Things heat up, and not only because I am traveling South this week, more specifically to Dubai where, on Tuesday (1st), the Mindshare Media Summit 2011 will open its doors. It carries a heavy focus on marketing and media in a multi-screen world where screens and user experiences converge. The organizers have a great line-up of speakers, including:
- AKQA
- Nissan
- HSBC
- BBC Worldwide
- Yahoo!
- The MBC Group
- (of course) Mindshare
- The Arabian Radio Network
- and many more (including yours truly).
So if you would like to hook up in one of the most vibrant regions in the world, in one of the swankier settings and soak up some sun before the winter (if you live in the Northern hemisphere, that is), come by! 
Next week, I will be speaking at the 1st Apps Summit, a conference organized by the Conference Group in Wiesbaden (near Frankfurt). The event, which runs on 4/5 May, features high-profile speakers from the creme de la creme of German (and international) business, including:
- Otto
- Lufthansa
- Deutsche Post
- Axel Springer
- Avis
- HRS
- G+J
- Volkswagen
- Yahoo
- Admob
- Madvertise
If you’re close, come by. It should be great! The conference programme and more info are here: www.conferencegroup.de/m-commerce
I know, I know, there’s a ton of conferences out there at the moment but this one has some real goodies to offer. The Social Media World Forum packs a lot of stuff into one by running no less than five different streams (next to mobile, this is the general one, enterprise social media, social TV, and cloud computing). There is a Facebook Developer Garage to go with it, too.
It’s running on 15/16 March in London (Olympia).
I’ll be speaking on mobile & social, making a case for the gaming side of things but there are some others, too… 
Companies sending top-level speakers include:
- Mercedes Benz
- Mars
- Mattel
- Orange
- Vodafone
- Yahoo!
- Cisco
- IKEA
- DHL
- StudiVZ
- Netlog
- CBS
- BBC
- Fremantle
- Endemol
- Beck’s
- Lufthansa
- Shell
- ING
- Marks & Spencer
- Virgin Atlantic
- TalkTalk
- bebo
- Ecademy
I actually feel quite small now! Come along, it should be inspiring and entertaining. Tweet me @vhirsch to meet for a chat.
After all the buzz in the back-end of last year over the Google-led Open Handset Alliance and their Android OS, Yahoo! has now presented its own view on how to reduce the complexity within the mobile landscape by announcing a development platform for “mobile internet applications”.
It is, alas, not the full bag of tricks: Unlike Android, which is of course basically an OS, the Yahoo! scheme only foresees tools to allow the creation of widgets to run under the company’s Yahoo! Go mobile service or in any mobile web browser. This means that “mobile internet applications” in Yahoo speak do not include “classic” mobile applications (developed in J2ME, BREW, Symbian, etc, and then downloaded to a user’s phone), and the latter will not benefit from the initiative.
The question (and this may well be one of the big ones for 2008) is therefore if the (short) age of downloadable applications is already dawning. Because, unlike the Internet, mobile is a cluttered space with a gazillion operating systems and middleware layers on even more different devices competing for market share. Ease to port applications at least across handsets and ideally also across operating systems is therefore the crucial factor. Only if downloadable applications (including indeed a software package like Yahoo! Go) really are displaced by the mobile internet proper would this change.
Commentators note that Yahoo! Go is not normally available on handsets as most tier-1 operators will (and apparently each and every US carrier currently does) simply remove pre-installed applications prior to delivery to customers. However, this does not seem to matter too much as far as the new initiative is concerned as it is said to run on every browser, too. It may take away from discovery and therefore usage so this is where it appears to chip away on the benefits: Whilst the Yahoo! move would seem the much less complex initiative compared to Google’s attempts to take on the OS heavyweights, it comes at the cost of lower usability for users and also less actual benefit for developers: why would you develop for that platform if visibility, discovery, usage and therefore commercial reward are foggy at best?
I’m not convinced (yet).
It heats up but remains VERY fragmented: After Microsoft snatched up Massive and bought Screentonic, AOL now acquired Third Screen Media. Google has been invisible on this front but powers ahead with integrating many of its products onto mobile – and they (can) come with ads (see article and interview with their Director of Product Management, Deep Nishar, here). Yahoo! as well is getting its search products onto more and more carriers, a step to keep doors and screens open… Mighty Nokia announced its own service… Various carriers do it on their own (e.g. Sprint as per the report here). And then there’s a few first-generation “indies”, such as Greystripe and Actionality (indies for how long though?), Exit Games and IDG try the partnering approach – there is certainly a lot going on!
