providers are “helping operators build a superhighway to the home and throughout the home using modern architecture that will ensure an interactive future with robust subscriber services.”  As he sees it, operators will monetize this highway through differentiated data plans, digital TV fees and new revenue streams from t-commerce (tv commerce), advertising and billing.”

CableLabs’ development of tru2way, java-based middleware that will be integrated directly into next-generation TV sets, is a critical step in this process.  With it, subscribers will be able to interact with a wide range of applications such as program guides, commerce, games, Video on Demand (VOD) and web browsing, without the need for a set top box.  Naturally, the world’s largest TV manufacturers are on board to bring us this technology.  Panasonic, Toshiba, Sony, Sharp and Samsung are just a few of the players lining up to cash in on this opportunity. Look for a big push at retail this holiday season.

But not everyone is going to rush out and buy tru2way TVs. So, CableLabs has introduced EBIF (enhanced binary interchange format), a technology which is being integrated into STBs as we speak. In fact, 15 million units are projected to be installed throughout the U.S. by 2010.  EBIF will enable true interactivity through multimedia pages that resemble html, so the consumer experience will have a similar look-and-feel to what we get on the Web. The advantage for brands is lead generation because cable viewers can click on a marketing message, in the form of a static banner, and receive information or goodies in the mail.

According to Paul, this “Cable Advertising 1.0 (which makes use of snail mail to fulfill a consumer request for information) will open the doors for brands eager to justify TV spend.”  Marketers see the opportunity and have stepped up spend on advanced advertising solutions from ARRIS and its partners, which supports them with the same tools they know from online and mobile, such as campaign management, media planning, analytics and response measurement.

These Cable Advertising 1.0 ad products and fulfillment services have been wisely engineered to meet the needs of this emerging ecosystem and to provide user experiences we can appreciate via this medium. Graphic overlays on top of full motion TV commercials will allow viewers to click through to micro sites where they can request information or coupons which will be delivered in the mail, allowing advertisers to target demographic segments by selecting zip codes.

Interactivity will also play a role, but mobile won’t be a shoe-in here. Subscribers can also participate in voting and polling using their TV remote control. Will we really want to use the cable remote control for text messaging? The jury is out is out on this one, but it’s clear there is a laundry-list of usability issues that will have to be solved before the cable remote is our keypad of choice in the living room–particularly when you consider the sophisticated touch and tactile keypads next generation smartphones will provide.

Personalization and relevancy on the big screen

Where are brands in the equation? The good news is significant progress is being made on the new standards and interfaces that will allow brands and marketers to buy interactive and addressable advertising locally or across multiple cable operators. Spearheading this effort is a consortium of ecosystem partners including SCTE (Society of Cable Technical Engineers), systems manufacturers including ARRIS, Biap, BlackArrow and Sigma and Canoe Ventures, a joint venture funded by the cable operators.

For brands seeking national reach, Canoe Ventures is developing a platform for advertising stewardship and fulfillment across the top six cable operators in the U.S.  The platform will aggregate inventory and subscriber intelligence to provide brands with rich data services, localized messages, lead generation and fulfillment on a national basis.

The platform will also no doubt attract the attention of Web giants who want to get in on the action. In fact, Paul tells me it’s “inevitable that major retail portals like Amazon and Expedia will want to collaborate with operators to provide subscribers with a personalized shopping experience.” What will make this experience more enjoyable for consumers and more targeted for advertisers? The key to the equation is unlocking the rich assets — our transactions, interactions, browsing behavior and viewing history all captured in the STB.

And why wouldn’t they be there? After all, it’s much more enjoyable to view a HD large screen to select your next vacation rather than squint and scroll on a 15” laptop. Moreover, cable operators are in great position to expand their billing systems to accommodate billing partnerships with the leading online retailers. Now consumers can buy what they see on TV and add it their monthly bill (Does this sound familiar? Mobile operators are determined to leverage their billing relationship in a similar way.) Shoppers benefit from a consolidated bill from a trusted provider.  Brands will love this — a virtuous cycle of shopping, analysis, advertising and more shopping.

In fact, astute brand managers will see the synergies between cable and mobile. Leads collected from the TV can be fed into mobile advertising systems enabling brands to continue the conversation on an individual basis.  Additionally, mobile SMS will grow as sports and reality TV continue to prompt voting and polling.

What else is cable doing to hedge their bets?

While excitement around Cable Advertising 1.0 continues to grow, some cable operators are exploring their options. In July Time Warner Cable and Comcast joined up to launch “TV Everywhere”, an over the top service (that is, where content is going over the Internet and not through the STB) designed to give cable subscribers access to premium content online.  Content from  cable network programmers such as TBS, TNT and Starz, along with movies from HBO and Cinemax, will be made available to Comcast and Time Warner subscribers.  It is rumored that AT&T will jump on the band wagon, as well.

But, as Paul pointed out, over the top is both “an opportunity and a threat.” On the opportunity side, TV Everywhere will accomplish several important tasks; it will extend audience reach, allowing operators to further monetize ad revenue, while at the same time reinforcing brand loyalty.

As a threat, TV Everywhere will enable subscribers with tru2way TVs to access the Web and enjoy premium content at no cost.  Case in point is premium content provider Hulu. The company’s audience , which has doubled since launch to approximately 1.3 million daily visitors as of July (Quantcast), underlines the validity of the ad-supported business model.   Hulu advertisers include some of the world’s leading brands : Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s, Visa, American Express, Best Buy, Chili’s, DirectTV, GM, Intel, Nissan, State Farm, Unilever, Wal-Mart, Cisco, and Procter & Gamble.

Plus, it doesn’t take much imagination to envision extending the concept of TV Everywhere to the mobile Internet. Combined with mobile’s portal personalization and recommendation engines (already delivering good user experiences to millions of subscribers in Europe and Asia), premium content streamed over the mobile Internet would provide the broad reach brands have been waiting for. Major Tier 1 service providers planned CAPEX investments in LTE can be subsidized in, no small way, by interactive video advertising dynamically inserted into premium content on the handset.  

Bottom line: who will dominate the living room?

At the end of the day, the battle for the living room will be determined by sophisticated personalization and recommendation engines that understand our preferences and profiles and serve us relevant content and marketing messages.

When operators append third-party retail data to subscriber demographics and STB viewing patterns, then the vision of personalization begins to get interesting.  Comcast Spotlight, in fact, is leading the way by appending third-party data from Experian to improve household targeting.  It’s easy to imagine households that frequently purchase from Toys R Us are a good bet for family products or mini vans.  And personalization technologies will connect the dots for sure.

While the wide spread adoption of tru2way is good news for cable operators it is also good news for telcos and premium publishers.  Sure, subscribers will be free to browse off-portal.  But why bother?  A rich and personalized portal with premium content, entertainment, shopping, social networking, video on demand and other services, will make browsing the Internet irrelevant.

So, who will dominate the living room?  Cable is in the driver’s seat – for now.  In view of somewhat difficult (but not insurmountable) environmental challenges, time will tell if they will be able to deliver the vision of a personalized portal with robust services supported by advertising,  If they don’t, the leading telcos that follow a multiplay strategy and Internet players will be just a few clicks away.

Jim Levey, formerly Director of Product Marketing for Search and Digital Advertising at Amdocs, joins the roster of authors and influencers contributing news, analysis and thought leadership to MSearchGroove. He comments on developments in personalization, recommendation and mobile advertising.

Regular readers will know that I work with a variety of organizations and publications, evaluating companies and candidates for awards ranging from the Meffys (awarded by the Mobile Entertainment Forum to recognize excellence and innovation in mobile entertainment and services) to the Smaato Mobile Advertising Awards (recognizing the best in mobile Web and in-app advertising) to the EContent 100 (a list of the 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry).

I am proud that EContent named me to its panel of judges to evaluate the 100+ candidates across the categories: classification & taxonomy; collaboration; content commerce; content creation, production, & digital publishing; content delivery; content management; content security; fee-based info services; intranets & portals; mobile content; search engines & technologies; and social media. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the many mobile and Internet companies that have contacted me to be considered for inclusion in the list, and issue a final call for candidates.

Round 1 of the judging wraps up on September 1, so please reach out to me this week. (Please note that your contacting me does not compel me to put any company name on the final list of contenders and, of course, in no way guarantees that any company will be named to the list.)

This year my participation in the judging team has not only introduced me to a number of new mobile industry innovators (companies you’ll see profiled on MSearchGroove in the coming weeks). It has also exposed me to new thinking about digital content creation and distribution.

The industry is at a critical crossroads. A milestone that speaks volumes: the storm brewing the media and digital industries after Rupert Murdoch’s very public announcement (after posting record losses of $203 million last quarter) that his News Corporation intends to charge for online newspaper content.

WILL WE PAY FOR CONTENT?

Artesian Solutions, a company specialized Web-based market intelligence and surveillance software (automating the process of search through machine-based surveillance), has an interesting take. Artesian CEO Andrew Yates issued a statement today arguing that Murdoch’s brave strategy may just (literally) literally pay dividends.

As Andrew puts it: Murdoch’s play is “based around ‘quality’ and this is tough call for a commodity that people are not currently prepared to pay for…. However he argues that one positive consequence of charging for content is that through targeted information and the learned behaviors of the subscribers, newspapers will be able to build a 24 hour, 7 days a week relationship (rather than once in the morning) with the subscriber and therefore tailor content to the demands of those paying for the service. The subscriber will get what they want, when they want it on whatever device they chose. Surely, this will be good for the consumer.”

Intrigued by this view I caught up with Andrew to ask why he can be so sure that we – people that have grown up accustomed to free content, search and social networking services – will change our habits and pay for news, for example. A few minutes into the call we were passionately debating the pivotal importance of personalization, relevancy and context – and the value they bring to our content experiences across platforms and devices.

CONTEXT & RELEVANCE

Artesian, for example, has built a B2B business model on providing its clients content in tune with their profiles, preferences and strategic focus. Using a variety of tools and techniques (advanced algorithms, natural language search the order and frequency of keywords, for example) Artesian effectively filters out information that we don’t want and gives us what we do.

In this scenario, the value of content is its quality – which is a function of context and relevance. Put another way, customers pay for genuinely useful content and they pay a premium for the choice of having what they need where and when they need it. With this in mind, the next deliverable on the Artesian roadmap is a service that delivers a daily dose of information to customers on their portable devices (PDA, smartphone, iPhone etc…).

My take: Artesian is one of a new breed of cool companies that makes its money by making choices for us to provide us choice content we appreciate. By spidering the indexes relevant to our interests and objectives (and not attempting to index or deliver the entire Web), companies such as Artesian are defining paid-content models that hold a great deal of promise for publishers everywhere (particularly in mobile). I would certainly pay for a daily dose of exactly what I want (gleaned from the sources I know and trust, as well the social media spaces, such as Twitter) delivered to my BlackBerry. All the more valuable if the technology employs explicit and implicit personalization (as Artesian does). Will we, as my close colleague Alan Moore suggested, pay for quality content? I vote ‘yes.’ As they say in Cologne, where I am based: What costs nothing, is nothing.

KOOABA MAKES MEDIA INTERACTIVE

Another value to focus on (because it can pave the way to effective/engaing advertising and increased revenues for publishers) is interactivity.

The merging of the digital and physical worlds is a hot topic at MSearchGroove and a big part of the Netsize Guide 2010. (Netsize has commissioned me to write it for the third year running and we just kicked off this exciting project at a meeting at Netsize HQ in Paris last week). But it’s more than a good read; it’s a great business model for the companies that can bridge those worlds.

Kooaba, a visual search and image recognition company and I have had high on my radar from the start (and that goes back almost two years), has an approach that spells good news for old media (specifically, print) anxious to get more mileage out of their content assets.

It’s hot off the presses (no pun intended!) and I caught up with Herbert Bay, Kooaba CEO and founder, to get the inside track on this new Kooaba and where it’s heading.

By way of background, Kooaba, which offers the Kooaba App for the iPhone and other devices, is strong in image recognition. It’s one of a number of companies providing the technology that allows people to interact with content and advertising using their cameraphones, paving the way for the all-important transaction.

(Little wonder why Amazon acquired visual search company Snaptell last month and this month released Amazon App for Android, an app that includes the experimental Amazon Remembers feature. With it people have two ways they can use their device camera to find and remember items available for sale on Amazon.com: they can either snap a photo of an item or scan a barcode.)

Kooaba’s new-look website is chock-full with information about the Kooaba App and case studies from clients ranging from BMW and EMI to Heineken – all a testament to the power of this technology to enable advertising and encourage commerce.

But the real news for me is Interactive print, Kooaba’s solution that effectively gives old print media a new lease on life.

In practice, people capture the content with their cameraphones and Kooaba makes the connection between the printed content and the cool interactive stuff it links to (videos, interviews, and special offers/discounts – the works). Additional functionality in the back-end lets people search, archive and even share this content. Read a job offer in the classifieds, save it for yourself in your personal library or share it on Facebook. Read an interview, get one-click access to the video and then pass it around.

