Mobile Advertising: New rules for a new economy

I was in a meeting today, talking about mobile advertising, issues, opportunities, and why sometimes its so difficult to achieve in the UK.

In our paper Mobile as the 7th Mass Media (please email me for a copy. alanm (AT) smlxtralarge (DOT) com, we explain the issues and how effectivemobile advertising can work.

Examples are the MVNO Twins, Cyworld, and Superstable. All engaging their audiences around a need to participate, which translates into commercial interaction and trading. Get it wrong and you go down the pan.

The feedback I got today was we know how to drive Mobile Advertising, but the problem is clients who struggle with the paradigm shift of exactly what that means to them. And more importantly how to execute!

Credo 1

Mobile Advertising is not interruptive. It has nothing to do with the last 100 years of advertisng theory and execution. Period.

Credo 2

It has to have currency.

What does currency mean?

Well, what it means is that the recipient feels that what they have just received, via SMS, or MMS, or voice, etc., has a value quantifiable as (x). (x) is: valuable information, that engages me so that I want to extend the narrative (become more involved - engaged and, that I would want to share with my friends).

In our book we also describe how this happens, what drives ARPU, revenues and profits.

If on the other hand the recipient perceives the communication to be irrelevant, intrusive, not valuable the currency of x is lost. And negative advocay results. Lost revenues and lost prophets. Sorry thats a band.

Further, the principle of advertising at a certain level is not to monetise, it is to create awareness, and to induce a potential propensity to buy. Then we bring in the "below the line boys". This however has nothing to do with mobile.

Take engagemenjt on TV for example: the Audi Channel, which will not show up on any barb/media ratings, as its not Mass Media (sic) is seen by the people that watch it as having currency, and they are genuinely interested in Audi. This is a driver, and a proven one to revenues. I realise its not mobile, but it understands there is a currency for these viewers that has (x) value. Mass Media only exists as it does because it was once the most effective mechanism to drive consumption. Today however, companies should only be interested in those people that are truly interested in their offering and proposition. The question is how to find them? Sometimes they self-select if you enable that self selection process.

Initially, the Audi Channel was thought of as quite a minnow and irrelevant to the commercial needs of Audi UK. I suggest, that that perception has shifted.

As Alan Mitchell - someone who had a profound effect on what I think, once said...

If marketing were a thing in its own right would anyone want to buy it?

The answer to that of course is 99.9% NO.

The mobile ecology on the other hand is very different. As I try to explain to people, it is, like the internet a two way communication concept, platform and reality. It has absolutely nothing to do with display or interruptive advertising.

This means we have the opportunity to get creative and to reinvent what advertising is and how it functions today.

As Marcel Proust wrote

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

I urge the UK advertising and marketing industries to look out of a new window onto the world and grasp the importance and relevance of such an insightful observation.

We are witness to a rapid migration from traditonal economics and traditinal media to networked economics and networked media, The old rules don't apply.

Or as we like to say Engage or Die.

Comments

[Heike Scholz]

The Audi Channel is mobile: http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.co.uk/2007/09/audi-channel-co.html

N-Series only but mobile. ;)

[Alan moore]

Thanks Heike

BTW - we should hook up! :-)

Thanks for posting

Alan