5 mobile advertising "myths"

Thomas Husson | December 03, 2007, 05:39 AM

Last week I attended the IIR mobile advertising conference in Budapest. Good conference but as often with lots of vendors and operators familiar with the theme. When I asked people in the audience to raise their hands if they were an advertiser or an ad agency, only 2 people did...Probably highlighting the fact that demand for the mobile channel is still low.

After having pointed out 10 general mobile myths a year ago, here are in my opinion 5 frequent "myths" in today's mobile advertising nascent market:

1) Advertisers can target 100% of individuals in a one-to-one direct relationship. Reality is this 100% penetration rate is SIM-based. What advertisers are interested in are INDIVIDUALS not connections. Most individuals owning a mobile phone use it basically for voice and SMS, few for mobile media purposes. Even if you look at direct SMS push-messages, few consumers have opt'ed in to receive messages.

2) Mobile Internet users > PC Internet users. This relies as well on the idea that mobile phones being the fastest ever technology to be spread, mobile media will explode at the same pace. No doubt mobile phones are a volume industry with a huge potential reach. However, this specific point is essentially true in developing countries where PC ownership is low and fixed infrastructure inefficient. There will be in Europe a very significant growth in mobile Internet usage moving forward, but it will be used in a different context that the PC one. Also, even Yahoo! does not expect this global trend to happen before 2017.

3) Mobile Advertising soon > 10,000,000,000$. Some of our competitors have high expectations for this nascent market. However, I am not sure what stakeholders can make of such global figures that include everything (in some case, mobile broadcasting live TV even represent almost 50% of this multi-billion $ approach?). JupiterResearch will soon publish its own detailled forecast but for 17 European countries, focusing on net revenues for Mobile Internet Advertising. There is a tremendous long-term opportunity for mobile advertising but if you look at how ad $ slowly shift from print to Internet, advertisers are really slow to react to evolving consumers' behavior and usage patterns.

4) A triple-digit growth. Many stakeholders have seen a huge growth in their revenues recently. Not sure what that means when you start from a very low base. I would be more interested in absolute figures...

5) Mobile Internet CTRs >> PC Internet CTRs. This is true today but the analogy is largely irrelevant since:

• High mobile CTRs are essentially due to the early adopter audience profile of current mobile Internet users
• A decade ago when Internet was a nascent medium as well, CTRs resembled today’s mobile advertising CTRs
• Advertisers should be more concerned about their ROI in comparison to other media; this metric does not help them in driving their business and brands and which can only decrease over time.

Anyway, beyond these "myths", there are very exciting news and trends happening. If you want to know more about the way Jupiter assess this market, wait another couple of weeks and watch this space.

This weeks sounds interesting: will be at the Mobile TV conference in Berlin and will attend Nokia World in Amsterdam. More on this later this week.