Mobile advertising
Encyclopedia
Mobile advertising is a form of advertising
via mobile (wireless) phones
or other mobile devices. It is a subset of mobile marketing.
It is probable that advertisers and media industry will increasingly take account of a bigger and fast-growing mobile market, though it remains at around 1% of global advertising spent. Mobile media is evolving rapidly and while mobile phones will continue to be the mainstay, it is not clear whether mobile phones based on cellular backhaul or smartphones based on WiFi hot spot or WiMAX
hot zone will also strengthen. However, such is the emergence of this form of advertising, that there is now a dedicated global awards ceremony organised every year by Visiongain
.
As mobile phones outnumber TV sets by over 3 to 1, and PC based internet users by over 4 to 1, and the total laptop and desktop PC population by nearly 5 to 1, advertisers in many markets have recently rushed to this media. In Spain 75% of mobile phone owners receive ads, in France 62% and in Japan 54%. More remarkably as mobile advertising matures, like in the most advanced markets, the user involvement also matures. In Japan today, already 44% of mobile phone owners click on ads they receive on their phones. Mobile advertising was worth 900 million dollars in Japan alone. According to the research firm Berg Insight the global mobile advertising market that was estimated to € 1 billion in 2008. Furthermore, Berg Insight forecasts the global mobile advertising market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 43 percent to € 8.7 billion in 2014.
advertising (which has been estimated at over 90% of mobile marketing revenue worldwide). Other forms include MMS
advertising, advertising within mobile games and mobile videos, during mobile TV receipt, full-screen interstitials, which appear while a requested item of mobile content or mobile web page is loading up, and audio advertisements that can take the form of a jingle before a voicemail recording, or an audio recording played while interacting with a telephone-based service such as movie ticketing or directory assistance.
The Mobile Marketing Association
and the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau
) has published mobile advertising guidelines, but it is difficult to keep such guidelines current in such a fast-developing area.
The effectiveness of a mobile media ad campaign can be measured in a variety of ways. The main measurements are impressions (views) and click-through rates. They are also sold to advertisers by views (Cost Per Impression
) or by click-through (Cost Per Click). Additional measurements include conversion rates, such as click-to-call rates and other degrees of interactive measurement.
Mobile media can run on a mobile web page or within an mobile application, often referred to as in-App..
There are limitations rich media on mobile because all of the coding must be done in HTML5, since the iOS does not support flash.
, WAP 2.0). For color images, formats such as PNG, JPEG
, GIF
and BMP are typically supported, along with the monochrome WBMP format. The following gives an overview of various handset screen sizes and a recommended image size for each type.
Source: Mobile Marketing Association
invented a portable handset in 1973, when he was a project manager at Motorola
. It was almost three decades after the idea of cellular communications was introduced by Bell Laboratories. Two decades later, cellular phones made a commercial debut in the mass market in the early 1990s. In the early days of cellular handsets, phone functionality was limited to dialing, and voice input/output.
When the second generation of mobile telecoms (so-called 2G) was introduced in Finland by Radiolinja (now Elisa) on the GSM standard (now the world's most common mobile technology with over 2 billion users) in 1991, the digital technology introduced data services. SMS text messaging was the first such service. The first person-to-person SMS text message was sent in Finland in December 1994. SMS (Short Message Service) gradually began to grow, becoming the largest data service by number of users in the world, currently with 74% of all mobile subscribers or 2.4 billion people active users of SMS in 2007.
One advantage of SMS is that while even in conference, users are able to send and receive brief messages unobtrusively, while enjoying privacy. Even in such environments as in a restaurant, café, bank, travel agency office, and so on, the users can enjoy some privacy by sending/receiving brief text messages in an unobtrusive way.
It would take six years from the launch of SMS until the first case of advertising would appear on this new data media channel, when a Finnish news provider offered free news headlines via SMS, sponsored by advertising. This led to rapid experimentation in mobile advertising and mobile marketing, and the world's first conference to discuss mobile advertising was held in London in 2000, sponsored by the Wireless Marketing Association (which later merged into the Mobile Marketing Association). The first books to discuss mobile advertising were Ahonen's M-Profits and Haig's Mobile Marketing in 2002. Several major mobile operators around the world launched their own mobile advertising arms, like Aircross in South Korea, owned by the parents of SK Telecoms the biggest mobile operator, or like D2 Communications in Japan, the joint venture of Japan's largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo and Dentsu, Japan's largest ad agency.