Will people pay for that interactivity? Perhaps… But it’s likely the real money will come from advertisers willing to pay a premium to deliver a more interactive advertising experience and – more importantly – measure the results. (Kooaba’s solution has analytics/tracking baked in.)
Herbert is bullish about the power shift that can happen when publishers are back in charge of their content and their advertising revenues (as opposed to aggregators and search engine companies.).

But I am even more excited about the potential for interactive learning. This technology can literally make books come alive! (A wonderful boost to the quality of education in the developing world.)

The bottom line: Relevancy rules! Whether it’s built into the algorithms that allow companies such as Artesian charge for relevant content or architected into Kooaba’s solution that makes print content contextually-aware (because it can morph to match the context of the people who activate it with their cameraphones), we want what we want and will gravitate to those companies that can give it to us.

In brief: In line with MSearchGroove’s ongoing and in-depth look at smart toolbars, personalized portals and the players that set the bar for these technologies, regular columnist and contributor Jim Levey shows a robust economic system (and new content distribution model) is emerging with personalization at its core.

These portals have developed large online communities by empowering users with self-service tools that enable them to create their own personalized homepages chock full of content that is dynamic, up-to-date and consistently relevant to their preferences.  This is achieved thanks to widgets that interoperate with specific applications such as search, weather, finance and social networks.

Fast forward and it’s the same model in mobile – although mobile markets in Europe and Asia have stolen the lead on North America (at least for now).

Why are operators outside the U.S. so far ahead in the delivery of content experiences that users appreciate? In my view, mobile operators, particularly in Europe, have embraced path-breaking personalization solutions that implicitly push relevant content to subscribers based on their browsing behavior. But their business objectives don’t stop at delivering a satisfactory mobile user experience (because it is personalized); they are further harnessing these solutions to deliver targeted advertising that potentially drives results.

Put the two together, (personalized mobile experiences and advertising messages targeted to users based on their content consumption), and you have the capabilities mix to satisfy users and – at the same time – create a sizeable market conditioned to accept relevant advertising. (And isn’t this exactly what brands have been waiting for?)

Put simply, by collecting and wielding terabytes of data, which reflect subscribers’ mobile Internet habits, operators can lay the groundwork for contextual ad serving.

The endgame is all about delivering users content they want and advertising they will appreciate. But these business benefits can come at a price. This mass customization requires network resources and bandwidth beyond what most operators anticipated or can afford. Clearly, users who can finally get the content they like are eager to explore the wealth of content and apps at their fingertips. This results in increased usage, challenging operators to think of new ways to generate new revenue streams (potentially to offset bandwidth costs or at least invest in network upgrades which will become a top priority if advertising on mobile becomes video-centric).

WHO FOOTS THE BILL?

Against this backdrop, the big question becomes: Who is going to pay for it all? Some mobile operators are betting on differentiated pricing and data plans (which require users the foot the bill) to solve this problem. However, this is hardly a long-term sustainable model in an age where free is the norm. Ad-supported content and business models are the way forward.

The real money is with the brands.  But, as we all know, brands are sitting on the sidelines waiting for the mobile industry to provide reach, standards, accountability and access to customer data. High marks to U.K. mobile operators who are trying to achieve this with the GSMA, but it’s a work in progress and it’s not clear if brands can wait.

So, why are operators slow to get onboard and get thinking about ad-funded models?

It’s clear: Operators are caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they are sitting on stockpiles of data that can power personalization and ad serving engines.  On the other hand, while operators know brands would like to get their hands on this data, they also know their subscribers trust them to act responsibly with their personal information. Indeed, the blogosphere tells us some people are even spooked by personally relevant content and advertising. (Interestingly, many more reports show consumers see huge value in receiving content such as coupons and vouchers relevant to their location or intent to buy.)

Naturally, some mobile operators have responded to this with a wait-and-see strategy. Others, however, have turned a problem into an opportunity, using personalization solutions that anonymize customer data, to develop sharper segmentation and deliver mobile content experiences that set the bar.

These solutions make sense because they encourage subscribers to browse the mobile Internet freely, while at the same time anchoring them to their operator’s portal start page because the experience (in tune with their lifestyles) is so good. Beyond this, some personalization solutions harness widgets (in the form of a widget toolbar, for example) to enhance this experience by delivering fresh content to the handset and take the tedium out of navigating the mobile Internet.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

What is the value proposition and how has the market reacted? I recently caught up with Joel Brand, Product Manager at Bytemobile — a provider of network-based service delivery platforms that enable the delivery of value-added servcies –  to get his perspective on this next mega-trend.

The way Joel sees it, mobile content personalization is “a subtle approach to marketing.” Subtle here means a trust-based give and take.

From the get-go this conversation – which we recall is based on a deep understanding of behavior and personal preferences/tastes — is a rewarding exchange that respects the individual and further rewards them with a fulfilling mobile experience that is perfectly in tune with their lifestyles.
As a result, the line between content and advertising blurs and the individual welcomes both because there is no noticeable difference. Both are relevant, useful and enriching. With this the groundwork is laid for an ongoing brand dialogue that can continue at other times and in other sessions. Quid pro quo.

What is the user experience when content and advertising combine? Joel offers this. “If a subscriber is browsing mobile travel sites [then] the system may push content from Expedia or Club Med.” Similarly, , if the user purchases South African jazz ringtones, the system can work with a third-party ad network to serve a marketing message about FreshlyGround, a hot band from South Africa. The possibilities are limitless because it’s tailored to each individual.

Put another way, the goal is to blend content with marketing messages in a non-intrusive fashion. The content is informative; the advertising is informative and the message is welcomed.  Advertising works best when it is subtle.

AMDOCS INTERACTIVE

Another significant player in the mobile Internet personalization space is Amdocs Interactive ChangingWorlds. The company’s solution, which is deployed in 56 top-tier mobile operators worldwide, harnesses advanced algorithms to analyze individual browsing behavior in real time and push relevant content into the portal.

I got together with Mike Lurye, Product Marketing Manager at Amdocs Interactive, to get his take on where this is going. As Mike puts it, it’s all about personalization, “but the value is in user choice.” The Amdocs approach lets users make the decisions, providing them the option to actively configure content requirements. But the system also makes decisions for the user, choosing which content to push dynamically based on the subscriber’s browsing behavior.

In practice, Amdocs Interactive features a smart icon-driven toolbar which supports more intuitive navigation and links to third-party content and services including social networks, ecommerce, search and news. All can be launched from the operator’s portal, but the experience doesn’t end there. The toolbar remains in the browser and travels with the user as they engage with these services.  As Mike puts it: “All this intelligence is logged, analyzed and optimized for a personal portal experience.”

With both Bytemobile and Amdocs Interactive, the marketing approach is subtle and the chances of success greater. This is because subscribers are in control and therefore comfortable about making personalization choices, either through configuring the widget toolbar that travels with them everywhere or by letting marketers/operators know what they like.

ROBUST ECOSYSTEM

Connect the dots, and the pieces are in place for a sustainable economic model that fosters the growth of the entire ecosystem. Why? Because aggregated and anonymous browsing behavior provides the data essential to the creation of well-defined profiles that, in turn, pave the way for brands to deliver subscribers an offer they literally can hardly refuse.

Marketers benefit because these personalization solutions provide the much-needed basis for an effective ad-supported content distribution model. The insights they provide into individual browsing behavior combined with other data points provide a consolidated view of the customer. And, as we know, delight the customer is the first rule of successful marketing.

Personalization pays for operators as well. In fact, Mike tells me one of his company’s operator customers saw as much as 20 percent uplift in revenues. It’s difficult to say whether the revenue boost was due to increased data usage, more premium content consumption, upgrades to richer subscription plans or more beneficial revenue share agreements with third-party ad networks – since the solution impacts each of these – but it’s clear that personalization had an impressive incremental effect. The same solution potentially improves mobile search, resulting in a more personal (hence useful) user experience.

And finally, it’s good news for the publishers as well – provided they forge relationships with the clever operators that have embraced these personalization solutions in the first place. By negotiating licensing and rev share agreements with these operators – ones that are willing to stream subscriber intelligence to the publisher ad servers – these publishers have the capabilities to extend the personalized marketing experience that subscribers have come to expect. No longer in the dark about their users profiles and preferences,  these publishers have the business and customer intelligence the need to serve relevant ads and sell premium inventory aimed at a high CPM audience.

THE BOTTOM LINE

While the mobile ecosystem seeks a silver bullet solution that will get brands to open their wallets and increase mobile advertising spend, some companies are growing the market by focusing on the user side of the equation. Companies like Amdocs Interactive and Bytemobile are sharply focused on the connection between personalized content, relevant marketing and personalized search. Together the companies count an installed base of more than 100 mobile operators worldwide. Do the math and those  implementations translate into tens of millions of subscribers who already enjoy a personalized portal with widgets that travel, and would likely be open to marketing messages that match their interests.

Personalized advertising is not science fiction.  It’s happening now because it must. The advent of 4G and LTE pushes operators to pursue new revenue streams to offset capital expenditures. Operators will therefore need to leverage subscriber intelligence, invest in personalization solutions and so take the lead in building an ad-supported content distribution model that works for everyone. This will surely spark interest among the marketers currently sitting on the sidelines and get the attention of the brands.

It was great to have the last few days off and even better to map out an exciting line-up of MSearchGroove projects for the next few months. One that I am particularly honored to announce: my collaboration with GigaOM Pro, the new research arm of the highly respected tech blog GigaOM. By way of background, GigaOM Pro has brought together an impressive roster of industry authorities and analysts (including my esteemed colleague Chetan Sharma) to “address the gap that exists in real-time expert industry analysis on emerging technology markets.” The GigaOM Pro solution: Make timely, highly relevant analysis and insights accessible and practical.

I’m on board to write an in-depth examination of personalization and recommendation technologies and business models, a natural next step given my long track record analyzing mobile search and my deep involvement in the recommender space. (This includes work with Strands, a major provider of recommender systems, on recommender industry events including RecSys 09 – October 22-25, NYC.)

The report is an ambitious undertaking and I am naturally interested in connecting with personalization/recommendation companies –so please contact me directly if you wish to be considered for inclusion. peggy@msearchgroove.com

Why the buzz about personalization?

The advance of Internet-specific smartphones and the spread of app store schemes turns up the pressure on mobile operators (and their content providers) to decipher data transactions (on and off the network), combine it with location and demographic data and use the results to create a 360-degree view of the individual.

Where does this shift leave mobile operators?

They are hard pushed to turn analytics into competitive advantage. Sensing this business opportunity (that execs tell me they estimate hovers in the hundreds of millions of dollars), a slew of companies (such as Amdocs, Bytemobile, Novarra and Qualcomm) are among the first out the gates with revamped offers to arm operators for the ultimate battle with Web giants for the mobile customer. This special series profiles the players jockeying for position in the marketplace.

This week we look at Openwave, which has recently productized its existing analytics capabilities and business intelligence know-how, and packaged it up as Mobile Analytics.

The solution – designed to aggregate usage data and behavioral information across a variety of sources, including on-portal surfing and open Web browsing, to generate meaningful reports –dovetails with other Openwave offers (behavioral targeting, profiling, usage pattern analysis) to lay the groundwork for the delivery of relevant content and advertising.

I caught up with Mayur Pitamber, Openwave Product Management Strategist, to discuss the role of the mobile operator, debate the value of personalization and what we can expect next in the Openwave product roadmap.

AN EXCERPT OF OUR Q&A

Q: Let’s talk about the fit with mobile advertising. You have just launched the complement to your own mobile advertising solution, which is Mobile Analytics. What’s the level of interest in mobile advertising? I’m hearing some operators get it, but many more don’t…

A: There was some hype about it at first, but operators are starting to see the value of it now and they are also beginning to understand the real value of the data they have. The last months have been marked by a surge of activity and RFIs and RFPs specifically for mobile analytics solutions, which is new in this market. We didn’t see this last year.

A lot of what happened and the initial excitement around mobile advertising industry was quite premature. It’s not just about offering targeted advertising; it’s about offering relevant products and services based on the user’s behavior. The operators can use analytics to gain profiles of these users, the sites they frequent and what they do while online. It’s when this information can be aggregated and provided to media agencies and brands that it really becomes valuable.

It’s all about helping operators to provide the mobile audience metrics that the brands are looking for. Not necessarily going through the GSMA, because they have some of that [covered in their] initiative, but doing that directly. With the solution we’re offering the operators can provide those metrics directly to the brands, to the media agencies, to the publishers, and be a vital part of that mobile advertising ecosystem. And with our solution there’s no need for us to insert tracking or cookies or JavaScript, or anything like that. Every Web page goes through our gateway and we can basically track on that. So, that’s a key differentiator.

