Amethon Insights

Mobile Internet Portal Strategies (MIPS) Wrapup

Just got back from a whirlwind week in London having participated in the MIPS 08 conference as well as meeting with a number of customers and potential customers. It was inspiring but also tiring as I spent 2 of 7 days at the back of a Boeing 747!

The conference was disappointing in terms of attendance given the strength of the agenda and speaker list. There was around 40 participants made up of operators and content publishers with a few vendors thrown in for good measure.

There was cautious optimism on the growth of mobile internet use but general agreement that useability was a key issue which covered a range of potential barriers such as price perception, handset configuration, content rendering and user interface design.

Operators and content publishers parried over the role of the operator portal vs the attractiveness of off-deck content but both parties acknowledged the importance of each other in the

A number of other themes were also discussed including:

• The need to dynamically and intelligently optimise content depending on the handset
• The emergence of mobile advertising as a geniune monetisation strategy, for both operators and off-deck content publishers
• The opportunity presented by emerging countries such as India and China where people have more ready access to the internet via their mobile phone compared with a fixed PC
• The need for accurate and relevant analytics to support ad-funded business models as well as help content publishers to understand how subscribers are interacting with their sites

From a personal perspective, I also met some great people who are doing really interesting things in mobile!

Mobile Internet Portal Strategies

I am pleased to advise that I have been invited to participate on a panel discussion at the Mobile Internet Portal Strategies conference in London on 20 - 21 May.

The topic of the discussion is as follows:

INTERACTIVE ROUND TABLE: Creating Usable Content for the Mobile Web and its Portals: Understanding Mobile-Optimised Sites, Content Translation and Adaptation... and How these Technologies Affect Your Strategy

• Realities of working within the complex mobile web environment - browser/portal variation, divided interests, nascent standards
• Understanding the challenges posed by content translation and rendering:
  • White-listing
  • user agent changes, - communication between operators and developers
• Best practice for mobile optimised sites
• HTML and xHTML in the mobile sphere - roadmaps, current realities, and what this means to your strategy

The conference agenda looks fantastic and they have secured a great selection of speakers, especially from the operator community.

I am particularly pleased that this particular topic is on the agenda as it emerging as a bit of a David vs Goliath battle between some of the big operators (Vodafone UK, Sprint Nextel) and the broader mobile content development community.

If you want to know the full story, check out the campaign that Luca Pisani is running over at WURFL. Better still, understand the issues and sign up to the manifesto!

Drop me a note if you are attending this conference as I am always keen to meet and discuss.

CTIA Wireless Wrapup

Its been a whirlwind past few weeks starting with CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas followed by trips to New York, Washington DC, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

CTIA Wireless was a great experience and I had a chance to talk with lot of companies who are doing great things in mobile. My focus was on content and services that could benefit from our Mobile Analytics solution and there were plenty of those!

The two largest categories were Mobile Social Networking and Mobile Site Builders. Both require analytics to support their business models:

• Social networking sites need to understand how people are using the site and need to provide accurate and relevant metrics to advertisers.
• Site builders need to be able to provide their clients with analytics since client will be unable to implement their own system.

A lot of these companies are now looking for an analytics solution and they were pleased to hear that we had a solution that fits both of these business models. It was surprising that they had gone for so long without an analytics solution but the simple fact is that there has not been a mobile specific package available up until now.

Most companies realised that Google Analytics won't work and have tried analysing log files but soon realised that standard log analysis packages do not take into account the complexities and challenges of measuring mobile browsing activity.

Some companies are gathering relevant usage data within the database but do not have the skills, experience or resources to develop the reporting front end. They typically have a few queries to provide the most obvious metrics but realise the work involved to report on a full suite of analytics.

My other trips within the US were meetings with some of the 'big guys' within the broader online space who are now starting to mobilise their content. It was interesting to see that none of these companies are using mainstream, commercial web analytics solutions, even for their web assets. They have all developed internal tools which they are starting to apply to their mobile content but realise there are differences between web and mobile that will need to be addressed. 

See you at CTIA Wireless!

The USA is a key market for Amethon, especially given the strong interest from operators, content publishers and digital agencies on mobile advertising.

I am heading over to the US to attend CTIA Wireless and would be keen to catch up with anyone interested in discussing the wireless content and mobile advertising industries in the US.

After CTIA Wireless, I will be heading over to New York and then back over to the West Coast.

Drop me a note at michael.stone(at)amethon.com and hopefully we can catch up!

Is Social Networking the Killer App for Mobile?