became a new media - called the seventh mass media channel
by several media and mobile experts - and even more, it is a two-way mobile media, as opposed to one-way immobile media like radios, newspapers and TV. Besides, the immediacy of responsiveness in this two-way media is a new territory found for media industry and advertisers, who are eager to measure up market response immediately. Additionally, the possibility of fast delivery of the messages and the ubiquity of the technology (it does not require any additional functionality from the mobile phone, all devices available today are capable of receiving SMS), make it ideal for time- and location-sensitive advertising, such as customer loyalty offers (ex. shopping centres, large brand stores), SMS promotions of events, etc. To leverage this strength of SMS advertising, timely and reliable delivery of messages is paramount, which is guaranteed by some SMS gateway providers.
Mobile media has begun to draw more significant attention from media giants and advertising industry since the mid-2000s, based on a view that mobile media
was to change the way advertisements were made, and that mobile devices can form a new media sector. Despite this, revenues are still a small fraction of the advertising industry as a whole but are most certainly on the rise. Informa reported that mobile advertising in 2007 was worth $2.2 billion. This is less than 0.5% of the approximately $450 billion global advertising industry.
Types of mobile advertising are expected to change rapidly. In other words, mobile technology will come up with a strong push for identifying newer and unheard-of mobile multimedia, with the result that subsequent media migration will greatly stimulate a consumer behavioral shift and establish a paradigm shift in mobile advertising. A major media migration is on, as desktop Internet evolves into mobile Internet. One typical case in point is Nielsen
’s recent buyout of Telephia.
However it should be kept in mind that the rapid change in the technology used by mobile advertisers can also have adverse effect to the number of consumers being reached by the mobile advertisements, due to technical limitations of their mobile devices. Because of that, campaigns that aim to achieve wide response or are targeting lower income groups might be better off relying on older, more widespread mobile advertising technologies, such as SMS.
experiences. A key element of mobile marketing campaigns is the most influential member of any target audience or community, which is called the [Social marketing intelligence#Alpha_Users|Alpha User].
Some mobile carriers offer freebie or cheaper rate plans in exchange for SMS or other mobile ads. However, mobile TV and mobile search may override this privacy concern, as soon as they are implemented on a full-blown basis. In a naive way to override privacy concern, however, User’s prior consent needs to be obtained through membership to join or User account to set up. Both mobile TV and mobile search may supersede the way of getting Users’ prior consent through membership or User account because users are free to choose mobile TV channels or mobile search services on a voluntary basis.
This user-centric approach was noted at the 96th annual conference of Association of National Advertisers in 2006, which described ”a need to replace decades worth of top-down marketing tactics with bottom-up, grass-roots approaches”.
Many use 2d bar codes to make offline print material more interactive with their mobile device. This has been proven to be successful in Japan, UK, Philippines and has been catching on in Northern America.
In a broad sense, mobile devices are categorically broken down into portable and stationary equipment. Technically, mobile devices are categorized as below:
The battery life and safety issues will perhaps combine to eventually push mobile equipment’s inroads into vehicle dashtops. However, satellite-based GPS navigation and satellite radio may already hit a snag because of their part-time usage and technological hierarchy. Put differently, people want more functions than GPS navigation and satellite radios. The trend indicates an ongoing convergence into all-in-one dashtop mobile devices incorporating GPS navigators, satellite radios, MP3 players, mobile TV, mobile Internet, MVDER (vehicle black box), driving safety monitors, smartphones and even video games.
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
via mobile (wireless) phones
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
or other mobile devices. It is a subset of mobile marketing.
Overview
Some see mobile advertising as closely related to online or internet advertising, though its reach is far greater - currently, most mobile advertising is targeted at mobile phones, that came estimably to a global total of 4.6 billion as of 2009. Notably computers, including desktops and laptops, are currently estimated at 1.1 billion globally.It is probable that advertisers and media industry will increasingly take account of a bigger and fast-growing mobile market, though it remains at around 1% of global advertising spent. Mobile media is evolving rapidly and while mobile phones will continue to be the mainstay, it is not clear whether mobile phones based on cellular backhaul or smartphones based on WiFi hot spot or WiMAX
WiMAX
WiMAX is a communication technology for wirelessly delivering high-speed Internet service to large geographical areas. The 2005 WiMAX revision provided bit rates up to 40 Mbit/s with the 2011 update up to 1 Gbit/s for fixed stations...
hot zone will also strengthen. However, such is the emergence of this form of advertising, that there is now a dedicated global awards ceremony organised every year by Visiongain
Visiongain
Visiongain is a British research company that provides analysis of the worldwide Telecoms, Pharmaceutical, Energy, Metals and Defence industries. The company focuses on business reports and international conferences, and provides a daily news service...