Q: There are, of course, other solutions in this space. A long list of gateway providers: Qualcomm, Amdocs, Ericsson, Nokia, Bytemobile, Novarra. And the space is getting crowded.

A: Obviously, there are competitors out there.  All gateway providers can provide parts of this sort of solution. However, I haven’t come across a solution [similar to ours] with this [breadth] out there in the market at this point in time. Being a gateway provider for the last 10 years, we’ve been providing this type of reporting to operators. But now we’ve added more features and made it more user-friendly. So, it’s a mature business intelligence product that we’re bringing to the market.

Q: In early August, Telstra announced it had implemented your Mobile Analytics solution. The press release says it’s all about providing Telstra a “dashboard view of intelligent analytics and rich reporting capabilities across its mobile device portfolio.” To start, how many of your operator customers have this solution or perhaps the analytics solutions that preceded this?

A: We have deployed previous versions of this analytic solution to some six tier-1 operators around the world.

Q: Let’s say I’m an operator and I don’t have a solution from Openwave, but I like the analytics.  Can I just have that, or is it a package deal?

A: Previously, the solution was just built around Openwave products. But obviously, we want a bigger market share, so we’ve designed the solution such that it will work with any other gateway, any other vendor of gateway products.

Q: You said before competing on analytics is the way for operators to be “a vital part of the ecosystem.” Can operators really play this central role?

A: That’s a really good question. I think it’s quite difficult to answer as well. The operators have traditionally been sluggish. Their bread and butter has been voice revenues and SMS revenues. To really get them incentivized to offer new services such as mobile advertising, you need a compelling business case. I’ve spoken to dozens of operators around the world. Some of them are in advanced stages of creating any-time mobile advertising organizations. Others have only one or two mobile advertising product managers. For these operators, the business case – for whatever reason – is just not compelling enough for the decision makers to say okay, let’s really invest in this.

Q: This jives with what people told me while I was conducting interviews for Mobile Advertising Research UK. As one executive at a mobile infrastructure company that counts over 300 network operator clients observed: Mobile advertising only becomes interesting for an operator when “the type of revenue they can envisage is around 2 percent of their overall revenue to 5 percent, and with an opportunity to grow to 10 percent of revenue. This is the revenue that will really make them sit up and make it work.” Another figure that stands out: GBP 28.6 million, which is what the IAB reckons was the mobile ad spend in 2008. What’s your take?

A: I can believe the ad spend for the U.K. I think the hold up is the thinking about the role of the mobile operator. We have to be clear about what they can do. In my view, the role of the mobile operator will be to provide incentives for people to use new services so that additional inventory and mediums become available to insert ads. And obviously, once those mediums become available, that becomes attractive to brands and advertisers. But, right now, it’s difficult for operators to manage their inventories. They have SMS inventory, MMS inventory, on-portal, off-portal. All of these are different systems and it’s difficult to provide brands and advertisers a consolidated view of what is available out there. So, it’s when there is a clear view of the different inventories out there and the tools to manage these inventories, and make these inventories available to third-parties such as the brands and media agencies, that I think mobile advertising will really take off.

Q: Are you convinced operators can start acting like media companies? Or are there going to be a lot of carriers that focus on access over audience?

A: The tier-1s I talk with have created organizations to manage mobile advertising. They’ve created sales forces to go out and sell inventory. So, they are already acting as media agencies and helping brands identify which inventory they want to use. But again, these are just the big tier-1 operators.

Q: Advertising is messaging – and loads of it. Or it could borrow from TV and be video-centric? We don’t know. In any case, we have more data usage – both from people surfing with their smartphones and brands that want to reach them. What is the potential impact on the network side of things? What are you seeing?

A: We’re seeing huge increase in data traffic volumes. A data tsunami is going to hit operators within the next 12-24 months. And some operators are quite oblivious to this. So, [with Mobile Analytics] we’re helping the operators to identify trends on the operational front as well. We’re saying ‘Hey, you need to do capacity planning and optimize your networks because this is going to be your traffic in 6 months or 12 months.’

Q: Let’s move to the report on North American mobile Internet trends you issued that may have got lost in the CTIA shuffle. It made some interesting points, and I understand you are about to release another one soon. What were some of the key observations and what were the surprises?

A: That report was basically based on data from one of our customers in North America. Many of the trends we saw confirmed what the market was thinking. For example, everyone is doing social networking on mobile. The top sites, as you could guess, were Facebook and MySpace.

In terms of search, we were able to also track some keywords. Something that was interesting: people – when they wanted to find Google — wouldn’t enter Google on their mobile phone and go to Google. They would actually enter ‘Google’ in a Yahoo search engine. This operator had Yahoo as a search partner. Anyway, that tells us that a lot of search use may be because of usability. It’s easier to type it [a destination] in a search box than to navigate to it on the Web.

Q: Finally – what about app stores? They’re hot. What is the value-add, if any, from analytics?

A: One of the operators we’re working with is in the process of opening an app store. They know that not all users are going to go through the apps. If you figure the iPhone app store has tens of thousands of apps and growing, users would lose patience sifting through all that. This operator wants to analytics specifically on this [operator] app store to identify the top ten apps. But it goes beyond this to include how many times have the apps been downloaded; who has consumed them; and whether the users have shared apps with other people. More importantly, the operator is providing this app store data to the application developers, so they also have insight into how their apps are being used and how many people have downloaded their apps. So, Mobile Analytics can be used to identify the audiences going to these app stores – and that can be used to build the business.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Generally speaking, the value of data is not in the data itself, but in the mashups we create when we combine it with other data stores. Put another way, the way to wring the value out of analytics is to combine it with location and demographics data, which is why Openwave is keen to feature both in its Mobile Analytics solution. Mayur tells me we can expect location in the next months. (Openwave is also gearing up to announce another customer win for its analytics offer in South East Asia.)

Likewise recommendation capabilities are moving up the list to take a center spot in Openwave strategy. As Mayur put it: The next version of Mobile Analytics will come with recommenders “bolted on.” No word yet on what the recommender will allow (delivery of content or advertising – or both?), how it will achieve this (based on item-to-item or user-to user – or both?), or how it will integrate with Openwave’s underlying Integra platform. But read between the lines, and the sharpened focus on recommendation is at least a welcome testament to the timing and importance of my upcoming GigaOM report on the same topic.

Openwave, unlike some of the gateway providers I’ve examined/profiled in this series, is also bullish about mobile search. The company demo points out that Mobile Analytics potentially improves mobile search, allowing operators to deliver relevant results individuals will find useful.

I am reminded at this juncture of a related post I wrote about the potential for operator-centric, operator-powered, operator-controlled mobile search. With the right tools and technology mobile operators can follow our virtual breadcrumb trail to optimize our mobile search (and advertising) experiences, using our actual usage patterns to give us the answers/results we will most likely appreciate.

My take: Personalization is a hot topic but personalized recommendation and search are even hotter. The space is crowding with gateway providers that are using their position in the network to give their operator customers insights into what people are doing on the network (on- and off-portal). The end-game is about helping operators make business decisions based on new subscriber behaviors and trends. Openwave is one of a number of companies in this space – but it has its eye on the prize: drilling down in the data to help operators manage bandwidth allocation, deliver targeted mobile advertising AND fine-tune recommendation and mobile search. What better way for operators to compete against Internet and search engine giants, and potentially win?

Next in the series: We discuss personalization with Novarra.

Last week, we outlined the opportunities and challenges created by the proliferation of app stores. The takeaway: app stores may have turned people on to applications and whet their appetite for new content types, but they also turn up the pressure on companies across the ecosystem (operators, OS providers and handset-makers-turned-content-providers) to make finding and buying applications/content a no-brainer.

Indeed, personalization is the new business mantra, and it goes for content/apps as well as advertising. Guest columns from Barry Smyth, Chief Scientist of Changing Worlds, an Amdocs company and recognized pioneer in personalization technologies, and Jim Levey, a former Director of Product Marketing for Search and Digital Advertising at Amdocs who has joined MSG’s roster of authors and influencers, will examine the models and mindsets required to turn personalization into competitive advantage.

In the meantime, it’s productive for us all to be on the same page, starting off with an understanding of the offers and an overview of the competitive landscape.

This week the focus is Bytemobile, a company that sits between the operator and the individual, collecting the data (such as browsing behavior on- and off-portal) that – in theory – allows its operator customers to deliver individuals personalized content (and advertising) they are bound to appreciate.

What are the practical benefits of personalization? Where does Widget Bar (software that enables operators to insert a personalized toolbar on the screen of any mobile device) fit in to the scheme of things? And what’s in it for brands? I caught up with Adrian Hall, Bytemobile CMO, to get the inside track.

Listen to the podcast here. [15:30]

WHY PERSONALIZATION?: The advance of the iPhone has impacted the space on two levels: it has highlighted the continued need for content adaptation solutions (to display Flash properly, for example) and it has increased the desire of people to experience rich-media content across all devices (not just smartphones). “So, there’s still a very strong market for the content adaptation as a class of product, but clearly as devices increase in functionality and in capability, there’s a need still to influence the way the end user interacts with data, even on a device as sophisticated as the iPhone.” To allow operators to personalize data (and brand the overall value-added services experience) Bytemobile has introduced Widget Bar. (You can view the demo here.)

As Adrian puts it: The idea is to have a personalized toolbar on the screen of any mobile device (smartphone on down to mass market device), “which offers efficient user access to services like local news and weather, enhanced search, email and social networking.”

By way of background, the Widget Bar got a bit of a boost in July when Bytemobile launched a – well – starter pack for mobile operators that includes:

• The operator-configurable Inline Portal application that intelligently brings portal content to the top of every web page.
• The Search Bar application, that provides an always-present search query box (piggy-backing the search engine preferred by the mobile operator), thus facilitating content discovery and enhancing mobile browsing.
• The Share application that simplifies the sharing of mobile web content with other users directly or through popular social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter.
• The Notifications pop-up application that gives operators a way to inform subscribers of relevant updates such as promotions and operational messages on roaming and data limits.

Connect the dots, and for Bytemobile it’s all about enabling operators to own and brand the all-important interaction between people, their phones and their peers.

APP COMPARISON: “Widget Bar is basically a clientless application window, if you like, so it helps mobile users to gain access to useful applications and personalized content of their choice.  As I said, it does this using a consistent presentation format. So, what it basically offers is a series of ‘mini-apps,’ if you like, that sit across the top of the screen of your device.” What does the use case look like? Imagine people that get access (through the carrier data plan) to apps as part of a larger offer. “Hypothetically, $10 a month would get you access to the choice of 10 applications that you could populate across the top of your device….So, you can then choose little mini-apps that are basically zero-click apps of your choice that are somewhat personalized by the operator.” The result: a populated Widget Bar across the screen of any class of mobile phone that is “updated in real time, basically in the background whenever we happen to refresh a Web page that we’re searching on as part of a session on our mobile phone.”

OPERATOR PERSONALIZATION: It all starts with Bytemobile’s Unison platform, a mobile Internet platform that enables operators to deploy fully integrated, multi-service solutions from a single node in the core data path of the network. As Adrian puts it: “We actually sit in the data path and so we get access to see how users search the Web, what advertisements they click on, [and] their browsing behavior.” This insight allows Bytemobile to build up a real time user profile of that particular user.

DRIVERS: Adrian tells me the main reason operators are interested in (and currently trialling) Widget Bar is to fight back the competition coming from Web giants and handset makers. “Operators captured a lot of their data revenue through their portals.  Now, as the walls of the walled gardens break down and portal traffic and portal revenue is reducing, we’re all going to the open Internet.” As a result, carriers are looking for ways to capture “the mindshare of their consumers rather than the consumers going off to the app store and some of the other products from Google and Apple that immediately take the consumer away from the carrier, from the carrier’s brand and the carrier’s applications.”

MOBILE ADVERTISING: “The key to effective advertising and more effective click through rates clearly is the ability to analyze the browsing behavior of particular [individual] consumers.  Because we can analyse browsing behaviour in real time, it allows us to work with the carriers and their ad providers, be it the ad networks that they’ve chosen or in-house facilities that they’ve built, to much more effectively target ads to consumers.”

PROFILING: Bytemobile’s ability to personalize content goes back to the insights it gained offering products and solutions to monitor how people use services such as video in order to implement fair use policies. “Typically when we talk to carriers, they see that 2-3% of users are typically using 50-70% of bandwidth and clearly they’re not paying for that amount.” Sitting in that sweet spot between the carrier and the consumer (monitoring video use) has also allowed Bytemobile to focus on personalization. As Adrian puts it: “It’s personalisation that’s going to end up increasing either the click through of an advert…or staying with the carrier and the value-added services that particular carrier can offer versus just going straight out to a Google or an Apple [destination], and ultimately increasing the chances of making that carrier a dumb pipe.”

