Mobile Marketing vendors and Ad Agencies deserve each other
During the past year, various mobile marketing surveys have highlighted the various hurdles that Advertisers & Marketers face as they enter the Mobile arena for the first time. The usual suspects being, but not limited to; Lack of mobile education, poor reporting metrics, lack of technical standards, fragmented industry especially in respect to Cross-carrier media buys, etc..etc.. All of which has led to a well-deserved conclusion that Mobile needs to mature in various areas before it makes the “big time” as a major advertising channel.
Along these lines, the U.K. chapter of the MMA recently held a Forum for industry executives in London to discuss various Mobile topics including Mobile advertising. BIG props to MobiAdNews for their article entitled, “What Do Media Planners Really Want From Mobile?” - The panel which consisted of members from some of the leading Media companies (Mindshare, Publicis, GroupM and agenda21) - all reiterated these SAME aforementioned hurdles.
OK. Now those of us within the mobile industry especially those companies playing within the Software space have heard all of these comments for some time now. The big question is what are vendors doing to make things easier for Advertisers and Marketers? The business requirements are there for the taking!
YES! I completely agree with the argument that ingesting the requirements from say Media planners and building perfect solutions to meet their needs is going to be a daunting task due to the complex and immature state of the mobile ecosystem in the U.S. The Carriers, which hold the majority of mobile user data aren’t exactly opening their floodgates to vendors or advertisers at this time and I would argue that the quality and volume of their data is the “Holy Grail” motherlode for all in this market Space.
That said, there is no reason why we don’t see more strategic alliances between traditional Agencies and vendors to build out robust marketing platforms that display data in useful formats and integrate with other existing marketing platforms. Companies like iPSH and Velti come to mind with their respective relationships with OmniCom and InterPublic Group. ALSO - there is an opportunity for vendors to start to better leverage user data outside of the Carrier walls via industry research firms like Nielsen Mobile and MMetrics - PLUS I would recommend that vendors start leaning on their Aggregators to start exploring ways to share consumer usage data.
I’ll close by saying that vendors should also work with their Clients and the MMA to exert some more pressure on the Carriers to come up with ways to make a Cross-Carrier media buy possible, map out standardized metrics and allow for more transparency into current usage data.
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