Is this all sensible or is it the silverbacks trying things out and some of the smaller players dressing up for a beauty parade and a big-buck exit by acquisition and/or running after the flavour of the month? AOL seems to think the former: their Chairman & CEO, Randy Falco said that “AOL is one of only four at-scale advertising businesses on the Internet, and the acquisition of Third Screen Media gives us a very strong position in the fast-growing mobile space. It also lets us offer advertisers a more complete set of solutions, from display advertising to search and now a superior set of mobile solutions.”
At the moment, the sector is all talk and little money. According to traditionally buoyant analysts Informa, 2006 saw $871m in ad revenue on the mobile platform (and they didn’t even tell what was comprised; I assume this includes SMS-based services which we can probably agree are pretty crude), others put it to half that (also see the overview on the fine GigaOM blog here). There is little doubt that the sector will grow exponentially but when, how and through which players is pretty much wide open.
Today, for MSFT, Google, Yahoo! et al, these acquisitions are largely insignificant as regards their impact on the P&L but they may well equip them with a much needed spearhead (and knowhow) in the new ad sector, mobile advertising.
If more and more players try to assert themselves, the question will arise which type of advertising model we will see: will it be syndication-driven as it is on the web or will you need to book your ads with every single media owner (as it is in print and TV). At the moment, even though one would/could argue that the mobile is merely a different iteration of online, it would seem as if they’re choosing the latter but then it is very early days.
The big issues are still somewhat unsolved as yet and they will arguably hinder quick implementation: white-listing of data services, so that the end user does not actually have to pay for the delivery of ads to his/her phone, is a big issue that will only be solved once data plans are truly open and not capped at [X] MB (as a few carriers now introduce, e.g. Orange). Many other issues, such as targeting users (relevance) and balancing ads (e.g. in-game; see interesting report here) need more robust solutions, too.
So at present I’d say: congrats to the likes of Massive, Third Screen, Screentonic, etc who have found a deep-pocketed corporate home and good luck and perseverance to all the others.
Mobile Marketing seems hot, even in this young blog where I commented upon it here, here and here already. Now though mighty MS moves again: Microsoft acquired Screentonic, a French mobile advertising firm. This follows their acquisition of leading NY-based in-game advertiser Massive a year ago (see here). Coupled with rumours around this ominous joint venture that sent Yahoo! shares soaring one wonders if MSFT is setting itself up for a true fight with Google.
Google of course has recently bulged up again with its DoubleClick acquisition, in particular as it was said to be interested itself (not that Google hadn’t done anything before: remember their Sky and MySpace deals). According to reports, Google is set to take 32% of the digital ad market this year, up 7% from 2006 (the report is not clear if that includes DoubleClick or not). Yahoo! came in at 18% in 2006 and Microsoft at a meagre 7%.
It is a very exciting space. However, when it comes to mobile advertising can I note that Google hasn’t really moved there yet? Implementing AdSense and AdWord on mobile might be tough as long as screen resolutions aren’t sooo great and data-inclusive plans still the exception but isn’t the absence of any action noteworthy? I think not, at least not at current (becasuse, let’s not forget, they are rather active when it comes to get themselves onto carrier decks as the search engine of choice).
Any move at current is a gamble: data plans can cost you anywhere from nothing to an arm and three legs, users haven’t shown to be taken to ads on the mini screens of mobile phones (unless they get immediate reward: see my blog post here). Microsoft’s explanations (which their GM of Digital Advertising Solutions gave to AdAge) aren’t uber-convincing, more middle-of-the-road talk about CPM, CPC and CPA… These are horrific for mobile at the moment. And mighty MS doesn’t reveal terribly deep insights into the space when they utter things like this when it comes to the carriers: “There’s definitely an economic relationship. I can’t tell you what those [revenue] shares are. Most of the mobile operators today basically look like a web portal on the mobile phone.” It is just that those operators today are more what AOL was in its heydays: they control the whole thing, including the access to the end user. And they do not provide the content, so you will need someone else in there, and, and, and. It might just not be just as profitable and rosy as people often say…
The hope always is that mobiles are the devices that make it easiest to target one-to-one. Fantastic! But the above shows that the jury might very well still be out.
So – as unfashionable as it might have become – Google may just have shown some smart thinking again: sit back (and comfy on their search cushion) unless you see a business unfolding that shows significance impact for your own business – and that would arguably have to be even more to merit such a move for Microsoft (that isn’t traditionally basing its business model on ad sales) than Google (that is).
