Mobile means creative, innovative, and… profitable?

Mark Challinor and his 3 guests: Jop Pollman, Jan Rezab and Tony Keavney gave some interesting examples of how to be creative, innovative, and make money with mobile devices.

No newsmedia company should underestimate the advantages that mobile technology brings. Just as the readers of printed newspapers migrate to the Internet, the migration from print and online magazines will be much faster. According to the Insight Research Corporation’s market research presented by Mark Challinor from g8wave Europe, there are 4 billion users expected to subscribe to mobile services by the year 2010 (more than 1 billion mobile were sold in 2007). But not only the mobile media / entertainment market is expanding. It seems that finally companies find the right use for mobile marketing:

• more than 15% out of 400 billion text messages exchanged each month are reported to be commercial messages,
• 89% of major brands are expected to advertise via mobile devices by 2008 – 40% of them have already used text messages for commercial reasons,
• 50% of major brands are expacted to dedicate up to 25% of their marketing expenditures to mobile operations.

According to the speaker there is a number of key factors that are expected to appear in the nearest future and that will help the mobile market continue its rapid growth. Among those key factors are:

• the deployment of advanced wireless networks (high-speed next generation networks),
• availability of mobile devices with multimedia capabilities,
• rapid growth of the number of wireless subscribers.

Mobile devices finally start proving great opportunities for media companies. Among them are: display advertising on mobiles in the nearest future, classifieds (already used by Chicago Tribune for instance), sponsored mobile searches and advertising-funded contents.

According to Mark Challinor, a newsmedia company nowadays simply has no other choice but to be inPaper/onLine/onMobile all at the same time. By comparing the internet to a supermarket, a mobile device could be compared to a local corner store.

The mobile internet market was also widely presented by Jop Pollman from Momac, a company specialized in building mobile websites. According to him, the mobile internet market is characterized by a strong growth and will triple by the end of 2013. Worth noticing is the trend of the growing number of people connecting to the mobile internet at least once a month:

Also, mobile advertising is on the rise. Adding an mobile website could help newsmedia companies frow their audiences by 3-5%. This is also due to the different dynamics of web and mobile platforms. Whereas desktop traffic is mostly on the rise between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. and then between 8 and 11 p.m., the mobile traffic rises all day long with most rapid growths around lunchtime (12 a.m. – 1 p.m.) and between 8 p.m and midnight (the browse of mobile internet in bedroom is higher at midnight than desktop browsing). This all gives great hopes for mobile publishing as a tool for news publishers to reach more audience.

Mobile internet simply has to become profittable as more and more consumers are interested in it. Around 8% of people worldwide use mobile internet every month. This number is growing fast, and is expected to surpass the number of fans of desktop browsing – said Jan Rezab from MLiven. In one year, the number of unique mobile users grew from 27,4 million in October 2006 to 32,3 million in October 2007. More and more companies decide to mobilise their websites (among most popular are Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo). The CNN mobile website was brought to attention as an example of good mobilisation (with all categories and features of regular website). Also, the QR codes (used by “New York Times” for example) were mentioned, as a great feature for mobile users, who, instead of typing a long URL link in their mobile browsers, can just take a photo of a two-dimensional bar code, which will then provide them with a clickable link to the desired website.

Jan Rezab predicts that mobile advertising will not differ much from web advertising, except for the fact mobile could give better possibilities for consumer targetting. It will not be fast money though, he said, and suggested that media companies should not just put the mobile website addresses in their newspapers and wait for readers to come. They should go beyond that (like for example “New York Times” with the QR codes). The content of the mobile website is also a tool to attract the readers. For European mobile users the most important content is weather, local/national news, and sports.

An innovative way to go further than the QR codes, was presented by Tony Keavney from SnapNow. It is a way that allows consumers instant content on their mobiles, directly from publishers, without any need to add or amend the publications (it means no QR codes taking space in the newspaper are needed). The way it works is that after the consumer snaps on advertisement or a commercial, the image is sent to a server where is transformed to a corresponding URL and sent back to the user’s phone. By building curiosity among readers (with slogans like “snap now, wait for the surprise), the publishers can easily link offline and online advertising. Even though this sounds rather futuristic, there is a number of titles that already implemented this technology (British part of Bauer is expected to test this innovation very soon).

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