Digital Media Buzz > Mobile advertising: Personalizing content for a greater payoff

Mobile advertising: Personalizing content for a greater payoff

Next Page « 1 2 3 »

Marketing hurdles
It’s important to remember that mobile advertising is in its infancy. In Internet terms, it is just coming out of a period comparable to the late ’80s, when proprietary dial-up services like Prodigy and a newborn America Online had just taken over from electronic bulletin board services. Hardware was primitive, content was primitive and the only thing certain was that a growing number of people were hooked on connecting their computers to others.

Likewise, the mobile device today is emerging from a long period in which its primary function was to make telephone calls. In the early days of the Internet, content was dominated by crude homepages (by today’s standards), and content from newspapers and television stations was shovelware — content from an old media, dumped wholesale onto a web page, with no recognition that it was a different user experience and audience.

Mobile devices are still in a fragmented, proprietary world, although the pace of standardization is picking up. Even for the most advanced smart phones in the near past, the wireless carrier has been the filter between the user and the Internet, converting web pages into something that could be viewed on wildly differing screens, resolutions and protocols. And most are not reliably able to accept the cookies and other tags normally used to track surfers.

From Nokia to iPhone to Android and Blackberry, devices are being developed with operating systems that more accurately render the web experience.

But it’s not the web of the desktop and laptop, and many marketers are failing to take that into account. While it has some similarities to the big-screen, non-mobile web, it’s different. And this has created a two-fold problem for marketers.

First, as in the days when it wasn’t clear which browser would be dominant, and there were no standards for HTML, marketers are faced with multiple platforms, multiple screen sizes and a variety of capabilities of devices’ operating systems. While advertising networks can tailor campaigns to particular devices, creating a campaign that works across multiple devices is difficult.

Second, while the cutting edge mobile devices can handle a wide range of media, there is little being developed specifically for the mobile device — especially the rich media for which it is enabled.  And in fact, while mobile advertising has a high click-through rate, the bounce rate for the landing page afterward is extremely high.

There are notable exceptions, but these underline the failure of many marketers to think past the first click, to make the landing page, or microsite called up by the click, engaging to the audience. Many advertisers just take the user to their regular website, a poor user experience.

“Mobile Advertising is enjoying a reputation for exceptionally high click-through rates compared to its web counterpart, but until now not much has been known about what happens ‘after the click through’ from a banner ad or SMS,” says James Cleary, CTO of Amethon.

“We believe that in order to leverage the potential of mobile advertising, brands and their providers can gain much from understanding behavior once a consumer lands on the microsite. This helps them focus on tangible campaign goals like competitions entry, content download and viewing key pages, rather than only click-throughs. The key differences between mobile analytics and traditional web analytics solutions include optimized measurement of mobile web activity, ability to track inbound campaign sources such as SMS and banner ads, and measure key conversion events such as a ringtone or video downloads.”

The mere utilization of shovelware, in other words, is useless. To capitalize on the promise of the high click-through of mobile advertisement, companies must develop mobile-specific microsites and landing pages that engage the audience.

The end game
The convergence of multiple media sources is evidently gathering at mobile devices. It is the one point of commonality between newspapers, radio, television and the Internet. It is pervasive, universal and personal.

Both the consumer and marketers have a stake in a system in which advertising and services are targeted to individual needs. In the overwhelming mass of data available, users have shown an affinity to information that narrow their choices, based on their particular circumstances.

On the advertisers’ end, providing prospective consumers with targeted, actionable information is the key to ROI.

Everybody wins.

Jon Donley, founder of three major metro newspaper websites, is a web consultant specializing in community engagement and next-generation models of journalism.  jon@dawnsinger.com.

Next Page « 1 2 3 »