Will Getting More Passionate About Mobile Advertising Deliver Profits? PLUS Reality-Check For Ad-Funded Content Schemes » mobilegroove

Between Mobile Advertising U.K and research and interviews I am conducting for MSG’s own MobiAD World Focus project, I am sharply focused on finding answers to the “big questions” in mobile advertising. The obvious question (Where is the money?) came up during last week’s European Mobile Media Conference in Prague. It’s not an easy one to answer, but Jonathan MacDonald, an esteemed colleague who also has a long track record in advising companies on their mobile strategies, was up to the challenge.

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?

Tags: Apple, Aspiro, behavioral targeting, C. K. Prahalad, co-creation, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Social Networks, Social Media Marketing, WPP, Xtract

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Mobile Marketing, Mobile Social Media, Personalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.