By Oliver Newton, Head of Emerging Platforms, i-level.
1999 was a defining year, we heard the song line “Hit me baby one more time” for the first time and it was also the year that the online ad industry really got to grips with itself starting the journey that led it to overtaking TV earlier this year.
Britney came to the public consciousness, and whilst she has no doubt led to billions of searches and page impressions she wasn’t the real reason.
The real reason was that it was the year that the ad industry introduced third party ad serving and a standardised set of creative formats. These factors brought simplicity of planning, reduced costs and reporting certainty as to how the new world was going to look.
Fast forward 10 years and Britney is still a searched for term, and we again demand third party serving and standardised formats. Only this time, it is for a smaller device, a device that 47 million people in the UK carry with them every single day. That device is of course your mobile phone.
Without it mobile advertising will continue to be an underutilised medium for the masses, struggling to grow beyond 5% of total mobile revenue (IAB.)
So why don’t we just introduce third party ad serving then? Well the main reason is that the mobile operators won’t enable it. Operator side latency issues with ad servers mean that there is no guarantee that a third party ad will be shown to the end user rather than a blank space.
Ironically though, it is with the complete shift in mobile usage that is happening all around us (led by the iPhone and followed by android) that operators and their declining voice revenues most need to embrace new revenue streams. I’m not saying that overnight we will mobilise and suddenly the £30m of ad spend will rival online’s £1.75bn.
But if we were to jump ahead another 10 years, then yes, I think we will look back disbelievingly at a time when mobile adoption was almost 100% yet ad revenue was so stunted.
And we will probably be using our phone to swipe ourselves into the Britney comeback tour residency at the iPhone arena (formally the O2), but that is a different article.
Mobile is booming but operators are failing. The real winners are the new entrants to the market; iPhone, android and the developers behind the apps and services who are building the loyalty.
At the recent Westminster eForum ‘Future of Mobile’ event the constant theme was operators have lost control. One speaker went so far as to as to state that operators were simply a “dumb pipe for services”.
The operators are simply a necessary irrelevance (they connect my call and handle my billing), a commodity service with little user value to keep me tied in.
The ending of the iPhone exclusivity to O2 will prove just that. Orange and Vodaphone will both soon be selling it, (3 reckon they will have it at some stage next year), and we will see mass shifting of networks by subscribers.
Mobile internet usage has exploded, growing 28% to 11m people last year (comScore June ’09).
TV programs like the X-Factor with SMS voting mechanics are enabling the next generation who’ll experience direct advertising via mobile and the sheer number of sites being accessed mean that mobile advertising is ready to go, we just need to be able to measure and plan it as easily we can traditional online.
So please, let’s sort out the third party ad serving and give the planner buyers a standardised set of creative executions they can book. If we do, then the operators might actually start to make some money from mobile again.