WHAT’S NEXT?: In a word, execution. It’s all about helping operators implement Bytemobile’s personalization solutions. Adrian tells me operator deals are in the pipeline, but no details yet. He also reports that large-scale user experience trials conducted in cooperation with operators show the vast majority of users accessed the Widget Bar application several times per week. (No numbers from Bytemobile, so it’s not possible to quantify this “vast majority.”)

Other observations from Adrian:

• Bytemobile users reported finding navigation tools such as the Search Bar application extremely useful
• The Inline Portal application effectively doubled users’ visits to the operators’ portals
• Instant user access to the latest portal services and content, the continuous presence of the operator’s brand on the web browser, and the accurate targeting of content delivered to users all resulted in increased click-through rates

My take: Hmmm – it wasn’t so long ago that mobile search was widely regarded as a silver-bullet solution that would allow content companies/developers to present their offers within an acceptable click-distance and clinch that all-important sale. However, the usability barriers outlined in this post from my last mobile search masterclass have shifted industry focus from mobile search to tools and technologies that allow content owners/developers to employ a more proactive approach. Against this backdrop, content discovery (and the solutions to present content/apps where users can see and buy them) is back in the spotlight, all the better if these solutions bubble up content/apps to the surface that are in tune with our individual preferences. (And it’s not just about content; personalization can also be harnessed to deliver people advertising that they are more likely to appreciate.) Bytemobile is one of a new breed of companies allowing operators to connect the dots in the clues people leave behind (browsing behavior, for example) to serve up content they are bound to like and – more importantly – brand it to reinforce their value-add. Will this allow operators to do battle with Google, Apple and all the other companies jumping on the content/app bandwagon? It’s too early to call that one – but solutions such as this certainly create a more level playing field and play up the importance of personalization data only the operators can access.

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.

If you think you read wrong when you understood from today’s report in NewMediaAge (NMA) that Blyk had indeed pulled the plug on its U.K. operations, you are absolutely right. My first reaction was disbelief, and I immediately called Blyk to get the story from the source. The story is: There is no story. [SEE UPDATE BELOW]

Jonathan MacDonald – a brave voice in the mobile advertising space, who, during his time at Blyk, was instrumental in developing the company’s strategy – has summarized the facts in this post. (And I see that NMA, just minutes ago, had retracted the headline that started it all.)

Judging from the level of excitement today, the timing couldn’t be better for a serious analysis of Blyk’s partnership strategy (and an update on negotiations with mobile operators). Another important development that needs some clarification: The announcement during Mobile World Congress that Velti and Blyk have sealed a deal to launch a content portal.

The intriguing part of the release (that no doubt got lost in the trade show shuffle): “The new portal acts as a conduit for Blyk members interested in content from relevant brands or lifestyle choices; which moves away from the traditional mobile portal business model.” (Hmmm – an interesting approach that potentially addresses the frequent complaints I hear from cool content providers and app developers frustrated by the red tape and – in some cases-  re-education  necessary to sell mobile operators on their offers.)

Blyk has a mobile savvy audience of 16-24 year olds (early-adopters), and has built its business on a deep understanding of social media marketing (the models and means to play matchmaker between customers and content/apps). Against this backdrop, the Blyk’s strategy opens up some interesting opportunities and raises some even more interesting questions: To what extent is it possible to encourage discovery based on insights into customer demographics (gathered through opt-in and other means)? In what way can personalization determine the content (and advertising, as Blyk does treat advertising as another form of content) Blyk users will accept and appreciate? Does this model displace carriers, or potentially help them in the inevitable transition from mobile operator to media company?

These are just a few of the questions I will discuss this week with Antti Öhrling, Blyk co-founder and U.K. CEO. We are scheduled for a catch-up call, but I have shifted gears and plan to produce a podcast based on this important discussion.

In the meantime, I invite you to listen in to this podcast from last year, one of MSG’s most popular series. (You can find the second in the Blyk series here.)

Please always feel free to suggest companies and individuals you would like to see on MSG. I am always interested in hearing your ideas!

One you shouldn’t miss: A podcast with a company that has turned the Google model on its head. It’s all about indexing the world around us for the delivery of hyper-targeted/hyper-local advertising and content recommendations.

UPDATE: This just in from Justin Pearse, editor of New Media Age, a publication I also respect and contribute to when the opportunity arises.

From his email:

We did not say Blyk has pulled the plug on it¹s U.K. operations. Our story
said the MVNO was being discontinued. Which is the case. We have not
retracted any headline.

Our story is solid, I would not have let it run if it were not. Of course
Blyk want to deny it. The job of a journalist is to print the news companies
do not want to get out. The rest is PR.

Point taken, Justin. I will most certainly ask Antti to define what he means by “discontinued”. I also plan to raise other matters (such as redundancies in the U.K.) during my call and include the answers in my next post on Blyk.

Since teaming up with Rudy De Waele, blogger at mTrends and  dotopen founder, to develop mobile search case studies in preparation for a workshop on Mobile Search Future Prospects organized by JRC IPTS (Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission), and seeing the positive response to our work to date, I’m convinced mobile search is back again at the top of the industry agenda. And with good reason: Search is the de facto interface to all things digital in the online space, and there is every indication that it will be the same in mobile.

From mobile advertising, where our queries trigger the delivery of related advertising (in the best case scenario, we’re not there yet), to social media, where the content we appreciate and discuss across destinations ranging from MySpace to Twitter allows us to restore balance in an otherwise purely algorithmic approach that tends to promote search engine optimized websites over what we find genuinely relevant and useful, mobile search is where the action is.

But as Rudy and I have both pointed out in our recent presentations, mobile search is not about the usual suspects (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft). Rudy spoke at Next09, and you can find his slides  further on in this post; I spoke at the European Mobile Media Conference, and my deck can likewise be found after the jump.

Indeed, context and personalization change all the rules (!)

A highlight of our recent presentations: A comprehensive overview of the market and (thanks to Rudy) a SWOT analysis of the players that stand out in their category such as Google (universal search with a poor mobile offer and an even weaker grasp of social search), and Twitter (a case of mobile search + social media = real-time results that really reflect what we discuss/share).

In my own mobile search research – an on-going project that began back in 2004/2005 when I wrote the first report on mobile search and content discovery, a 220+ page report published by Informa Telecoms & Media – I have recently identified some 60+ companies and 10+ categories of mobile search I would like to share with you (below) for your feedback.

INTERACE

• Text: ChaCha, 4INFO,MINFO, textperts (acquired by 118118), Answers.com, AnyQuestionAnswered, Ask, AskMeNow
• Voice: Google, Yahoo, Vlingo, Microsoft, ChaCha (Watch this space for an expert assessment of the voice-enabled services offered by Google, Vlingo, and ChaCha. ( I am proud to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Peggy Albright, MSG Associate and founder of Albright Communications, and even prouder of the results.)
• Visual: IQ Engines, Kooaba, Mobile Acuity, Searchme, SnapNow, SnapTell, Tin Eye Mobile, Nokia
• Navigational: Boopsie, kannuu, Nuance (through Tegic acquisition)

ACTIONABLE

• Universal: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL (based on Google), Medio Systems, JumpTap (although a much stronger focus on mobile advertising)
• Federated: MCN, Motricity (managed mobile search platform providers)
• Operator-centric search: Amdocs, Qualcomm, IBM and this company coming out of stealth mode
• Alternative search: Defined as every service except for Google, and includes a long tail of 1500+ search engines (tracked by AltSearchEngines) with ambitions to go mobile – some sooner than later
• Vertical/content-specific search: abphone, vtap, Truveo
• Local search: Hundreds of players that offer local search via SMS services, on their own WAP sites, and/or as part of a nearby shopping scheme. (Fortunately, the local mobile search landscape is the topic of an upcoming column on MSG from Martin Wilson, founder of Indigo 102, an independent consultancy with a focus on mobile local search and services, so watch this space!)

SOCIAL

• abphone, ChaCha, Hiogi, Taptu
• Twitter in a class by itself!

It’s work in progress, but it’s all the more exciting if we remember that – in mobile search – the players that matter and the business models that deliver are wide open to discussion.

Indeed, the central role of mobile search in a wide variety of mobile services around sharing, advertising, location, and context-aware activities turns up the pressure on an even broader range of businesses (operators, brands, agencies, enablers – everyone!) to understand what mobile search delivers (and doesn’t) and the companies/models that do it best.

To help mobile professionals and practitioners navigate this tough terrain, Rudy and I have joined together on a project to produce the definitive mobile search market overview, a work that will draw from primary research, case studies, and exclusive forecasts to document this exciting space and present our recommendations for strategies to harness growth opportunities on the horizon.

I still have the opportunity to take your views and perspectives into account, and I would welcome your input. The project, widely distributed via our sites and via our network of sites, supporters, and influencers, will also offer a commercial opportunity to companies interested in conveying their value proposition to a growing community of senior executives and decision-makers in the mobile space.

If you are a mobile search company with an interest in being considered for an interview, please contact me directly or send an email to my assistant Andrea Henninge (andrea@msearchgroove.com).

In fact, this new breed of services, which combines mobile social networking fun and community with the utility of mobile search, potentially creates new forms of interaction and new opportunities for the delivery of relevant mobile advertising. Granted we aren’t there yet, but there are some signposts that I believe mark the way. One start-up that that stands out is HeyStaks (www.heystaks.com).

The company, based in University College Dublin, Ireland, was founded by Dr. Maurice Coyle and Dr. Peter Briggs, and is a spin-out from the research group of Prof. Barry Smyth, who is perhaps best known as co-founder and Chief Scientist of ChangingWorlds (now a Unit of Amdocs Interactive), a company that has pioneered personalization technology. I recently caught up with Barry for a guided tour of the service and an update on the company’s mobile ambitions.

I am also proud that Barry recently partnered with me to publish a series of thought leadership columns exclusively on MSG. Understandably, Barry took a break from the series (which kicked off with this exploration of the “hidden interaction costs” associated with surfing and exploring the mobile Internet) to develop his path-breaking HeyStaks service – now in Beta. But he’ll be back soon with a typically cool column focused on the intelligent delivery of personalized content and advertising, so watch this space!

What is the problem?

As the company cleverly points out in the cartoon strip below, we waste a lot of time searching for things our peers are also searching for (or may already have found!). To make matters worse, we have a lot of trouble sharing what we find with people once we find it. A solution is to make search a social activity (and that goes double for mobile search, in my view) and provide people the tools to create and communicate the searches that matter to them most.

What is HeyStaks?

HeyStaks is a search utility (a browser toolbar for both Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers) that adds collaboration features and a host of social networking functions to your favorite search engine. (It currently works with Google, but Barry tells me that Yahoo and others are in the pipeline.) The beta service is squarely focused on enhancing Web search, but an iPhone app is also on the roadmap.

In a nutshell, HeyStaks allows people to collaborate while they search. With the toolbar, people can create and share what the company calls search staks, which act as repositories for search experiences. HeyStaks also improves the results list because it promotes the results that have proved to be relevant to friends/peers during similar or related searches. (More further down in the Q&A.) As Barry put it: “A search stak is like a folder of your search experiences. You can create as many search staks as you like to cover your different interests and activities.”

To show rather than tell, Barry, a long-time MSG reader and supporter, has created a search stak around MSG content. In addition to keeping all the searches together in one place, HeyStaks also “reminds” us of searches we have found interesting in the past (and previously forgot to bookmark) by highlighting them within the search results delivered and listed by Google. HeyStaks can also make recommendations by inserting other results that Google may have missed or simply buried too deep in the list of blue links for us to find. (Thanks for using MSG Barry! You’ve given me a great idea. The sceenshots below illustrate this new stak. The next step is to make the MSG stak public and so create an MSG search community where readers can join, add their recent related searches, or simply keep up to date with the search activities of the wider community. After all, knowledge is most powerful/valuable when it is shared.)

***

Q: Creating and organizing the searches in HeyStaks is pretty straightforward. How do people share them?

A: Let’s take the example of you planning for a vacation. You create a search stak, call it “Vacation,” and store all your searches there. Suppose the vacation you’re planning will involve family and friends. You can share your Vacation stak with them, so that they can benefit from what you have found as they search, and vice versa. You can do this directly from the HeyStaks toolbar by selecting “Share active stak” in the staks menu. You then enter their email address and each person you invite will receive an email invitation that, if they accept, will add your stak to their own list of search staks in their toolbar. Sharing search staks in this way means that the search knowledge can rapidly grow because relevant searches from your friends and family are added to the Vacation search stak.

Q: HeyStaks can also highlight results in the search results from, say, Google and promote these to the top of the ranking. How is this possible?

A: We have a couple of ways to help people get more out of search. Once you share a stak you have essentially created a search activity feed that will provide you with a live update of searches carried out related to the stak – or staks – you have chosen to share.

