Mobile companies are mostly selling tools now. Brands are about reaching consumers, audiences and technology is not interesting to advertisers.
IF you talk to people in the mobile industry, they’re all abuzz about mobile advertising. I’m not talking about SMS marketing – which is universally despised as spam of the most intrusive kind – but mobile display ads.
Mobile display ads are the mobile equivalent of banner ads that you see on websites. Just think of them as really tiny banner ads that appear on mobile sites. And what are mobile websites? They are basically special websites that are optimised for the mobile phone. If you want to view a few good ones, check out mobile sites belonging to BMW’s (www.bmw.mobi), Time magazine (mobile.time.com) and Facebook (m.facebook.com). If you’ll notice, all these sites load very fast and are easy to navigate even on a small screen.
Another name for mobile Internet is WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) which was much derided in 2000 when they first emerged. The reason was understandable. WAP sites then were black and white, had no graphics and were super slow (though that was due to lack of GPRS and 3G, not because of the protocol).
WAP 2.0, the current version of mobile web, offers a much closer experience to the World Wide Web. Based on xHTML rather than WML, WAP 2.0 gives you almost everything a website does. And so, browsing the web on your phone is now a more fulfilling experience.
Yet, you don’t see local vendors rushing into mobile display ads. And that’s because there are very few mobile websites around.
Question: “How do you advertise on a medium that barely exists?”
Answer: “With great difficulty.”
The mobile telcos don’t seem to realise this. They blabber on about the potential of mobile display ads without giving a hoot about how those ads can appear if there’s no medium for them to appear on.
This much was apparent to a young entrepreneur I spoke to who runs an online advertising agency. He told me he sees the potential in mobile (everybody does) but he asked, “Where do they appear on?”
It sounds like a stupid question but it isn’t. That young man realises what the big telcos don’t. You can’t have a mobile ad industry without the presence of mobile websites. And the telcos aren’t doing much about it.
Instead, they are content to make do with the traffic they get from their walled-garden WAP portals, which are actually more a conduit for ringtone and game downloads than for mobile web browsing. Such traffic is transient not sticky. And as such, is not attractive to potential mobile advertisers.
Let’s face it, the mobile web industry is not going to blossom organically. It needs a big player to fund its initial growth until it’s vibrant enough to stand on its own. The telcos are best positioned to do this. Let’s hope someday soon they will realise this.
By Oon Yeoh