Delivering On-Target, Engaging Messages through Mobile Marketing

September 30, 2007

Mobile Marketing Matters

Is mobile marketing right for your company? That’s a tough question to answer if you don’t know enough about what mobile advertising can do for you. Mobile marketing is a relatively new form of advertising that involves delivering marketing messages largely through cell phones and PDAs (e.g., Blackberries). It’s a new advertising vehicle compared to the conventional, web-based advertising that pushes messages to your desktops or laptops while you are surfing the web, at home or on the go.

Given that we are familiar with traditional media such as print, TV, radio, mobile marketing is an uncharted area for many of us. However, it’s a fast-growing medium because the customer base of cell phone households has increased rapidly. According to a recent MediaMark Research study, 84.5% of U.S. households have one or more cell phones. The sheer number of cell phone users represents an attractive demographic for advertisers because cell phones are personal items that we carry with us at all times.
Hence, the message delivery from mobile marketing can be more personal and direct than normal, web-based advertising.

For marketers who are serious about fine-tuning their marketing mix to include ontarget,
message delivery to customers, mobile advertising is a medium that you cannot ignore.

In our effort to help you determine if mobile marketing is a right mix in your marketing strategy, we spoke with Shanan Delp, Senior Product Manager at Rhythm New Media (RNM), based in Mountain View, CA. We asked Shanan to share with us RNM’s point of view on these issues, among others:

• Where is mobile advertising adoption today?
• How does it differ from web-based advertising?
• How can b2b and b2c advertisers take advantage of this medium?
• What challenges have advertisers encountered?
• How is mobile advertising going to evolve?

An edited version of that conversation follows:

Huang Consulting: Let’s start with the basic question: What does Rhythm New
Media do?
Delp: Rhythm New Media (RNM) does 3 things: 1) we sell ads; 2) we source content; and 3) we provide a technology platform that combines content and ads and deliver them to consumers (ad serving). Essentially, RNM is a mobile advertising solution that allows advertisers to target messages within different content formats to subscribers that they want to reach. Additionally, Rhythm has a patent-pending inline brand awareness research system that tracks and measures ad effectiveness and customer satisfaction. This measurement system is important to our customers because it gives them an accurate measure of the overall success of their campaigns.

Huang Consulting: What type of audience does mobile advertising reach effectively?

Delp: Mobile subscribers tend to be a younger demographic who are elusive and hard to reach through traditional media such as TV and print. Because the mobile environment is controlled by the subscriber, it’s free of ad clutters, and advertisers benefit from having an engaging audience that is not channel surfing or multi-tasking while watching the ads.

Huang Consulting: What types of mobile advertising solutions are being offered to
advertisers today?

Delp: Current mobile advertising solutions come in many different flavors. At RNM, we allow advertisers to insert their ads into videos, games, or banner ads that subscribers downloaded onto their cell phones or PDAs for viewing.

Huang Consulting: Where is mobile advertising adoption today for b2b and b2c
advertisers?

Delp: Research firm Frost & Sullivan in July estimated that the U.S. mobile advertising market would hit $450 million in 2007 and exceed $2 billion by 2011. Another firm, Gartner Inc., is even more bullish, predicting $3.9 billion in North America and $14.7 billion worldwide by 2011. This is a young and nascent market that will grow exponentially. Advertisers who are comfortable with traditional and online media should want to test this medium to establish brand presence with younger generations. Most of RNM’s advertisers today are innovative companies, both B2B and B2C, who are willing to test ad deliveries through new media technology to gain mindshare.

Huang Consulting: Does the introduction of iPhone accelerate that adoption?

Delp: Absolutely. iPhone is an incredible popular device that helps get people even more excited about accessing information on the go. iPhone’s innovation paves the way for more mobile advertising as more mobile operators are made available on its platform.

Huang Consulting: How does mobile advertising differ from web-based advertising?

Delp: Because Rhythm New Media’s technology has the ability to serve individual ads to the right subscribers the moment they click onto a particular news or entertainment channel, it adds another level of content relevancy and takes the guess work out of webbased advertising (e.g., banners ads, SEO, pay-per-click). By working closely with mobile operators such as 3-UK, T-Mobile, and Telecom Italia, RNM is able to insert ads into news/entertainment channels that a subscriber has selected as his/her primary information source.. Whereas in web-based advertising, there is not a lot of demographic data available about the end users other than the fact that we know where the users come from and the various brand or product ads that they may see within a particular channel such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, MSN Sports, CNN Money, while
they are surfing the web.