At a deeper level, HeyStaks is looking at the various searches that different members of your staks are performing. It’s looking for patterns in those searches, and it’s looking for results that are related to those patterns.  So, you’re not just reminded of results that were clicked for the exact same query by other members of the stack. HeyStaks goes one further and actually figures out that certain results may be relevant to similar queries that haven’t been used before.  So, it’s a way of helping people to understand the sort of things that you’re finding interesting in a particular context, and making sure that everyone else who is sharing in that context is getting the benefit of your finds and you’re getting the benefit of theirs. Put another way, the stak is gradually learning more and more about your interests and is able to better predict those interests and better highlight the results from Google that are likely to serve those interests.

Returning to the Vacation stak example, the  screenshot below shows a typical search using Google and how HeyStaks has highlighted two particular results and promoted these to the top of the ranking. These results were previously selected by other members of the stak for similar queries. HeyStaks has picked up on these being results that others in the community have found interesting and therefore promoted these at the right time and within the right context.

Q: How else can I promote results in what Google delivers to me and others in my search community?

A: Using the toolbar’s tagging function, users can manually add any Web page to a stak. This makes it easy for users to add important pages that would not normally appear in Google’s results, for example. So, going back to the Vacation example, let’s say you find an offer at a hotel after clicking down deeper into the site. Finding this result again is going to require some extra effort, and the others in your community are sure to miss it. How do you make sure the result you found will catch their attention? HeyStaks solved the problem by letting you tag the page from the toolbar, using a tag you choose. You add it to the Vacation stak and – when you search using similar queries in the future or your fiends and family search – HeyStaks will promote this previously hidden result for all the stak members in the search community to see. This tagging feature is a practical way for HeyStaks to mine the deep Web that is all too often invisible to major search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Q: What are the opportunities and use cases highest on your radar?

A: There’s a very important enterprise search opportunity here, particularly when we look at those enterprise 2.0 tools that promote collaboration within the enterprise as a side effect of capturing certain important pieces of knowledge. Some studies estimate as much as 10 percent of salary costs are effectively wasted because people aren’t able to find what they’re looking for easily. So, there’s lost productivity there and a huge opportunity for HeyStaks.

Using HeyStaks in the enterprise would allow an organization to capture all of that latent search knowledge that is lost as people perform the searches. HeyStaks allows searchers to share that knowledge, so that novice searchers in the organization can benefit from the expertise of more practiced searchers. It’s a way for organizations to start to parcel up the various different types of search knowledge that they have. You could also imagine that, as a new project starts in an organization, it’s just a matter of creating a new search stak to capture the relevant information that is found during the course of that project.

Q: Search results become content. Do you see opportunities in publishing and social media?

A: Yes, there are also huge opportunities in what I’ll call the consumer space. Individuals can create a small number of staks and share them with a small number of friends. You can even envisage larger staks being created by special interest websites or media portals, for example. They could create a stak, populate it with relevant search results, and share that stak with their subscribers, readers, or website visitors.

In the context of MSearchGroove, for example, you can create an MSearchGroove stak, feed that stak with relevant information, and share it with your readers. This way, any time they perform a search which happened to be relevant to MSearchGroove, MSearchGroove results would be promoted within the result list that comes back from Google. So, it’s a way of helping your subscribers get a more personalized version of the Google results list that takes account of the sort of interests they have as subscribers to your site.

CREATE MSearchGroove stak

TAG cool content

PROMOTE pages in Google results for everyone to share

Q: You are focused on your Beta, but iPhone is also in the pipeline. Describe the fit with mobile and how it might intersect with social networking.

A: HeyStaks has created a whole social networking site based around your search activities and if you go onto HeyStaks.com, you will see the social networking that is built around people’s search patterns.  Just like Facebook provides you with social networking services around your friends and your interests and what you do on a daily basis, HeyStaks.com provides you with social networking around your search interests, what you’ve been searching for, the various stacks that you have created, the people that you’ve shared stacks with, and what they have been searching for.

That sort of information can be readily made available as part of a mobile interface so that people can have access to their search communities on the go and they can keep up to date with what other people [in their community or organization] have been finding, for example, especially in projects that are related to their work interests.

Q: What are the business models that would make this possible?

A: I think what’s appealing is the sort of software as a service model. We would envisage keeping the basic service free of charge for all to use. However, for certain types of users who wanted to take advantage of more sophisticated services, if they wanted to create a very large stack and potentially share it with thousands of users; there might be a subscription-based charge.  Ad-funded is another potential source of revenue.

My take: There is plenty of room for innovation in the search space. HeyStaks provides us a glimpse of the future of social search and an important confirmation of the increasing importance of people in the equation. HeyStaks isn’t mobile yet, but when it is it could be game-changing. (Indeed, social search, sharing and community go hand in hand. Taptu, a socially-assisted search service “gets” this – which is why it has recently introduced features and functionality that allow people to share their search results.) Although HeyStaks is aimed at turning our simple search queries into serious content, I also see opportunities for brands to enhance (rather than interrupt) the information flow. In this scenario, search queries and results, created and maintained by tight-knit social networks passionate about their quests, could provide a starting point for brands to get actively involved in the exchange, and even lend a hand in the search by suggesting related answers/products/services members are likely to appreciate. But why stop there? Brands could also post search staks around topics where we need and appreciate some solid advice (such as recipes for food manufacturers, how-to tips for repairs around the house, or remedies for colds/flu or whatever ails us). What a great way to add value for a change!

He turned the question around and showed in his presentation that the money is where it always was: With people we are best advised to stop treating as consumers. (You can view Jonathan’s slide deck along with a few others here, thanks to Jan Rezab from HungryMobile.)

So, how do we get our share of the money out there? Jonathan suggests companies position themselves closer to people and respect their requirement  (particularly in the mobile space) for conversation – both with the brand and with their peers. In a nutshell: “Abandon control of communications and realize that advocacy is more powerful than you. Provide facilities and utilities for people to talk with each other and listen [to what they say].

The next step is about creating and co-creating experiences, products, and services that people value. Get that right and the way is clear to pursue a strategy that will ensure you get your share of the money. I won’t give it all away here (and perhaps you’ll have to attend Jonathan’s upcoming mobile advertising workshop), but let’s just say a big part of it is “creating things that are open, customizable, extensible, and share-able.”

Before you dismiss this as a warm-and-fuzzy approach, I recommend you read The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers, a must-read business book co-authored by C. K. Prahalad that has had a profound impact on my work. In this recent interview he further outlines how the role of the consumer (the individual!) has changed. “Traditionally, companies create products based on their market research and exchange that for a value. But it has changed now, with customers equally involved in solving the problem. Co-creation is not customization, but it is personalized.”

Prahalad doesn’t specifically address mobile – an extremely personal device central to our lives – but it’s easy to make a logical leap and conclude that people are likely to be  more demanding of a say in personalizing a personal experience like receiving personalized content/advertising on a personal device.

My point: Mobile is personal and mobile advertising (actually all communications from all companies) will have to at least offer people a say in their experiences. If they choose to be passive “consumers” then we have to let them make that choice themselves (as opposed to us making it for them).

This brings me to the presentation from Mark Linder, Global Client Leader at WPP, a global advertising and communications agency. Mark focused on the other “big question” in the industry: What will have to happen for mobile advertising to really take off? He gave us a choice: 1) Mobile advertising will have to prove its effectiveness to the advertiser, and utility to the consumer or 2) Mobile advertising will have to prove its emotionality as an experience.

Which do YOU choose?

Before you decide, allow me to recount the powerful argument from Mark that convinced us of the merits of an approach aimed at achieving the latter.

First, advertising used to be unilateral, but mobile – a two-way communications device – changes all the rules. As Mark put it: “Advertising is no longer written by somebody else for everybody else.”

Indeed, people are empowered and connected, and advertisers are well advised to take a multilateral view of people and how they relate. (The importance of understanding the social graph cannot be overstated, one reason why I have scheduled a podcast in the next weeks with Jouko Ahvenainen, co-founder of Xtract, a company that excels in developing software products for social marketing and advertising intelligence.)

Mark also drew some interesting comparisons between cultures to show that we are motivated by passion. Advertising – at its most basic level – is also about passion. It’s about making us want an object/service so badly, we will buy it over any other in its class. Why do we choose a particular brand over another? Mark pointed us to a key quote from cultural anthropologist Dr. Robert Deutsch. Brand is “actually a primal and primary mechanism of the mind. It is attachment, a merging between a person’s ’self story’ and a person’s story of you, the product, the company.” Based on this, Mark concludes people get attached to brands like they do dogs, cats, cars and even other people.

If advertising is about attachment, then it’s clear that passion has a role to play.

Apple “gets” it. It has created shiny objects and a complete store of goodies that people are passionate about.

Connect the dots, and we’re back to Mark’s initial question: What will have to happen for mobile to take off?

It just could be that we have to say goodbye to marketing 101 (where the goal is a sale) and embrace (mobile) marketing 2.0, where the aim of advertising is to excite our emotions with an emotive experience. As Mark summed it up: “Mobile should not be afraid of being intoxicated by passion.”

My take: As I have written in my series of mobile advertising white papers, and repeated in the Netsize Guide 2009, mobile is indeed different. The mobile phone, a personal device we have at all times, is not just an interface to content (digital and physical) around us; it is also an expression of our digital persona. Want to interact with me? Then you’ll have to get past my phone, where I screen and decide what content I will interact with and on what terms that interaction will take place. Push is being replaced by pull because people can choose. Advertisers won’t get far if they treat mobile as just another screen, and insist on using it to deliver a one-to-many pitch rather than encourage a balanced exchange that respects our personal space and excites our individual passions.

***

Another presentation that (at least for me) was a wake-up call came from Gunnar Selleg, CEO of Aspiro, a provider of mobile entertainment and mobile marketing solutions in the Nordic countries.

(By way of background, Aspiro is also the event sponsor. Mart Kikas. Aspiro, Area Manager Baltics, CEE, CIS, told me that the conference was initially organized to bring together companies from up and down the value chain. My impression: Kudos to Mart for achieving his goal and coordinating an event that exceeded my expectations. I will certainly attend again. If you want to connect with professionals and practitioners from companies across the value web (emerging), I recommend you join me. Mart and I also discussed ways MSG could become more closely aligned with this premiere event moving forward, so watch this space!)

Gunnar walked us through the waves of transformation that have impacted the mobile space. These included a decrease in content downloads (a development observed in the progressive Nordic markets and which could affect markets elsewhere), a shift in billing mechanisms, and the impact of new devices, features, and functionalities on the content we want and how we access it. (You can view the slide deck here.)

Based on these observations, Gunnar identified the six trends highest on his radar:

• Music, TV/Video, and games will to a large degree become streaming based

• Download will become a minor part of total consumption

• Business models will be subscription, pay per download, pay per view/time/whatever

• Ads will never be the main source for financing mobile services, except services that are ad financed on the Internet

• Browser based services will be more common than clients

• IP billing and credit card billing will beat CPA

Let’s take a moment to digest these…

The one that made many stop and think is the prediction that ads will never be the main source of funding for services (except those we know and pay for from the Internet). What will work? Gunnar told me advertising will be about product placement in the actual content.

But keep in mind this is not – and can never be – a hard-sell. Players in a multi-player game may accept ad placement, but they will likely reject advertising that interrupts their gameplay. Get it right and the viral marketing that follows (when players pass the ads around) will be well worth the effort.

Finally, who are the winners in this new mobile world?

Gunnar is convinced content owners will have the top-notch spot.

What do YOU think?

On the heels of JumpTap’s announcement of tapMatch, its pay-per-click (PPC) performance mobile ad marketplace, I can finally post this exclusive Q&A with Paran Johar, JumpTap CMO. During the pre-briefing, we went through the nuts and bolts of the offer (unlike Google, which offers keyword bidding  and MCN – a provider of mobile search management, search merchandising, and PPC content promotion solutions offering category bidding- Jumptap offers both), and took a closer look at how the search technology potentially maximizes performance by delivering contextually relevant advertising.

By way of background, tapMatch builds audience profiles from multiple sources including search queries, context, and click thru history to match the most relevant ad messages to each mobile consumer. Advertisers can target their marketing message according to keywords, categories, location, demographics, mobile carrier, publisher, and mobile handsets including Blackberry and iPhone. Ads run across a comprehensive set of categories including automotive, careers, finance, fitness, and health, enhanced by keyword search parameters. They are priced and served by auction, and advertisers only pay when consumers click on their messages.

JumpTap tells me it can decipher the keywords from mobile Web pages and use that information to create categories of users. For instance, in this chocolate example above, if the user has gone to a site about mobile phones and then another site comparing different mobile technologies, the system knows that a search for “chocolate” has a higher probability of meaning the mobile phone “chocolate” instead of something you eat. JumpTap can then place the correct advertiser ads in front of the user that relate to chocolate phones and not candy.

Q&A EXCERPT:

Q: Let’s start with the landscape. When I read the draft press release I thought it competes with Google at one level and MCN at another. What is the differentiation?

