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Mobiles are personal - we need to realise this
Alex Leslie - Oct 2, 12:43 PM
So says Andrew Grill, London Based Mobile Evangelist, who discusses why advertising needs to understand this – article courtesy of GoMoNews.
So why has Mobile Advertising not taken off the way we all expected? Why have we not been able to simply transfer what we know from the internet onto mobile?
I recently delivered a keynote presentation to 400 people in Amsterdam and tried to answer these very questions.
I asked all those assembled to hand their mobile to the person next to them, and then invited a complete stranger to go through their address book. Everyone shifted uncomfortably and watched their private lives unravel in front of their eyes. As expected, this experiment failed and the mobiles were handed back to their owner. The point that was made here is that the mobile is so incredibly personal –so why then do we allow a broadcast advertising mindset to invade such a personal medium?
The bottom line: So something is broken. But we need to understand what is broken first before we can attempt to fix it. We can start by pointing the finger of blame at ourselves. We fail to understand that mobile is mobile. It is different from all the media preceding it (cinema > radio > TV > Internet). It’s a new space with new rules.
Consider the introduction of TV. At first it was “radio with pictures” (because it followed and therefore built on the radio experience that preceded it). Advertising? In the early days of TV, this was limited to a live voiceover with a few shots of the product thrown in for effect.
And so are we about to repeat this mistake again? The mobile is widely regarded as just another screen (only smaller) and the mobile Internet is about delivering Internet content to mobile devices. I argue that mobile is much more than this, and it requires a new approach.
This becomes painfully obvious when we look at advertising. Internet advertising was all about getting the attention of the user with flashy graphics, banners, pop-ups, pop-unders and the like. We all got fed up with that rather quickly, which is why most browsers now allow us to block out banner ads.
We are tuning out because we can. And new technologies provide us new tools to make sure we only see what we want to see. To get our attention, advertising messages have to be relevant and genuinely useful. And here’s the one that changes all the rules: Advertisers have to ask before they sell. Listed below are some “mobile secrets” – things we all probably know but don’t want to admit.
Mobile secret #1 “Mobile operators don’t collect the information advertisers need”
Mobile operators and technology companies talk in terms of APRU, CPM and churn figures. Advertisers speak in terms of reach, frequency, brand values and gross rating points. This means that mobile operators don’t collect the sort of information that advertisers need such as gender, age and lifestyle preferences of their customers. Thankfully this I starting to change, but there is still a gap between what advertisers need and operators collect.
Mobile secret #2 “no-one ever got sacked for buying TV”
Unfortunately the “TV guys” in any media buying agency seem to always win out. Everyone knows that a well filmed commercial “sells stuff”. How much they actually sell, and who they sell it to is less understood however. Mobile has the opportunity to deliver the right ad, to the right person, at the right time – but the “big guys” in TV spend the entire ad budget and mobile only gets the scraps at the moment.
Mobile secret #3 “We’re a bit scared that mobile may expose the lack of transparency with TV ratings” – quote from an Ad executive
This is a real threat…….
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