Huang Consulting: Is mobile advertising more complex than conventional webbased
advertising?

Delp: In the beginning, as with any new technology, people who are not familiar with the development may think of it as complex. However, mobile advertising can easily take an ad that has already been developed for TV or web video and adapt it to the mobile format and make it work, provided that the ad can be customized to fit into the mobile advertising context.

Huang Consulting: What can mobile advertising do better than web-based advertising such as search engine marketing in terms of measuring important metrics for marketers?

Delp: With search engine marketing like Google AdWords, you pay Google by the number of people clicking onto your ads. What you don’t know is who those individuals are and their demographics such as their age and sex (male/female). With mobile advertising, we know which ads we serve, to which subscribers, and in which content channels. At RNM, we also do a brand survey after each ad campaign to gauge unaided brand awareness. We think mobile advertising has the ability to help advertisers achieve higher brand recall because the advertising environment is a lot less cluttered and more personalized.

Huang Consulting: How can b2b and b2c advertisers take advantage of this medium
for branding and lead generation?

Delp: Initially, mobile advertising is well suited for companies to do brand ads over direct response ads because of the short time frame that the ad format creates. Basically, it’s easier to get a brand message across in a short time in the initial ad campaign. Then as subscribers become more familiar with a particular brand, RNM can help advertisers with lead generation by developing an interactive ad where a subscriber may be watching a BMW ad and then a message will ask if the subscriber wants a brochure on the new 3 series which would then be sent to his/her email address provided by the mobile operator.

Huang Consulting: What are the types of marketing do you see in mobile
advertising from RNM’s customers? Which are more successful using mobile
marketing?

Delp: Advertisers are putting their ads into short video clips and games; ads can also come in the form of banner ads, plain text messages, or search results displayed like those you would see on the Internet. So far in the brand arena, video clips and games are the most common ad formats because they are more entertaining in nature

Huang Consulting: What challenges have advertisers encountered with mobile marketing (or what do they need to be mindful about)?

Delp: Advertisers need to make sure that they have short duration ads which RNM can help merge into existing video or game content. A 10 second ad would have more successes than a 30 or 60 second ad in the mobile environment because people are watching it on the go and their attention span is a lot shorter.

Huang Consulting: How is mobile advertising going to evolve in the next 2-3 years, any prediction?

Delp: We think the future for mobile advertising is bright. As more consumers spend their time on mobile vs. watching TV or listening to radio, we will see a rapid rise in the adoption curve. On the technology and content side, we expect that technology will enable RNM to deliver more innovative ads with relevant content to consumers.

Mobile Marketing Soars

Based on what we’ve learned from Rhythm New Media, there is no doubt that mobile marketing will emerge to become a mainstream vehicle for advertisers to deliver targeted ads while gaining appropriate mind share among younger demographics. If we can predict where it’s headed in 2-3 years, we will see that mobile advertising can be delivered in other formats in addition to videos, banners, text messages, games and search. Video and audio podcasts could provide additional appropriate content that would work well in the mobile advertising environment.

About Rhythm New Media

Rhythm New Media is a mobile advertising agency offering turnkey mobile advertising solutions, including video, games and banners to pioneer brands in the technology and consumer arenas. Rhythm's turnkey services include ad serving, ad sales and content sourcing. Its patent-pending ad platform enables broad reach, sharp targeting, precise frequency management, high customer satisfaction, extensive reporting and automation of business processes. Leading mobile operators 3-UK, Telecom Italia and T-Mobile-UK are currently using Rhythm's solution to deliver targeted ads to consumers. Rhythm is also working with top brands, content providers and advertising agencies worldwide.

Sources: ClickZExperts column “Understanding the Mobile Marketing Ecosystem,”
American Marketing Association article by James Ryan “Stand Out and Be Heard,” and
interview with Rhythm New Media based in Mountain View, CA.

Jenny C. Huang Consulting © September 2007, Branding Quick Tips Fall Issue

Back to Newsroom