Third Screen supplies software for the stakeholders in mobile advertising to communicate with each other — the advertisers, the content publishers and the mobile carriers. I caught up with CEO Tom Burgess to find out how advertising is likely to effect mobile content.
The carriers want to generate additional revenue from the media world. “Especially here in the US they’re all very aggressively pursuing the model that will balance between additional revenue and subscriber experience,” said Burgess. “So their goal is to keep user experience high while introducing advertising as a benefit as opposed to a detriment. In other words…if there’s advertising the subscriber better get something for it.”
Surveys have returned different results as to whether people would accept advertising on their mobile phones…In-Stat found only 20% would accept it in any form whatsoever while the Mangement Network Group found two in five people would be interested in receiving ad-supported multimedia content — twice as many as were willing to pay for it.
At the moment most mobile advertising is via WAP pages because it reaches the most users. “The next stage will be some combination between WAP and Java and BREW downloadable applications for the applications that are becoming more network aware,” said Burgess. In the past downloads didn’t connect to the network after it was downloaded, but this is changing. “The new applications reach out to servers and are dynamically updated and so forth…and it becomes more of a model across many different users so there’s a lot more unique users using those applications then that would be the next place for dynamic advertising.”
These ads will be targetted, which makes them more valuable to advertisers (and hopefully to consumers as well), as well as tracking how often the ads get delivered.
Burgess said the perfect media for mobile advertising is mobile video, but at the moment almost no-one uses it so no-one is interested in advertising there. He expects this to change as the take up of mobile video increases with better technology and handset upgrades…
Most of the mobile advertising today works under the CPM model (cost per 1,000 impressions) but Burgess expects a pay-per-click model to become more common. “The high value content will likely be sold on a CPM basis, for (lower value content ) there will be a need for and an increase in performance based advertising, so pay per click and so forth,” he said.
Burgess also said the practice of sponsoring mobile content — for example segments of the news — will become very common.
Mobile advertising is still in its infancy, and people are keen to get it right. “That’s something people in the industry are saying. “Don’t let it become the wild west. Nail down the standards. Nail down the processes,” said Burgess.
I’m not familiar with the way advertising works, but considering the fragmentation of the mobile industry I can see the benefit of everyone organizing a system that allows advertisers to easily deal with a wide range of carriers, media and technology.
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