.
As mobile phones outnumber TV sets by over 3 to 1, and PC based internet users by over 4 to 1, and the total laptop and desktop PC population by nearly 5 to 1, advertisers in many markets have recently rushed to this media. In Spain 75% of mobile phone owners receive ads, in France 62% and in Japan 54%. More remarkably as mobile advertising matures, like in the most advanced markets, the user involvement also matures. In Japan today, already 44% of mobile phone owners click on ads they receive on their phones. Mobile advertising was worth 900 million dollars in Japan alone. According to the research firm Berg Insight the global mobile advertising market that was estimated to € 1 billion in 2008. Furthermore, Berg Insight forecasts the global mobile advertising market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 43 percent to € 8.7 billion in 2014.
Types of mobile ads
In some markets, this type of advertising is most commonly seen as a Mobile Web Banner (top of page) or Mobile Web Poster (bottom of page banner), while in others, it is dominated by SMSShort message service
Short Message Service is a text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices...
advertising (which has been estimated at over 90% of mobile marketing revenue worldwide). Other forms include MMS
Multimedia Messaging Service
Multimedia Messaging Service, or MMS, is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from mobile phones. It extends the core SMS capability that allowed exchange of text messages only up to 160 characters in length.The most popular use is to send photographs from...
advertising, advertising within mobile games and mobile videos, during mobile TV receipt, full-screen interstitials, which appear while a requested item of mobile content or mobile web page is loading up, and audio advertisements that can take the form of a jingle before a voicemail recording, or an audio recording played while interacting with a telephone-based service such as movie ticketing or directory assistance.
The Mobile Marketing Association
Mobile marketing association
The Mobile Marketing Association is a global non-profit trade association established to foster growth of mobile marketing. The MMA's stated goals are to clear obstacles to market development, establish mobile media [guidelines and best practices] for sustainable growth, and evangelize the use of...
and the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau
Interactive Advertising Bureau
The Interactive Advertising Bureau is an advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry. The organization represents a large number of the most prominent media outlets in the United...
) has published mobile advertising guidelines, but it is difficult to keep such guidelines current in such a fast-developing area.
The effectiveness of a mobile media ad campaign can be measured in a variety of ways. The main measurements are impressions (views) and click-through rates. They are also sold to advertisers by views (Cost Per Impression
Cost Per Impression
Cost per impression, often abbreviated to CPI or CPM for Cost per thousand impressions, is a phrase often used in online advertising and marketing related to web traffic. It is used for measuring the worth and cost of a specific e-marketing campaign. This technique is applied with web banners,...
) or by click-through (Cost Per Click). Additional measurements include conversion rates, such as click-to-call rates and other degrees of interactive measurement.
Mobile media can run on a mobile web page or within an mobile application, often referred to as in-App..
Mobile Rich Media
In addition to standard mobile display banners, a growing trend is to include rich media execution within the banner ads. This includes banners that would expand to a larger size, offering advertisers a larger display to communicate their message. Games within the banner to make the experience more interactive or a video within the banner space.There are limitations rich media on mobile because all of the coding must be done in HTML5, since the iOS does not support flash.
Handsets display and corresponding ad images
There are hundreds of handsets in the market and they differ by screen size and supported technologies (e.g. MMSMultimedia Messaging Service
Multimedia Messaging Service, or MMS, is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from mobile phones. It extends the core SMS capability that allowed exchange of text messages only up to 160 characters in length.The most popular use is to send photographs from...
