@ CTIA: Billboard: Mobile Advertising Still Searching For Positive ROI

The panel on mobile advertising at Billboard Entertainment Live started off with a wide-open question from the moderator, Even Neufeld of M:Metrics, who asked the panelists what advertisers and marketers are looking for from mobile. “Positive ROI,” came the response from John Hadl, the MD of BrandinHand, which does mobile marketing consulting with companies like Procter & Gamble.

That seems like a fairly obvious answer, the hard part is telling them how to achieve it. On that point, things remain murky. Courtney Acuff, director of Deuno, a “futures practice” of advertising giant Publicis Groupe, said that the concept of directly measurable ROI supported by a host of metrics may not be a viable model for mobile. Marketers are faced with a host of choices of how to approach mobile: they can simply use it as another advertising channel, or they can approach it as a marketing platform and use it to communicate with their customers, not just try and drive them directly to sales. These sorts of individual, personal dialogues, she said, aren’t easily measurable, so marketers will need to overcome their fascination with metrics.

On mobile search: Both panelists agreed that mobile search was going to be crucial for mobile marketing, though neither detailed what it was they’d like to see as advertising people, or what form they think mobile search would take. Acuff did say that it was important that mobile search not become an extension of the link-dominated environment of web search, and that it needs the input of companies outside of Google, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and MSN.

On the role mobile operators should take in mobile advertising: According to Hadl, the operators should step aside and “let the professionals do their job.” He raised the example of the cable television industry, where carriers built networks, sell service to consumers, and pay content providers to carry their channels, and let them retain their advertising dollars. That’s a proven model, he said, and it’s one that’s at odds with the mobile industry, where the operators don’t want to pay for content, and want to control the advertising revenue as well.

Our CTIA conference coverage is sponsored by Cellfish.

Comments have been disabled for this post