A: Well, that’s really the point. It’s not just a pay-per-click marketplace. It is a pay-per-click marketplace that allows advertisers to bid all the way to the keyword level. Smart advertisers understand that keyword level buying is the best way to target users. So this allows you to target context, and [target] carrier handset, all the way to the keyword level.

Q: How does your technology do it?

A: Our technology crawls the page, extracts the relevant keywords, builds a taxonomy based on those keywords, and then builds a preference set to develop an audience profile to serve a relevant ad.

Q: How does this fit in with the other products and announcements I’ve tracked on MSG? I’m thinking here of your white label search, your premium ad network – the works.

A: You mention the premium mobile ad network. Now this has been an evolution to our business model. We started with tapSearch, which is our white label search product. We evolved into the premium mobile ad network, which still exists and is really toward let’s say the upper funnel of mobile advertising to drive brand awareness, consideration, purchase intent. We’ve got our platform, tapLink, to extract data from carriers. This [tapMatch] is the last piece of the puzzle, utilizing our search technology to develop audience profiles in a pay-per-click marketplace. It [tapLink] addresses the ROI sensitive advertiser. So, if the premium mobile ad network is really focused on the upper funnel, tapMatch is really on the lower funnel -  driving ROI, whether that is click-through, click-to-action, click-to-SMS, or click-to-call.

Q: What about publishers?

It provides publishers with access to multiple resources for their inventory monetization. First, they can allocate a percentage of that [inventory] toward brand advertising – actually as much as possible to get those high effective CPMs. Second, they can take any remnant inventory and run it through tapMatch with full transparency and full control to make sure that they’re not running let’s say, punch the monkey ads. The advertiser also could control on the other side, what types of publishers they run on.

Q: Relevancy is a big part of your messaging here. Is this because you sense a change in what advertisers require? It used to be about showing an ad and now it’s about making sure the ad matches context somewhere along the way.

A: Yes. Our goal is not to run billions and billions of impressions. Our goal is to make an impression – with both the consumer and the advertiser – with relevancy. The mobile phone is a very personal channel. We think the appetite for a user to accept what I call ’spam advertising’ has really diminished, and that’s why we really focus on driving relevancy from all sources.

Q: What is the fit with iPhone?

A: Well certainly iPhone apps are part of both networks. An iPhone application developer is really like a publisher with much more dynamic abilities for creative insertion in terms of integration into maps, integration into address books, whatever. So absolutely, a publisher has the opportunity to participate in either or both [ad networks]. And they can allocate their inventory based on their choice.

Q: Of course there are a lot of ad networks out there. How are you going to continue to differentiate?

A: If you can name me another ad network with 17 carrier relationships and search as part of its technology, then we have competition. The only one I know that’s even close is obviously Google. Google and Yahoo we compete with. But the AdMobs and the Quattros of the world are in another space. If you just look at the ad network component of our business, then, yes, we compete, but they don’t have that white label search technology and they don’t have any of the carrier information either.

Q: That may be – but the space is crowding fast…

A: We organized a mobile advertising conference in Florida a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday night through Sunday. And we had almost 200 brands and agencies show up. I organized that and I reached out to our friends at AdMob and our friends at Quattro, and they participated as part of this mobile advertising conference. They are ad networks, and there is differentiation. We all know Quattro – they take a different approach which is ‘I’ll build your WAP site in exchange for the ad revenue’. AdMob takes the long-tail approach.

Ours is completely different. We have those carrier relationships. We’ve got the white label mobile search technology that builds relevancy, we’ve got the premium mobile ad network for the top funnel, and then we’ve got tapMatch, a performance marketplace that builds relevancy; that takes it all the way to the keyword level, utilizing hyper-targeting.

You can’t just go out and get 17 carrier relationships. You can’t just go out and build a white label search engine and utilize that technology for hyper-targeting. That kind of stuff takes years and years of development.

Q: What about the mobile analytics? What can I track and target?

A: It’s fully self-service. The app has tracking mechanisms so you can set up click-to-SMS, click-to-call, click through, and track all of that at the individual campaign level.

Q: And the difference with AdSense here?

A: Certainly AdSense is similar. However, they don’t do carrier targeting or handset targeting or context. So it takes AdSense specifically made for mobile to the next level.

Q: You have 17 carrier relationships. These include:  AT&T, Alltel, Boost, Virgin, US Cellular, Orange Spain, TeliaSonera Group (in seven countries), 3 Sweden and Bell Mobility. It’s a good mix, but I miss more operators in Europe and Asia.

A: We’re looking at the rest of Europe, and we’re obviously looking at parts of Asia. But we’re doing so very carefully. Given the economic times, excessive capital expenditure right now does not make sense. We have to look at those opportunistically to make sure it’s the right time. And you’re going to hear a big announcement for us in Spain in the coming weeks.

Q: Let’s talk about some hard numbers. In your press release you state: “Reaching qualified mobile audiences with highly targeted, relevant ads elicits strong consumer engagement, increased click thru rates and higher conversions according to early testers of the tool.” What is the range of CPCs you see?

A: It really depends on the category and the keyword. The more granular you get in terms of your keywords, the more expensive the bid price. And it’s dynamic and all in real-time. What are the keywords on Google or Yahoo? It depends on the keyword and it depends on the category, and it depends on the day and time. It could range from $0.10 to $0.25 in some cases to several dollars.

Q: Not a ball-park figure?

A: Peggy, it just depends on the keyword and the time of day. It’s almost like saying how much does a TV spot cost. It depends if you’re in prime-time; daytime; late news. And it’s similar here.

Q: Many will read today’s announcement as  throwing down the gauntlet, challenging Google and Yahoo. Is that how you see it?

A: Yes, definitely it’s a David verses Goliath story and we don’t mind being David. The fact that people reference Google and Yahoo in an on-going basis with JumpTap is a good thing for us.

Q: So let’s wrap up with some nuts and bolts. When are you live and in which countries?

A: We can give you a demo log-in – it goes live on the 15^th. It’s only the U.S. right now.

My take: Competition is heating up, but JumpTap’s connection with mobile operators (and access to valuable customer data that Google and Yahoo will never see) is the source of competitive advantage. JumpTap’s marketplace (category and keyword) and spread of networks (Premium Ad Network and now tapMatch) position it to offer a powerful combination of premium and performance advertising, going a long way toward ensuring the best ads will appear on a site. The technology is in place, now JumpTap has to focus on execution and slow but steady expansion of its operator footprint.

At the other end of the spectrum, this shift in mindset also turns up the pressure on mobile search providers to develop services that are (likewise) more useful, engaging and personal. Indeed, improving the mobile search user experience is at the center of a sustainable and successful mobile search and advertising strategy. Users are encouraged to explore the wealth of content and applications at their fingertips, and their urge to discover leads to more queries and more opportunities to deliver paid search advertising. It’s not quite the fixed Internet all over again, but there are similarities.

The outcome is a virtuous cycle where useful search results and targeted advertising convince users that mobile search is a useful way to find content and applications that matter to them. What’s more, the advance of app stores (similar to the excitement the industry experienced when content portals were the rage) underlines the critical importance of a better interplay between search and advertising moving forward.

I am therefore encouraged by improvements (from companies such as Yahoo), and excited by the increasing popularity of new mobile search paradigms, ranging from multimodal search (which has received a much-needed boost thanks to the iPhone); to approaches that integrate human input/judgment to deliver search results we’re much more likely to appreciate. (I am currently compiling a comprehensive directory of mobile search providers, so please contact me to be included. If your story is interesting, I will also profile your company on MSG.)

A category of mobile search high on my radar is visual search. (Companies include: Idée, IQ Engines, Kooaba, Mobile Acuity, Searchme, SnapNow and SnapTell.) I am pleased to report I am close to confirming a date for a podcast with Philipp Schloter, Nokia’s general manager of Point & Find. Nokia (which MSG covered here) just last week took the wraps off a new beta of its visual search service. The technology is cool but the real excitement is about the fit with mobile marketing campaigns. As Julian Pate, Client Partner at interactive marketing agency AKQA, put it in a statement: “The Nokia Point & Find service marries the digital world with the physical world in a way that actually has meaning for brands and consumers. Not only does it allow consumers to engage with brands in an innovative way but provides brands ‘point and purchase’ opportunities with an on-the-go audience.”

This same value proposition is echoed by SnapNow, a U.S.-based visual search company I profiled in my regular column for EContent magazine.

In it I examine the proliferation of pilots and projects that harness mobile to hyperlink images and items, enabling consumers to access information, make purchases or just browse the Web for similar cool content, by simply snapping a picture using their cameraphones. I also interview Tony Keaveny, Head of Sales for SnapNow UK, who updates me on what the company is doing to “snap-enable” content ranging from print to video.

As Tony puts it: “Your phone becomes your mouse and the world around us becomes the Web. It’s about transforming print, packaging, video, outdoor, or just about any other advertising into a portal enabling communication and – more importantly – commerce.”

Tony walks the talk, which is why he has also kindly offered to “snap-enable” the MSG logo, which means you can get more information about MSG by taking a picture of the logo with your cameraphone and sending it to pic@snapnow.co.uk. I’ll think of a contest to make it worth your while. In the meantime, this is  great (!) because MSG is in demand as a media partner and now you can connect to MSG via the  logo on brochures and posters  at industry conferences such as the Open Mobile Summit, June 10-11 in London, a top-notch industry conference organized by OpenMobileMedia, where I chair the session on mobile advertising.  I invite you to read the column here – and to explore the other great content at EContent.

On a personal note, I am proud to be a contributing editor and look forward to collaborating with Michelle Manafy, EContent Editor-in-chief on a special social media issue sure to set the bar. More about that when I put out a call for pitches here and on Twitter (@peggyanne). Michelle is also the programming chair of Information Today’s Enterprise Search Summits (ESS), annual events that encourage deep discussion and practical analysis of the search space. The next one is May 12-13 in NYC. This week Michelle wraps up Buying and Selling EContent Conference, an event that brings together leading executives knowledgeable in the techniques for buying and selling content. She gives her views on the marketplace and the role of user-generated content in this pre-conference audio interview.

But visual search is just one of the 15 categories I have identified in the process of compiling a comprehensive overview and SWOT analysis of the major mobile search players, together with Rudy De Waele, Mobile Web 2.0 luminary and founder of dotopen, an open innovation consulting firm advising start-ups and established companies helping them define business models, forge alliances and pursue funding opportunities.

Our work is in preparation for a workshop on Mobile Search Future Prospects organized by JRC IPTS (Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission), an organization providing customer-driven support to the EU policy-making process.  The purpose of the workshop next week in Seville, Spain, is to identify mobile search trends and recommendations for policy makers. I cannot attend the event, but look forward to publishing a summary analysis of key points raised during the workshop on MSG.

Connect the dots, and mobile search innovation is shaping up to be a major focus in 2009.

The last word on the increasing importance of mobile search comes from Nokia (via AltSearchEngines.com). During his presentation Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President of Nokia’s new Markets unit, told the audience mobile is the future of search. (Hmmm…Does this conviction mark a new chapter in Nokia’s own mobile search strategy? It’s a topic I’ll raise in my upcoming podcast…)

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.

I have had this trend high on my radar for several years, a passion that received its first outlet and accolades when EContent magazine gave me free reign to write an in-depth cover story on the state of Social Search (which appeared in the November 2007 issue). I loved researching and writing the article, a work I still regard as one of the best in my career. The good news: I’m told the article had – and continues to have – an impact on the content industry. The not-so-good news: When I wrote the article I was disappointed that so few companies “got” mobile, and today – nearly two years later – only a handful of companies have really have caught on.

To be fair, I wrote the article, aptly titled Teams Work: Social Search Gets Results, before companies such as abphone, ChaCha, Hiogi and Taptu broke on to the scene with strategies that draw on social search approaches and algorithms to improve mobile search results ranking and relevancy. I invite you to read my comments in new-release white papers from abphone and Taptu, and MSG’s own soon-to-be released assessment of the user experience delivered by search engines (among them ChaCha).

But progress is progress, and I am confident that more online social search companies will sharpen their focus on mobile as the advance of mobile social networks and other communities pushes people-powered mobile search to the top of the agenda this year. (In fact, recent reports/stats on Twitter, Facebook, and my own discussions with social networking companies confirm an exciting new trend: We have begun to search in communities – and today the number of queries even exceeds our searches in Google. Connect the dots and a game-changing search paradigm emerges. The power of people + the power of mobile = a power shift in favor of new mobile players who harness the wisdom of mobile crowds.

Where does all this leave mobile operators?

Well, just a week ago I would have said they can watch if they are stupid, and open up their analytics to third-parties (to give critical context to search results) if they are smart. Now, I can say they have a third and far more lucrative option: They can offer a people-powered search service provided by an infrastructure vendor (building on existing front-end analytics capabilities that capture the interests, passions, and profiles of users) to deliver subscribers genuinely useful and relevant search results. And if mobile operators chose to bolt on the mobile advertising module, they can position themselves to offer paid search advertising from a variety of ad networks and keep the lion’s share of the revenues.