Quite a few start ups seem to think so if a recent article in the New York Times is anything to go by.

If you think about it, the mobile device is the perfect medium for social networking for a number of reasons:

From the end user's perspective, the mobile phone is always with you. Why wait until you get to a PC to learn that "Matt is contemplating lunch"? I myself am guilty of updating my status to "Michael is using Facebook on his mobile!". It also means that cameraphone shots can be uploaded immediately and from a business perspective, a client's personal life can be investigated just before you walk into a meeting.

From the startup's perspective, it is about the potential advertising revenues. Mobile phones are highly personal compared with a PC which may be used by multiple people in the same family. Combine this with the demographic and preference information you provide when signing up to a social network site means a perfect channel for targetted advertising.

A recent study by Nielsen Mobile shows just how prevalent mobile advertising has now become with 23% of US mobile subscribers having seen an ad on their screens in the previous month and almost half of those claiming to have responded to at least one mobile ad. While these numbers sound impressive, they are based on a survey of  22,000 "active mobile data users who used at least one non-voice mobile service in the fourth quarter" so perhaps it is not really a statistically representative sample?

Now don't get me wrong, I am not skeptical about mobile advertising and its ability to drive investment in compelling applications, services and content. What I am highlighting is the missing piece in this puzzle - accurate numbers.

Mobile social networking sites will not be able to properly monetise their subscriber base without accurately communicating subscriber activity to advertisers. Everyone can talk about 'registered users', but this will overstate the potential audience if the number of social network sites that I have signed up to  (but never visit) is anything to go by.

What advertisers need are measures such as page impressions, average session time and unique visitors, and most importantly, these need to be accurate!

Since many mobile devices will not support cookies, unique visitors and sessions times can be problematic. Tracking pixels also tend to under count due to image caching by both the handset and the WAP gateway - we typically see errors of around 30% - 35% when comparing our wireline capture technique with page tagging of this type...

So where does this leave mobile social networking? Their biggest competitive threat is not from each other but from the established web players - Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. They all now have mobile versions of their sites, they have existing advertiser relationships and they have enormous and active subscriber bases.

 

Mobile Analytics Hots Up!

It is amazing how quickly this industry moves! While we have been heads down, bums up, launching our Mobile Analytics solution, securing customers and rolling out new releases, analytics for the mobile internet has suddenly matured to the point where there are 4 specialist players in the market and people are doing product reviews.

So why Mobile Analytics from Amethon?

• Optimized for Mobile: We have done a lot of research into how mobile devices and mobile networks differ from the fixed internet in order to maximise accuracy in areas like unique visitor counts, handset identification, operator identification, bot detection and filtering, and filtering PC browsing from mobile browsing.
• Mobile Specific Metrics: With the wide variety of mobile devices, mobile browsers and capabilities, it is important to know what sort of phones are using your site and what capabilities they have. We also breakdown mobile operator and country of origin which is critical for assessing the success of on-deck referrals, etc.
• Search Terms and Referrers: Page tagging solutions using a image tag or similar cannot capture referrer and search term information. Our solution tracks and reports all of this information to help you calculate the ROI from affiliates, ad placement and paid search.
• No Page Weight or Latency: Our off the wire capture method relies on analysing a mirrored copy of the HTTP traffic requiring no additional code to be added to the page. Once our system is deployed, it automatically starts analysing all of your pages without having to go through the effort of tagging them. Page tags also add 'weight' to the page which slows download speed and increases the data cost to the end users. The end users also has to wait for the tag to be delivered so what happens if the page tag server is busy...
• Near Real Time Reporting: Rather than waiting 24 hours for you stats, how about 5 minutes? That is the refresh cycle for our Mobile Analytics platform, irrespective of traffic levels. We are also able to provide 'live' visitor information i.e. who is browsing the site now, what pages have they viewed, what search terms brought them to your site, etc.

This is definitely a positive step for everyone in the industry as it raises awareness of how different the mobile internet is from normal PC based browsing and why AWStats, Google Analytics and other web-centric analytics solutions just won't give the right results or relevant information.

‘So how big is it?’ – The challenges and opportunities of measuring off-deck by Michael Stone

In my previous blog article, I mentioned mobile banner ads as one of the key forms of Mobile Advertising. What I forgot to mention was that it be a key driver in the growth of mobile internet outside the Operator’s portal, known as off-deck.

As mobile operators open up the walled garden and allow their subscribers to browse any site on the internet, we are seeing all of the major internet publishers scramble to ‘mobilise’ their existing content assets providing a much larger range of content and services to the mobile subscriber compared to their operator’s portal. The question is, are subscribers actually going off-deck and where exactly are they going?

