Mobile and Technology

Insight: Advertising on mobile devices

Published: 05 Feb 2010

Insight: Advertising on mobile devices

Projections regarding advertising on mobile devices may have been disappointing in the past but the recent developments have raised hopes for a relatively bright future.

Companies such as Apple and Google have been in news for whole new mobile devices and buying up ad firms specialising in mobile advertising. Recently, mobile network operator Orange launched a new mobile advertising service that enables brands to engage and interact directly with targeted segments of Orange’s customer base in the UK. Orange Shots aims to help companies to benefit from real time conversations with customers, offering a highly targeted audience base with no wastage and an opportunity to build an engaging and enduring relationship with customers.

In another development, Google has unveiled a mobile feature that allows advertisers to add a clickable local phone number to mobile paid search ads.

From a travel company’s perspective, Steve Sherlock, Founder, car rental comparison site Oodles.com, says there are several challenges at this stage. Sherlock shared his thoughts and observations with EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta. Excerpts:

This year, we have already seen a couple of significant moves including one from Apple as far as mobile advertising is concerned. How do you foresee the impact on search and social media via mobile phones on the travel industry?

Steve Sherlock: I can imagine many travel companies are grappling with plans to move forward with mobile web and iPhone applications - not to mention Android platform applications.

There are already some very clever location-enhanced services for mobile phones that are travel related – for example, in Melbourne I regularly use a Tram Tracker iPhone application that tells me where the nearest tram stop is and when the next will arrive. By leveraging GPS, services such as this could serve up location- and context-specific advertising that would add further value. Think of the opportunities, for example, that location-specific advertising presents to organisations offering self-guided walking, drive or bus tours.

At the same time, leveraging social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook seems to be at the core of the telecommunication company’s smartphone marketing strategies. With my iPhone, for instance, I just started using Google Latitude, which allows me to see where my contacts are, provided they have a GPS and accept my invite.

Can you provide an insight into how search differs for mobile phones vis-à-vis PC? What, according to you, are the striking differences?

Steve Sherlock: For me search on mobile phone is for when you’re out and about; it’s all about convenience.

I think it’s still very early days, with many innovative applications to come for things we just never imagined.

Of course, some applications will be important; some will be a little more trivial.

Just the other day for example my brother and I set off for the traditional Australia Day BBQ. This annual event entails throwing some lamb chops on the “barbie”, drinking a few beers and saying “mate” every second sentence until you gain enough “Frequent Aussie” points to last you until the next Australia day. Given it was Australia day it was no surprise to find that literally all of Melbourne’s public BBQ’s were in use, with queues forming. After riding around in search of a BBQ for nearly an hour, it dawned on me that there must be an iPhone application that maps BBQ locations. There wasn’t! We eventually found a BBQ and ate our lamb, drank our beer and said “mate” a few times while we pondered how life will be next year with the BBQ finder application coming to an App Store soon.

What do you make of current trends as far as paid-for-search advertising on the mobile Internet and mobile display advertising are concerned?

Steve Sherlock: I think it’s still very early days.

Google’s recent acquisition of AdMob for a reported $750 million certainly made a lot of eyes widen.

If Google succeeds in getting more and more handset companies to adopt the Android platform then it would seem they’ll have a broad distribution for their mobile advertising strategy to be deployed on. I imagine this is where the AdMob acquisition will come into play.

One of the key differences between the PC-based Internet and the mobile web lies in the wide spectrum of capabilities of different handsets on the market. How do you think this poses a challenge to marketers and agencies as far as optimising budgets is concerned?

Steve Sherlock: From the perspective of fragmented mobile operating systems, this is a real drain on the development budget.

Currently, at Oodles we need to optimise and test our website for only a handful of browsers, including IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. With mobile handsets we could find ourselves optimising and testing for a plethora of variations, such as iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian, with each manufacturer having its own level of operating system customisation.

From a development perspective that all adds up to a lot of time, effort and money for an unknown return. My brain hurts just thinking about it!

What do you make of plans for the advertising fraternity to capitalise on the growing popularity of apps for iPhone, display advertising, and eventually search advertising?

Steve Sherlock: I see a problem with mobile advertising linking to sites that are not mobile web compatible.

For example, I do a search on Kayak.com’s mobile app which is impressive, and click on a Hotels.com ad which takes me to a normal website version - less impressive.

I understand, however, that it’s early days and as more and more advertisers have mobile websites this will improve. From a consumer perspective, the more relevance and consistency mobile web and iPhone app advertising is, the fewer users will get turned off by ads linking to non-mobile sites or linking to pages that are not relevant to the ad’s message.

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