You’re reading it in MSG first: Watch for a mobile infrastructure provider to launch a solution that joins existing analytics at the front-end with search and advertising, potentially allowing operators to be equivalent to Google. And watch a mobile operator customer to implement it this year.

I am under NDA and therefore cannot disclose the name of the vendor company, but I can share the details of the search technology and the recent results of a trial test the vendor company conducted with a mobile carrier (a pilot that effectively proves the business case for mobile search powered by mobile searchers (subscribers) and enhanced by operator analytics).

Let’s examine the business case for operator-managed mobile search and advertising.

First, mobile search is not rocket science, nor is it a service that only search engine providers can offer. Search can be broken down into two basic tasks: Indexing the Web to include domains and fresh content in search results; and developing algorithms to assist in ranking and rating the results. It’s not impossible and white-label search providers have shown how this can be accomplished. (They just lost the plot when it came to finding and indexing the content on the wider Web, which is why white-label has lost momentum.) However, for reasons I outline below, mobile operators are positioned to go one better than the solutions that have gone before.

Second, PageRank is not the only game in town. There are many techniques available, not just PageRank, a one-size-fits-all approach pioneered by Google (that as I point out in my post suffers from serious limitations in the mobile space). Operators, because they are close to the customer, can harness social search concepts to improve the experience and the search results. (One to consider is BrowseRank, a new algorithm developed by the vendor company that represents a vast improvement on PageRank because it focuses on the pages people click most often, and correctly assumes that we click these pages because they offer the content and answers we value most.

Third, mobile operators alone have access to the data that matters - directly from us. They know our location and context; our profiles and purchases; the sites we browse; and the search results we think rock (!). As a result, mobile operators don’t have to index the whole of the Web because they know from their usage logs the sites we browse and click (not as individuals, but as a group), and can simply make sure these domains figure prominently in the mobile search results.

Finally, we don’t need the whole of the Internet on our phones. If people really do want/demand the whole Web on their phones, then it makes sense to leave mobile search to the search giants who can handle the mammoth task of organizing the world’s information. But do we want it ALL? Not if we consider a recent trial involving the vendor company and a North American carrier. As the source put it: A review of a month of mobile search usage and queries revealed that “millions of users had only visited 34,000 domains.” Drilling down, the source found that a whopping “96 percent of transactions were covered by 14,000 domains.”

Hmmm… So, is there really a Long Tail in mobile search? Or have bad experiences – poor content adaptation, broken links, and other shortcomings – already dampened our enthusiasm for the mobile Web? Or are we just gravitating to our favorite destinations (such as social networks) on the move, and leaving the Long Tail searches to our PCs where we have access to a large screen and a full keyboard? So many questions we can and must address…

I pose a devil’s advocate question: But what if users are flocking to a cool new site, not already in the index? The answer: “A single page request can flag a new site to be included in the search index, giving unprecedented speed of index updating.”

But doesn’t that somehow at some level limit choice? Not really. To introduce an element of serendipity, the solution comes configured with a “throw external” feature that will redirect to GYM search engines if the results delivered by the operator search engine are below a given accuracy. (Settings for SafeSearch also allow the mobile operator to exclude harmful content from the search results.)

The source and I then debated the extent to which analytics and behavioral data could actually enable the creation of new and more personalized mobile search services. Our conclusion: It certainly covers all the bases to achieve this because it would only index the sites the subscribers like best. Take a mobile operator with a prosumer customer base such as O2. They would likely value straightforward results that help them plan and execute their daily routine, and the mobile search results would reflect this. A consumer-focused operator, such as Virgin Mobile, may find that its users prefer entertainment sites and social networking/moblogging destinations, and likewise give them top-notch placement in the mobile search results.

Beyond identifying sites to index tailored to the preferences of the subscriber base, the solution would pave the way for mobile operators to refine search results based on meta data from browsing activity. For the first time ever, mobile search results could be ranked by device type, time of day, or day of the week. As the source put it: “Initially we have  focused  on domain and page popularity within a given data set, however this can be further optimized, for example by refining result ranking based on  time of day or device – people  browsing in  the morning preferred a particular destination domain, while people with a Nokia N95 preferred another.”

Likewise, the solution would allow mobile advertising (which the industry is finally beginning to recognize is another form of content) to be refined and targeted to the preferences and profiles of the subscriber base. What’s more, the mobile operators could keep the lion’s share of the paid search revenues.

My Take: Operators – through their enviable position at the center of our mobile experiences – are perfectly positioned to tap into the wisdom of invisible crowds (us). With the right tools and technology mobile operators can follow our virtual breadcrumb trail to optimize our mobile search (and advertising) experiences, using our actual usage patterns to give us the answers/results we will most likely appreciate. What better way to compete against search engine giants and even win?

Today marks the debut of these new segments on the MSG video jukebox (located in the right-hand sidebar). This week’s focus, and feature video in the player, is my interview with Shane Lennon, Senior Vice President, Marketing & Product Development at GyPSii, a must-watch company leading in the race to deliver connected and cool experiences combining information, entertainment, social networks,  and location/navigation. In our interview we connect the dots in the recent string of announcements and discuss the significance for brands and advertisers.

By way of background, I have followed the company – which is a business unit of GeoCentric, a company that provides a geo-integration platform for mobile phones, personal navigation devices, web browsers, and Internet-connected devices, including PCs and set-top boxes – since it broke on the scene last year. Unlike many companies that focus on social networking or enable location-relevant mobile marketing, GyPSii stands out as a company that connects people to people, places, and stuff across all platforms, devices and networks.

Indeed, it’s the raft of announcements over the last weeks — including a partnership to embed GyPSii’s app on a range of LG mobile phones; the tie-up with Nokia and RIM (blackberry) to make the app available on a wide variety of their devices; and a wise decision launch an open API (allowing partners to call the shots on how they integrate GyPSii into their mobile strategy and devices) – that speaks volumes about the company’s new and stronger focus. My take: GyPSii has both the ideas and the impetus to impact our mobile lifestyles.

In addition to the interview and my analysis (below), I also encourage you to read more about GyPSii in my regular column for the bnetTV newsletter, which counts some 10,000 readers. For all my coverage and columns in one place, check out this page on the bnetTV site dedicated to MSG news and views. Thanks again to bnetTV’s Michelle and Tony Sklar for promoting MSG to their growing audience of  industry executives and professionals, and to Nicole Scott for bringing it all together in some great brainstorming sessions!

An excerpt from my weekly column:

Web 2.0 was all about the tools and technologies allowing users to freely create, share, and connect around content with members of a larger mobile community; Web 3.0 places location at the core of this exchange, empowering users to make their experiences personal, relevant, and much more compelling.

The jury is out on whether location – on its own – is a service consumers will pay for. But there is no question that location brings value to a variety of everyday mobile experiences, ranging from social networking to mobile search/shopping services,  to more relevant and engaging mobile marketing campaigns. Indeed, the race is on to offer connected and cool experiences combining information, entertainment, social networks and location/navigation. And companies that deliver products and services that connect people to places and networks, from work to play to home,  across all platforms, devices and networks, will likely lead the pack.

GyPSii stands out as a company that covers all the bases with a suite of applications that seamlessly combine location, social networking, search, and Web 2.0 technologies. I caught up with Shane Lennon, GyPSii Senior Vice President, Marketing & Product Development, during Mobile World Congress to connect the dots in the recent string of announcements and discuss the significance for brands and advertisers. We covered all the key questions, and then some. A special highlight: An explanation of GyPSii’s Open Experience API (called OEx).

Unlike other mobile social networking platforms such as Facebook, which offer a subset of desktop functionality, GyPSii has effectively given its partners the last word in how GyPSii is integrated into their devices and apps – and how much of the functionality they want in the first place. Put another way, GyPSii allows its partners to do more than location-enable/community-enable their apps and devices; it gives them control of the UI and with it the user experience they deliver to their customer base. Partners can integrate anything from a single app (create a piece of geo-tagged content) to a feature (find a friend) to full-blown social network.

By way of background, features/services include: User-Gen Content (create and share geo-tagged content); Friends (create and manage relationships with GyPSii members); Explore (find places, people and stuff nearby); Communication (keep in touch using messages, email and more); Profile (tell the community who you are and what you’re doing/feeling); and Advertising (integrating GyPSii’s location-based and contextually-tuned advertising service). To round out the offer, partners leverage GyPSii’s infrastructure to get streamline delivery of services to their customers.

As Shane put it: “We decided to have a next-generation approach to [mobile phone] client development….As we looked beyond smartphones it became clear to us that taking our user interface and jamming down into a Java enabled platform or WAP-like [platform] wasn’t going to work.” The way for this to succeed is to take a more embedded client approach, which is why GyPSii’s strategy is focused on embedding GyPSii on as many devices as possible, where the actual user experience (via the UI) is owned by the customer/partner company. (GyPSii’s platform is device and network agnostic, and works across iPhone, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Web-based operating systems.)

A big part of GyPSii plans going forward is focused on mobile advertising. And with good reason since the disconnect between mobile advertising efforts and results is a growing cause for concern. Predictably, the lack of real mobile marketing success stories reduces the enthusiasm of major brands to invest in mobile advertising in the first place. And around we go. But it’s more than a catch-22 for advertisers and carriers. It’s a vicious cycle that threatens the health of the global mobile business ecosystem if we consider that the vast majority of content companies, app store developers, and mobile carriers have already bet the farm on the uptake of mobile services increasingly subsidized by mobile advertising.

Against this backdrop, GyPSii has purposely made Advertising a central focus of its OEx API, beefing up the offer with a location-specific targeting capability and the ability to deliver an integrated advertising experience/message across devices and platforms – even  gaming consoles in the future. (Makes good sense given the perfect fit between games, location, and community…)

We wrapped up the interview with an interesting look at the future of content types and what might evolve from experiences that bring together information, entertainment, social networks, location/navigation, advertising, and search on all devices everywhere. It’s early days, but GyPSii is beginning to break down the content and comments it sees into its smallest components, allowing it to recognize the associations and relationships between the content and the context. “When someone looks for something or wants it [relevant information] in a mini-feed, we want to make sure it is relevant and [fits] in the context of their world.”

The right content to the right person at the right time and in-tune with their lifestyle/life stage? It’s a challenge. However, GyPSii has the capabilities (information, entertainment, social networks, location/navigation, advertising, and search) and mindset (open APIs and a sharp focus on the user experience) that may get us there.

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.

A browse through Tom’s bio, and it’s clear he’s not one to follow the crowd of lemming investors who rush to the next new thing, only to drop it when the cool factor has gone cold. To the contrary, Tom is convinced early-stage startups can pay-off big if investors stick with them for the long-term. To identify the do’s and don’ts for startups in a downturn, he started off talking through the business basics, such as the best exit strategies and the opportunities for “kitchen-table startups” – as he calls them – and app developers. Tom’s answers are insightful and entertaining – all the more reason to listen in.

But the main attraction is Tom’s take on what mobile advertising really needs: Engagement. In his view, it’s all about providing and managing a one-to-one conversation between brands and people, and he’s looking for companies that “get” it. As he puts it: “There are a few agencies that appear to get it, but they und up getting slotted as a mobile agency…What you want to be is a creative advertiser [agency] that uses mobile.” Since there are so few on the horizon, the time may be right to start one yourself.

Listen to the podcast here. [19:16]

I’m smiling to myself as I write this post, since Tom’s outspoken views on engagement echo the principles of Every Single One Of Us, a venture set up by colleague and co-collaborator Jonathan MacDonald to “unite a cross-section of mobile operators, mobile companies and big-name brands to educate the market and encourage discussions about emerging business models, industry issues, and areas of growth that will help companies, stakeholders and shareholders engage with potential consumers and ultimately drive mobile advertising revenues and positive results.” Every Single One Of Us is gaining serious traction, counting over 100 supporters (aptly called Collaborators), including the CEOs of large brands and advertising agencies, mobile influencers, and citizen activists. (Disclosure: I am also a Collaborator.) In the few weeks since the launch meeting, Every Single One Of Us has achieved some exciting milestones (and formalized its relationship with MSG), developments which I am documenting in a press release as we speak for distribution next week. All good, as Jonathan would say..

Among the interview highlights:

M&A: It’s THE exit strategy. “But along the way, you should build the company as if you are absolutely going to be ready to go public.” It’s important if you want to structure your company properly, “but you can’t have a specific company as your M&A target; as you acquire a target. If you ever do that, you’ve narrowed the universe of potential buyers so extremely that I don’t think your odds for success are very high.”

GROWTH: Tom recalls the milestones he’s seen in mobile, including the expectation that mobile would reach over one million (yes million) subscribers by 2000. The fact that we are well past this shows that mobile is and continues to be the highest-growth sector there is – even in a downturn. “Anyone who’s been participating in mobile for the last 15 years and hasn’t experienced unbelievable growth has had their head under a log.”