, WAP 2.0). For color images, formats such as PNG, JPEG
JPEG
In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
, GIF
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability....
and BMP are typically supported, along with the monochrome WBMP format. The following gives an overview of various handset screen sizes and a recommended image size for each type.
| Handset | Approx Handset Screen Size (px W x H) | Example Handsets | Ad Unit | Ad Size (pixels) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| X-Large | 320 x 320 | Palm Treo 700P, Nokia E70 | X-Large | 300 x 50 |
| Large | 240 x 320 | Samsung MM-A900, LG VX-8500 Chocolate, Sony Ericsson W910i | Large | 216 x 36 |
| Medium | 176 x 208 | Motorola RAZR, LG VX-8000, Motorola ROKR E1 | Medium | 168 x 28 |
| Small | 128 x 160 | Motorola V195 | Small |
History
Martin CooperMartin Cooper
Martin Cooper is an American former Motorola vice president and division manager who in the 1970s led the team that developed the handheld mobile phone ....
invented a portable handset in 1973, when he was a project manager at Motorola
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...
. It was almost three decades after the idea of cellular communications was introduced by Bell Laboratories. Two decades later, cellular phones made a commercial debut in the mass market in the early 1990s. In the early days of cellular handsets, phone functionality was limited to dialing, and voice input/output.
When the second generation of mobile telecoms (so-called 2G) was introduced in Finland by Radiolinja (now Elisa) on the GSM standard (now the world's most common mobile technology with over 2 billion users) in 1991, the digital technology introduced data services. SMS text messaging was the first such service. The first person-to-person SMS text message was sent in Finland in December 1994. SMS (Short Message Service) gradually began to grow, becoming the largest data service by number of users in the world, currently with 74% of all mobile subscribers or 2.4 billion people active users of SMS in 2007.
One advantage of SMS is that while even in conference, users are able to send and receive brief messages unobtrusively, while enjoying privacy. Even in such environments as in a restaurant, café, bank, travel agency office, and so on, the users can enjoy some privacy by sending/receiving brief text messages in an unobtrusive way.
It would take six years from the launch of SMS until the first case of advertising would appear on this new data media channel, when a Finnish news provider offered free news headlines via SMS, sponsored by advertising. This led to rapid experimentation in mobile advertising and mobile marketing, and the world's first conference to discuss mobile advertising was held in London in 2000, sponsored by the Wireless Marketing Association (which later merged into the Mobile Marketing Association). The first books to discuss mobile advertising were Ahonen's M-Profits and Haig's Mobile Marketing in 2002. Several major mobile operators around the world launched their own mobile advertising arms, like Aircross in South Korea, owned by the parents of SK Telecoms the biggest mobile operator, or like D2 Communications in Japan, the joint venture of Japan's largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo and Dentsu, Japan's largest ad agency.
Mobile as media
This unobtrusive two-way communications caught the attention of media industry and advertisers as well as cellphone makers and telecom operators. Eventually, SMSSMS
SMS is a form of text messaging communication on phones and mobile phones. The terms SMS or sms may also refer to:- Computer hardware :...
became a new media - called the seventh mass media channel
Seven mass media
The seven mass media, or often used as "seventh mass media channel", to draw attention to the latest mobile phones as a mass media, are a new concept and neoliberalism to distinguish the major mass media channels and highlight their relative merits and benefits...
by several media and mobile experts - and even more, it is a two-way mobile media, as opposed to one-way immobile media like radios, newspapers and TV. Besides, the immediacy of responsiveness in this two-way media is a new territory found for media industry and advertisers, who are eager to measure up market response immediately. Additionally, the possibility of fast delivery of the messages and the ubiquity of the technology (it does not require any additional functionality from the mobile phone, all devices available today are capable of receiving SMS), make it ideal for time- and location-sensitive advertising, such as customer loyalty offers (ex. shopping centres, large brand stores), SMS promotions of events, etc. To leverage this strength of SMS advertising, timely and reliable delivery of messages is paramount, which is guaranteed by some SMS gateway providers.
Mobile media has begun to draw more significant attention from media giants and advertising industry since the mid-2000s, based on a view that mobile media
Mobile media
The mobility and portability of media, or as Paul Levinson calls it in his book Cellphone, “the media-in-motion business” has been a process in the works ever since the “first time someone thought to write on a tablet that could be lifted and hauled – rather than on a cave wall, a cliff face, a...
was to change the way advertisements were made, and that mobile devices can form a new media sector. Despite this, revenues are still a small fraction of the advertising industry as a whole but are most certainly on the rise. Informa reported that mobile advertising in 2007 was worth $2.2 billion. This is less than 0.5% of the approximately $450 billion global advertising industry.