This question is not asked out of curiosity but because understanding the size and extent of off-decl mobile browsing is fundamental to growing our industry. It starts with the content and media owners who gauge their investment in mobile based on its perceived effectiveness as a delivery channel to consumers. It then drives agencies and brands to pay content and media owners to host mobile advertising or sponsor services on the assumption that they can engage potential customers. You only have to look at the structured approach to television ratings to realize how independent and transparent measurement drives investment in both the content itself (TV shows and movies) and the associated advertising.

Measurement can also assist us as an industry to identify areas for improvement to drive uptake and usage of the mobile internet even higher. In particular, it can help to uncover the problems and barriers to mobile browsing which can be addressed through consumer or industry education campaigns.

So it is pretty clear that being able to measure off-deck browsing activity is fundamentally important for our industry – the next question is how do we do it?

The answer is that it is much easier than for the internet or even TV, and the results of this measurement is potentially much more accurate and informative.

All off-deck and on-deck mobile browsing in Australia goes through four points, the networks of our mobile operators (Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and Hutchison), compared with the hundreds of ISP’s and millions of televisions measured by internet and TV ratings.  Both internet and television measurement rely on representative samples to develop industry statistics, however by measuring at these four points, we are able to see and measure every mobile browsing event in the country.

The personal nature of a mobile phone also increases the validity and accuracy of this type of measurement. Whereas all family members might use a given PC or watch the same television, each mobile phone invariably corresponds to an individual subscriber.

Furthermore, every operator has extensive demographic and segmentation information on their customer base, especially post-paid subscribers. Information gathered during signup of the subscriber typically includes gender, age, address and employment status. Combined with their usage patterns, each mobile subscriber can be categorised within the operator’s specific segmentation model which may include types such as early adopters, mature achievers or young sociables.

All this sounds fantastic but what do we need to do to make this happen?

The Mobile Industry Development group within Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) has established a Mobile Measurement initiative to further explore these possibilities and work with the operators and the rest of the industry to realise this opportunity. It will also focus on ensuring that the privacy and rights of consumers are protected given the sensitive nature of this information. Technically there are a number of options including aggregating statistics already gathered by the operators or deploying specific platforms such as Amethon’s Portal Analytics solution. It is early days for the mobile internet and our Mobile Measurement initiative but stay tuned for more information on both!

In conclusion, the mobile industry has the potential to provide measurements and statistics to media publishers, content owners, advertisers and brands with greater completeness, accuracy and relevance than any other communications channel. This will drive both investment in our industry as well as improvement to the services and products being offered to consumers, which are exactly the sorts of outcomes that the AIMIA Mobile Industry Group is seeking.

Big plans for the small screen by Michael Stone

Mobile marketing and advertising has really started to gain some traction in the broader media over the past few months. In 2006, Yankee Group forecast the mobile ad market to more than quadruple to US$275m in 2007 and eventually increase to US$2.2bn in 2010, up from an estimated US$60m in 2006. A more recent forecast from Strategy Analytics is even more bullish suggesting that advertisers will spend US$1.4 billion on mobile media this year, rising to US$14.4 billion by 2011. They predict that mobile media advertising will account for a fifth of global spending on Internet advertising by 2011. Abi Group has also forecast some impressive numbers with their 2011 figure topping US$19b including mobile search and video advertising.

As a key application and driver for both Content Fingerprinting and Portal Analytics, this has definitely been music to our ears but it is worth taking a step back to try and put some of the hype into perspective.

We are seeing a number of general themes emerging in terms of how to leverage mobile phones as channel for advertising and marketing.

1. SMS to win/SMS to register interest: Allows brands to solicit interest from potential customers and typically complemented by print media, packaging, etc. This is now very common and has a well established business model

2. Mobile Portal banner ads: Very similar to the banner ad model on the internet today but constrained by device capability and consumer use of mobile devices for browsing the internet. Both of these are improving which will speed industry growth. Check out the Toyota ad on wap.drive.com.au as an example. The traditional media players are leading they way by simply adding a mobile channel to their existing print, TV or internet rate cards. This has also led to the birth of intermediaries such as Admob which is positioning as the Google Adwords of the mobile domain linking mobile site publishers with advertisers.

3. Mobile Search: Similar to the internet model and will increase rapidly as consumers use mobile search engines from Google and Yahoo to navigate off-net content. It will be typical pay to get to the top of the list stuff and even more important when there is only a small screen.