APP OPPORTUNITIES: Thanks to iPhone and a new interest in openness among mobile operators “there’s suddenly an opportunity for entrepreneurs that have been using mobile phones in a very widespread way.” Who is likely to benefit and make a lot of money in the process? “They’re kitchen table start-ups that can make individual developers quite a bit of money, as long as they don’t sell most of their company to venture capitalists with very high expectations.”

SPONSORED APPS: Thanks to the iPhone there is a new market for what Tom calls “sponsored apps” that allow people to interact with brands in a personal way. “There are a lot of opportunities to develop these sponsored apps…and I have been investing in companies that would provide the sponsored apps, the one-to-many communications capability.”

MOBILE ADVERTISING & ENGAGEMENT: Cross-media is the key here. As Tom puts it: “I’m very interested in a number of opportunities that involve the heterogeneous mix of talents and services that’ll aim at using mobile in quite comprehensive personalization campaigns, as opposed to looking at platform plays where mobile is all that the platform looks at. I think it has to be a combination.” To be clear mobile advertising is not about technology. It’s about “individual engagement between a consumer and the brands they will grow to love as opposed to this notion of targeting.” Is this a business model or a warm-and-fuzzy concept? Tom has no illusions. Big ideas can be “baloney” but this is an idea whose time has come. Engagement is the “ultimate goal” of most brand advertisers. “If you told any large brand that you were going to offer them the opportunity to have a cost-effective personal engagement with their consumers; they would all say ‘tell me more’.”

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: Tom and I enjoy a meeting of the minds near the end of the podcast when we debate engagement, and question whether we might have to start a company that “gets” it. But it’s more than fun; it’s a blueprint for change – if you’re game to transforming how you do business.

Check back for Part 2 next week, when Tom is back with valuable advice for entrepreneurs, and his pick of top trends for 2009.

To be clear: I am not blaming any one ad network. Realistically, it’s early days and we have to crawl, walk, run. However, companies with far less passion for the industry than I will no doubt soon lose patience with trial-and-error ad targeting.

(On a personal note, using referral data from a recent banner ad campaign offering a Body Mass Index calculator for free download I discovered the ad was showing up on a range of irrelevant sites focused on topics ranging from MP3s to “chat with hot girls.” My own intellectual curiosity is boundless and I believe serendipity is a must-have element in our lives (an observation proven by the fact that visitors to the hot chat site did indeed click on my BMI offer). However, are you willing to bet your ad budget on the off chance that someone interested in hot chat will click through to check if they are overweight? Fat chance (no pun intended).

No wonder targeting is the new mobile business mantra. From here on expect a new emphasis on quality and not quantity in mobile advertising. JumpTap, a mobile search and advertising company, has another one to add: Exclusivity. In the pre-holiday hectic, JumpTap took the wraps off what it calls a Premium Ad Network. In comparison to “typical ad networks,” JumpTap tells us that media buys across the JumpTap Premium Ad Network of premium mobile channels (including ten different audience segmented packages including entertainment, finance, news, reference, sports, lifestyle, social networking, travel, and games) elicits “higher engagement and a higher return on investment.” The logic at play here: Branded content sites have a greater impact on key metrics such as increased CTRs, brand awareness and purchase intent than generic mobile ad networks. Translated: Big brands draw big interest.

By way of background, JumpTap has third-party exclusives with content publishers including NBC.com, BravoTV.com, SCIFI.com, astrology.com, E! Online, Currency, Citizen Sports (Sportacular),LimeLife, ScoreMobile iPhone Edition, SportsTap, Showtimes, and Sudoku (Free). Other more recent additions to the JumpTap Premium Mobile Ad Network also include: media companies MSNBC, NBA, AOL, Ask.com, Fox News & Business, and Kargo (includes MotorTrend, Tiger Beat, Shape, US Magazine); mobile content companies Hands-On Mobile, MocoSpace, and Verve Wireless; and iPhone web and client applications including AroundMe, BlackBook, Loopt, Mobile News Network Powered by AP, Shazam, and SnapMyLife.

At the other end of the spectrum, JumpTap launched ADtap for Publishers, a solution that provides mobile publishers, media companies and iPhone application developers a means to monetize their traffic and streamline sales to brands and agencies (companies in the JumpTap Premium Mobile Ad Network). JumpTap also now provides the full outsourcing of mobile advertising operations for early-stage publishers to monetize their impressions. Partner programs allow publishers access to reciprocal remnant advertising across other member sites as a means to increase visibility and drive traffic. Finally, ADtap can integrate and manage multiple third-party ad networks for high-volume publishers seeking to backfill remnant inventory.

To round out the offer JumpTap has formally rebranded its mobile advertising engine (targeting technology JumpTap discussed with MSG here) as tapLink, a platform that builds targeting intelligence from multiple sources including search queries, browsing history, demographic and location data. Read between the lines and JumpTap has put together a capabilities mix to deliver targeted ads and drive higher yields. Relevant ads tied to content that rocks – makes sense…

But what does this shift tell us about JumpTap? Is it a mobile search company or an ad network? Is JumpTap going strong in Europe? These are some of the questions I explored in a briefing with Paran Johar, JumpTap CMO. (Thanks again to Julie Ginches at JumpTap who has a perfect track record in arranging briefings for me with JumpTap execs.)

Q: Let’s start with Denmark, where you are exclusively handling the mobile advertising inventory for 3 there. How does this impact your footprint there?

A: As you know, we’re working with 3 and we’re working with TeliaSonera. I think this is a real testament to what’s happening in the mobile operator environment. More operators are recognising that – as they reinvent themselves – they need to become more media- centric and they need to partner with companies that can empower them to make that transformation . Someone whose interests are clearly aligned with theirs and can help them develop their own mobile ad revenue streams.

Q: You’re in charge of inventory. But where does mobile search fit in here? At conferences people ask me: Is JumpTap still a search provider – so I’ll put the question to you…

A: We’ve evolved. Our core business is mobile advertising, both premium and performance. The key differentiators are our premium mobile ad network and performance marketplace both of which continue to grow globally and remember the mobile ad network could include on- or off-deck, meaning it could be publisher inventory or it could be carrier inventory .  Second is our unique targeting abilities – this is where our search heritage comes into play as keyword search and query data helps fuel more effective and targeted advertising but it goes beyond that –  by tapping numerous other information feeds. And then there’s the full array of Publisher, Advertiser and Operator solutions and services that make it easy for partners to monetize their assets.

Q: So, clearly intertwined?

A: Yes. So, with 3 Denmark, we are representing their mobile ad display inventory.  In the case of TeliaSonera, we do white label search and we monetize display advertising for them.

Q: So you both a search company and an advertising company? You’ve not left one for the other?

A: We’re trying to bring it full circle here, everyone knows about our white label search heritageWe’ve launched the Premium Mobile Ad Network, and obviously the monetization and targeting platform, tapLink, which is really the engine that helps monetise publisher’s inventory to a higher level and possesses the targeting intelligence to delivers the relevant ads. So, if you think about it, the publisher gets a higher effective CPM because now they have a much more targeted audience. The advertiser gets targeted audiences, so their dollars are being wasted less. And the user gets a better experience because they’re not being spammed with ads irrelevant to their interests.

Q: Who are your competitors now that you are evolving into an ad network?

A: We compete with Google and Yahoo. And both sit at that intersection. They both have search and advertising. Google has it with the acquisition of Double Click and certainly Yahoo has a display product. Many of our operators, many of our partners, started with search but it has evolved into a dual relationship [search and advertising]. There are the pure play generic ad networks out there but their targeting capabilities are so rudimentary, we don’t think they’ll be around for the long run.

Q: Is your value-ad the white label neutrality you bring to the table or the exclusives with content companies. Do you get more mileage out of search or advertising?

A: First, an observation about the marketplace, because it’s also evolving. It really is the most aggressive we’ve seen and we’re seeing more that operators want a white label search solution provider who can actually take their carrier data, monetize it and provide a branded experience for their customer base.  Operators can concede that business completely [to branded search providers], but they still need a platform like tapLink which sits at a totally different layer in the stack, to utilize and protect the data necessary to deliver targeted ads.  That same evolution holds for the ad display network business as well.

Back to your other question. Our business is mobile advertising.  I think what this says is that more operators are beginning to understand that they need help to reinvent themselves as a media-centric organisations, and they recognize that a carrier-friendly solution like JumpTap is critical in that reinvention.  They know and trust us from the earlier white label search partnerships and we’ve also proven our advertising solutions with some of the largest and most recognized carriers in the industry.

Q: How are you helping operators get reach?

In Denmark we’re allowing them to participate in our premium mobile ad network as opposed to some of the ad networks that just really focus on mass reach and billions and billions of impressions.  Our approach is premium content plus targeting builds relevancy which leads to user engagement.  It is really getting premium content providers. Whether that’s an operator, a publisher or an application developer, those are all forms of content. If you add that content to relevant targeting, users will engage more.  We’re the only ones out there right now really focusing on getting the content, adding on the targeting premise to build a relevancy so the consumer doesn’t get a generic ad. They get what is relevant.

Q: Are you saying you won’t show an ad if you don’t have the right ad to match a query?

A: We may choose not to show one, or we may show one the publisher chooses to show. Different publishers and operators are going to have different rules. If we don’t have a relevant ad, there might be times they [publishers] may show a house ad.

Q: Can you share some stats? Your recent press release states: “Of 2.3 billion total available monthly impressions, the JumpTap Premium Mobile Ad Network attracts more than 26 million unique users with over 450 million premium page views per month. The iPhone, which has experienced rapid growth across JumpTap’s ad network, offers over 260 million monthly premium impressions.”

A: I think the key here is really bringing together consumer interest to provide a high level of engagement in a premium content network.  We did do a study some time ago in Scandinavia which showed the increase in brand metrics of our network. In general, our click rates are above industry average. Certainly, I don’t know what our competitor click-through rates are, but we’re seeing [CTR] rates ranging from 2 – 15 percent, which is certainly high within the overall mobile advertising eco system.

Q: Why are you focused on exclusive deals with content companies in the pipeline?

A: The volume that we’re doing on the Premium Ad Network is 300 million premium page views per month. I think exclusive is very important because, if you’re a media buyer and you have four of five different ad networks selling your inventory, that just commoditizes it. Why? Because if I know that five ad networks are selling it, I’ll just call each and every one of them until I get the best price. So, we focus on exclusive relationships. In the platform I talked about [tapLink] it’s about taking input from multiple sources –  it could be search word query data, it could be browsing history, demographic information or location data –  whatever is passed to us from an operator or another publisher, to build relevancy.

NOTE: After the briefing Paran told me more exclusive deals are in the pipeline. He promised to let me in on the news early, so please check back.

Disclaimer: Maria Sanchez is an employee of Bango, an MSG supporter; JumpTap has sponsored an MSG podcast series.

I present my take in a guest column set to be posted on Friday at Mobile Marketer, a leading mobile advertising news site and MSG partner featured in the news feed section.

Mickey Alam Khan, Mobile Marketer Editor-in-Chief, was going to post my column earlier, but he decided to save the best for last – literally. As he put it: The strongest opinion piece gets the Friday slot (allowing it to stay up for three-day run). I am honored that Mickey feels my guest column qualifies,  and I look forward to the industry-wide discussion I hope it will inspire.

Until then, another worthwhile commentary on this controversial topic comes from esteemed colleague and MSG supporter Ajit Jaokar.

In addition to his views, which I detail below, he has a comment from Jeff Chester, CDD director, urging the mobile industry “to better inform the public about its business model, encourage a discussion and debate, and agree to reasonable safeguards designed to protect privacy and support consumer autonomy.”

(I agree with Jeff on all counts, and outline my position in my own column. However, I also suggest that education – not regulation- is the path that will get us there.)

Ajit also points out that our concern over privacy and consumer welfare – particularly youth – should not stifle innovation or experimentation. As he sees it: The report correctly places the needs of the consumer and the people above the needs of advertisers and commerce. (A good thing since Ajit also contends mobile impacts the psychosocial development of youth. Put another way, mobile is much more than a communication tool; it’s how youth shapes their individual identity.)

Hmmm – reminds me of the words of Marshall McLuhan, philosopher, educator and scholar of media theory: The technology we invent reinvents us. Thus, youth (and all of us) are becoming mobile, and mobile is also becoming a part of us…

At the same time, Ajit takes a brave stance and declares we must “protect youth but not patronize them.” As he observes, younger people will have a fundamentally different relationship with technology – and I would add they will also want to communicate with brands on their terms.

Overall, the complaint demonstrates the maturity and potential of the mobile data industry. Where does it go from here? The jury is out on this one – but the discussion is just starting, so please join in.

NOTE: I also encourage you to peruse Every Single One Of Us – a venture (in the words of founder Jonathan MacDonald) “dedicated more toward education than regulation that potentially undermines the principles and values of citizens, and is supportive of methodologies that promote citizen bias.”