Figures, figures...

Thomas Husson | March 15, 2007, 10:56 AM

I participated to the mobile 2.0 conference in Paris last Monday. I’ll come back to it later this month, but I just wanted to comment on figures that are often used by the industry or shown in presentations and conferences.

Mobile Advertising CTR >>> Internet

Apparently average click through rates on mobile (between 1 and up to 10% depending on campaigns) are much higher than on the Internet (between 0.5 and 1%), so mobile marketing & advertising is much more efficient than online campaigns.
Well, well,…Let’s stop comparing apples and oranges, those who browse the mobile Internet and use mobile search engines are early adopters and are not that numerous whereas the Web is a mass-market media with a large and fragmented audience. Let’s compare current mobile figures with Internet rates 10 years ago…As mentioned once my colleague Nate Elliott, marketing and advertising analyst, advertisers do not care about CTRs, they care about ROI !!! And it is dangerous for all those start-ups and mobile players to communicate heavily on CTRs since they will decrease over time !!!

However, it is true that mobile advertising has the long-term potential to enable sort of real 1to1 marketing since it is a truly personal platform allowing contextual and personalized campaigns (despite churn and multiple SIM ownership limitations), particularly on contract customers.

Close to 50% of mobile users strongly disagree with the idea to receive ads on their mobile phones even if relevant to them and even if it helps them save money. Precisely because no device is more personal than a mobile phone. No later than yesterday I received a call from a company that wanted to sell me some stuff. My first reaction was to ask: Who on earth did give you my personal number?
There is room for mobile advertising as long as it is based on opt'in, that is not intrusive, relevant and that there is a clear benefit to the end-user. The younger generation is much more willing to receive ads on their cell phones, with close to 33% of them saying they would agree to receive promotions and ads.

There are more phones sold than TV and computers so mobile TV and mobile Internet will soon be mass-market

There is an industry consensus that more than 1 billion phones will be sold globally in 2007. This is a impressive metric: it translates into close to 2.7 million phones sold…per day or roughly 32 phones per second !!

That’s impressive but only a very small fraction of them will enable a compelling mobile TV or mobile Internet experience.

I mentioned several times that I couldn't buy the idea that H3G Italy had reached 500,000 DVB-H users at the end of 2006, contrary to what I see regularly in presentations. This was the initial objective. Apparently, this has been officially confirmed yesterday by the operator: the final metric is slightly over 250,000 users*. I am still wondering how many pay the 29 euros package (mix of voice and data) and how many pay for a daily access in the Italian prepay market...not to mention the monthly churn

Figures, figures…

* updated: H3G Italy officially announced to have reached 400,000 DVB-H users as of March 22nd