4. Branded Content: Most operators are offering mobile services such as news alerts, video streaming, etc. These are now being sponsored by brands so you will increasingly see pre- and post-roll adverts. For the 2007 Superbowl, Pepsi partnered with Sprint Mobile in the US on a range of mobile marketing initiatives including sponsorship of the live highlights mobile videos.

5. Viral Marketing: This is our speciality as we provide technology to operators that allows them to track mobile content as it is shared/forwarded P2P. The key application is to allow branded content (viral video or animated gif) to be seeded to a small target group and then leverage their social network to distribute it further.

Of course, we see these mixed and matched, for example, allowing consumers to use an SMS shortcode to  request rich media content delivered via MMS which is also viral. Location based information is also being used to improve the relevance of the message to the end user.

It is also heartening to see a number of organisations trying to develop guidelines for agencies and brands on mobile advertising to ensure that the end user experience is as compelling as possible. The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) in the US is leading the way others such as the AIMIA Mobile Industry Group in Australia are not far behind.  Everyone in the industry is keen to ensure that many of the mistakes made on the internet are not repeated on mobile!

Ultimately the most successful mobile advertising strategies will be those that try to hold a conversation with the consumer. As with any conversation, it needs to be informative, relevant and two-way, and the mobile is the ideal vehicle.

To finish off, something funny but incredibly relevant to this topic. Enjoy!

Viral Marketing Demo at Mobile Monday Sydney by Michael Stone

A few of us attended Mobile Monday last night where it was open mike night i.e. anyone could get up an talk about their company, their views on the industry etc. I took the opportunity to talk a bit about Amethon and our products but also used the occassion to demonstrate a mobile viral marketing campaign.

I had downloaded a few clips from YouTube which I though would be entertaining for the crowd and then put together an MMS which included a video followed by some comments around Amethon, our logo and then a link to our .mobi site. Receivers were also able to download more videos from the .mobi site.

The audience was asked to provide me with their mobile numbers and I then sent it to about 12 different people.

Of course the underlying message was that if Content Fingerprinting was available, we could track the video as well as the ones from the .mobi site every time it was forwarded.

The demonstration also highlighted a few key components we think is required for a successful viral marketing campaign i.e. some compellling content, subtle branding, a call to action and a relevant reward.

So, how successful was my demonstration? Unfortunately without Content Fingerprinting we will never know...

MMS Congress 2007 by Michael Stone

In late March I attended the MMS Congress 2007 in Munich. This was one of the better conferences I have been to as there was strong operator representation and even the vendor presentations were reasonably constrained in their product marketing. The organisers had also put together a good agenda structure that had a strong logical flow.

There were three distinct focus areas in the operator case study presentations:

1. A2P MMS: What types of content and services are being delivered via MMS (voice mail, email, alerts, sports, etc),
2. P2P MMS: What is being done to encourage and stimulate P2P MMS (push stimulation campaigns, marketing/promotion, price elasticity, user education)
3. P2A MMS: Emerging Mobile 2.0 applications such as photo blogging/sharing, citizen journalism, competitions, etc

My conclusion is that we need to be doing all of the above in order to offer something of interest to as many subscribers as possible so they start using MMS in the first place and then keep using it in different ways.

For example, a presenter from an operator in the Middle East has 70% of MMS traffic being A2P as they use it to deliver all content to subscribers. He believe this in turn teaches people about MMS and they start using it P2P.

All presenters agreed on the need to get the basics right. Maybe we are spoiled in Australia but many markets still have significant issues with non-delivery of MMS, especially between carriers. They say you don't get a second chance to make a first impression and this is particularly true for new technology. I'm sure there are many subscribers who got their new camera phone, took a picture, sent it to a friend or family member only to have it disappear into the aether...

Another key theme from the conference was the need to start thinking of MMS as a bearer for other applications and services as well as a P2P messaging technology. For example, one operator has launched a voice mail service which delivers each recorded message via MMS rather then requiring the subscriber to dial in.

This as a number of great advantages including:

• The sending number for MMS is the phone number of the person leaving the voicemail. This means you can immediately see who the voicemail was from including their name if it is in your address book.
• You only need to listen to the messages you want to rather than having to go through all of your voice mails in chronological order.
• Your storage of messages is only limited by the handset and not the operator's message deletion policy.
• It is easy to reply with a message, call the sender or even forward the message to someone else through the existing messaging functionality of the handset
• Messages are deliver via best effort packet data reducing the demand on voice channels in the network

The moral of the story is that all operators have invested a lot of time and money into getting MMS to where it is today and it is now time to start generating a return on that investment!