Types of mobile advertising are expected to change rapidly. In other words, mobile technology will come up with a strong push for identifying newer and unheard-of mobile multimedia, with the result that subsequent media migration will greatly stimulate a consumer behavioral shift and establish a paradigm shift in mobile advertising. A major media migration is on, as desktop Internet evolves into mobile Internet. One typical case in point is Nielsen
Nielsen
Nielsen , is a Danish patronymic surname, literally meaning son of Niels, Niels being the Danish version of the Greek male given name Νικόλαος, Nikolaos . It is the second most common surname in Denmark, shared by about 5% of the population. It is also used in Norway, although the form Nelsen and...
’s recent buyout of Telephia.
However it should be kept in mind that the rapid change in the technology used by mobile advertisers can also have adverse effect to the number of consumers being reached by the mobile advertisements, due to technical limitations of their mobile devices. Because of that, campaigns that aim to achieve wide response or are targeting lower income groups might be better off relying on older, more widespread mobile advertising technologies, such as SMS.
Viral marketing
As mobile is an interactive mass media similar to the internet, advertisers are eager to utilize and make use of it [viral marketing] methods, by which one recipient of an advertisement on mobile, will forward that to a friend. This allows users to become part of the advertising experience. At the bare minimum mobile ads with viral abilities can become powerful interactive campaigns. At the extreme, they can become engagement marketingEngagement marketing
Engagement marketing, sometimes called "experiential marketing," "event marketing", "live marketing" or "participation marketing," is a marketing strategy that directly engages consumers and invites and encourages consumers to participate in the evolution of a brand...
experiences. A key element of mobile marketing campaigns is the most influential member of any target audience or community, which is called the [Social marketing intelligence#Alpha_Users|Alpha User].
Privacy concern
Advocates have raised the issue of privacy. Targeted mobile marketing requires customization of ad content to reach interested and relevant customers. To customize such behavioral personal data, user profiling, data mining and other behavior watch tools are employed, and privacy advocates warn that this may cause privacy infringement.Some mobile carriers offer freebie or cheaper rate plans in exchange for SMS or other mobile ads. However, mobile TV and mobile search may override this privacy concern, as soon as they are implemented on a full-blown basis. In a naive way to override privacy concern, however, User’s prior consent needs to be obtained through membership to join or User account to set up. Both mobile TV and mobile search may supersede the way of getting Users’ prior consent through membership or User account because users are free to choose mobile TV channels or mobile search services on a voluntary basis.
Interactivity
Mobile devices aim to outgrow the domain of voice-intensive cellphones and to enter a new world of multimedia mobile devices, like laptops, PDA phones and smartphones. Unlike the conventional one-way media like TV, radio and newspaper, web media has enabled two-way traffic, thereby introducing a new phase of interactive advertising, regardless of whether static or mobile.This user-centric approach was noted at the 96th annual conference of Association of National Advertisers in 2006, which described ”a need to replace decades worth of top-down marketing tactics with bottom-up, grass-roots approaches”.
Many use 2d bar codes to make offline print material more interactive with their mobile device. This has been proven to be successful in Japan, UK, Philippines and has been catching on in Northern America.
Mobile device issues
Coincidentally, however, mobile devices are encountering technological bottlenecks in terms of battery life, formats, and safety issueIn a broad sense, mobile devices are categorically broken down into portable and stationary equipment. Technically, mobile devices are categorized as below:
- Handheld [portable]
- Laptop, including ultraportable [portable]
- Dashtop, including GPS navigation, satellite radio, and WiMAX-enabled dashtop mobileDashtop mobileDashtop mobile equipment refers to wireless mobile devices mounted on the vehicle dashboard. Dashtop mobile equipment includes satellite radios, GPS navigation, OnStar, mobile TV, HD radio, vehicle tracking system, MVEDR and Broadband Wireless Access devices. Currently, the dashtop mobile devices...
payment platforms[fixed on dashboards]
The battery life and safety issues will perhaps combine to eventually push mobile equipment’s inroads into vehicle dashtops. However, satellite-based GPS navigation and satellite radio may already hit a snag because of their part-time usage and technological hierarchy. Put differently, people want more functions than GPS navigation and satellite radios. The trend indicates an ongoing convergence into all-in-one dashtop mobile devices incorporating GPS navigators, satellite radios, MP3 players, mobile TV, mobile Internet, MVDER (vehicle black box), driving safety monitors, smartphones and even video games.