WPP's Mediacom Weighs In With Its Mobile Internet Gripes

Nothing too new in the complaints, but they deserve a mention because of the person delivering them: Anne Parsons, a regional chief executive for the WPP-owned media-buying giant Mediacom, writes in Australian IT that the mobile media initiatives that have been put into the market have fallen short of the medium’s potential. She cites as an example the spectacular failure of the BT Movio/Virgin Mobile TV venture, which made the incorrect assumption that people want to watch on their handsets exactly the same thing they watch on larger screens in their living rooms. “At present advertisers, agencies and even to some extent mobile operators are trying to force-fit old media techniques and formats on to mobile with average results.”

Mediacom projects that mobile can generate a 2 percent share of all media investment by 2010, but Parsons also points out: “the accuracy of this prediction is solely reliant on the industry’s ability to innovate and customize for this medium.”

She draws some notable conclusions also about where Mediacom thinks the money will be in mobile content, and how the pie in general will be much smaller than people may have originally thought: “Our local and global experience suggests our clients’ use of the medium is more relational, more permissive and more content-driven. This means revenue will be increasingly derived from internet protocol, setting up frameworks and fees related to results rather than the traditional commission on spend. Simply put, the nature of the medium means we spend and earn more on the back-end than the front-end, and this will increase our use of mobile as an advertising medium but dampen expenditure in the medium in traditional terms.”

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