How to monetize the mobile?
October 15, 2008 by marek.miller
Newspaper companies are building their mobile content and sales operations to catch the wave of consumers’ raising interest in mobile use, lucrative advertising budgets and growing subscription revenues.
Fredrik Oscarson
Fredrik Oscarson, Founder and VP New Business Director of Mobiento Mobile Marketing in Sweden spoke during the third session of WAN’s World Digital Publishing Conference: Digital Revenue Gold Mine in Amsterdam in October 15-16, 2008 about the necessesity of using the mobile platform by media companies.
He started with explanation of what the “big mobile buzz” is all about. There are many reasons why publishers should be interested in entering the mobile platform:
- Analysts predict the mobile market in 2011 will be worth 25 billion US dollars.
- The advertisers’ predict that mobile ads have all potential to upstand tv.
- Global reach of mobile devices is about 3,3 million devices.
- There has been a shift from messaging to multimedia, what means mobiles are finally being treated as a media channel.
- The penetration of mobile internet in Europe is 79% .
- 85% of mobile surfers are 18-44 yrs old.
The third generation of mobile phones becomes standard. Better and cheaper devices are coming to the market. Probably, in the nearest future, the mobile operators will consider introducing flat rate for data traffic. The main driver for such changes in mobile internet is iPhone – first device more dedicated more to internet browsing than anything else.
What does this all mean for advertising industry? It is simply a highly efficient channel. This efficiency is also proved by the 94% reading rate for SMS, and the clickthrough rate which is 2-10 times higher than regular links on desktop internet.
When publishers have difficult times setting the mobile strategies, that is when Mobiento comes into play. Fredrik Oscarson has a simple 3-step manual for publishers:
- Launch a mobile web site
- Drive traffic to it. From web site, from the print paper, from marketing, and from partnership with mobile operators.
- Monetize the traffic (by personalised advertising!)
The hardest part is probably point 2, and that is when creativity counts most. Here are 3 examples of typical campaigns by Mobiento:
- Snickers peanut challenge – a downloadable game for mobile devices (penalty shootouts). The game became so popular it reached 2,5 million kicks. It also used a viral effect of marketing - after reaching some level of points a user could send the game to one of his friends from his phone’s address book.
- H&M summer 2008. Mobile website where users could check the latest collection, and read fashion blogs. The target of women in special age was carefully selected. As a bonus for browsing the mobile site, the users received by SMS a mobile coupon for shopping.
- Visit Britain – London Calling. Mobile quiz with 7 questions – after answering the questions, the users would receive their profiles and after one more clic they could win a prize – a trip to London.
Media should use this knowledge and think about their mobile web strategy. Having something with such potential cannot be ignored.
Tagged: conference, innovation, mobile, WAN
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