Editor's Corner

I'm anticipating mobile advertising to be a hot topic of conversation at the CTIA Wireless 2007 event in Orlando. Although the conference is still a week away, the early buzz is strong and I've been contacted by lots of mobile advertising companies wanting to meet with me to talk about their "significant" deals. I'm wondering how relevant some of these new deals are--and how many are still just early experimentation. Are brands really ready to commit budgets to mobile advertising? And, perhaps more importantly, are wireless ad enablers and publishers ready to provide the relevant reporting information and metrics to those brands so they can measure the return on their mobile advertising investment?

Medio Systems jumped the gun on the CTIA news rush by making its announcement Monday. The mobile search firm launched its MobileNow Ad Network, which will drive ad placement on search results pages. The company's first customer is MVNO Amp'd Mobile. Omar Tawakol, chief advertising officer at Medio, says that he expects this approach to mobile advertising to produce value for consumers because it's more targeted than traditional mobile banner ads. "If someone is bothering to search on a mobile phone, they are not doing a research project," Tawakol says. "They are about to do something." Plus, Tawakol says that consumers don't see mobile search results as advertising, they see it as content. "It's an answer to a query," he says.

Nevertheless, mobile ad veteran Louis Gump, vice president/mobile at The Weather Channel, says that banner ads still dominate mobile advertising because this type of advertising is intuitive and easy for consumers (and ad buyers) to understand and use. And Gump should know: The Weather Channel consistently scores high on the lists of top mobile web sites. NPD named The Weather Channel the third most popular mobile web site visited in December and the No. 2 most-visited mobile web site visited in November.  "We can put a banner on a page and have consumers click-through to a destination," Gump says. "The mobile web is more flexible and similar to the PC, so it's an easier transition for ad buyers."

But Gump believes that the mobile web is just a launching pad for mobile advertising. Text messaging--which has the potential to reach a lot more consumers because more people send and receive texts vs. those that access the mobile Web--is promising. However, Gump says that brands are less certain about this mechanism because it requires a different mindset. Text messaging ads must be short and concise, sometimes no more than just a word or two.  He also thinks that mobile video advertising holds promise but that there is still work to be done on the length of the advertising spot (15 second or less) and the audience still needs to grow to make it attractive to more big-name brands.

Although early mobile advertising efforts are promising, Gump admits that the advertising ecosystem is still fragmented and there's not a clear, dominant model, at least not yet.  Some wireless carriers are playing an active role in selling their ad inventories, others are outsourcing that role to platform providers. When more of the CTIA mobile advertising news finally comes to light next week, it will be interesting to see how many of these "significant" mobile advertising deals clarify the mobile advertising ecosystem, and how many just muddle the picture. - Sue