Mobile Insight and Search

Mobile Services: The Short Head

2008-05-26T09:29:11Z

Everyone talks about The Long Tail, but what is it, where did it come from and how does it apply to digital marketing? The phrase was coined by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired in an article published in that magazine in October 2004. It made a huge impression immediately and Mr Anderson subsequently expanded his theory into a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

The theory refutes the long-held wisdom of the 80/20 rule whose premise is that 80% of sales would be made on the 20% of the inventory. The arrival of the Internet as a mass medium has proven this wrong. Amazon says 50% of its total sales come from a wide range of items that only sell once a month, while eBay’s staggering success came from auctioning obscure items.

The classic graph below illustrates the Long Tail. The Long Tail theory is that the Long Tail equals the Head in size; that collectively many products account for as many sales as the few bestsellers.

Away from the Internet, even bricks and mortar video retailer Blockbuster claims that half the films rented each month do not come from the top 100. Apparently customers buy films they know or that are in the top 100, but prefer to preview less well known movies at home before making a purchasing decision.

However, the Long Tail isn’t universal. Mobile is the big exception. Here the business model could more accurately be described by what BKI Media terms the Short Head – that is, that the first massive peak in take-up will contribute almost all the revenue and the Long Tail will barely exist.

Western Europe is full of pastiche and nostalgia, with lots of new music in fact being a remix of old tracks or sounds from the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. Certainly this repackaging appeals to some of those who remember the tracks the first time round (and who might continue to buy the original records online as a Long Tail purchase), but equally it attracts a new, mostly younger audience.

These people are likely to view a riff or track as super cool for a short time, often because it had been used for a TV advertising campaign. Recent examples include Status Quo’s hit Matchstick Men from 1968, which is now more famous as the backing track to the Gordon’s Gin advert. Likewise The Chi-Lites’ 1971 hit Have You Seen Her, used by Hutchison to promote music downloads on its 3 network, has got a huge new lease of life.

In mobile, immediacy – ‘nowness’ – is almost everything, so it’s crucial that things can be found quickly and easily through vertical options such as “most used”, “most read”, ‘top ten” or “most popular”. Mobile service providers themselves play to the Short Head model by constantly refreshing on-deck content to keep people engaged and making fresh purchases.

In the maelstrom of argument that the principles of the Long Tail, including the Short Head, has generated, perhaps the most important aspect of all has been almost lost – the unprecedented opportunity to cross-sell.

The user interface, personalisation, recommendation and navigation have at least as big an effect on sales as the content itself, although as we have just illustrated, these present differently on mobile than they online, but they apply to both. And although they comprise different strands of digital marketing, people are distinguishing less and less between their use of the online and mobile world, it’s all part of the same digital life.

This was shown perfectly by Scott Kelliher, director, mobile media services, Virgin Mobile USA, speaking at an Informa conference in New York at the beginning of March. Last year Virgin Mobile USA launched a rewards programme, Sugar Mama, through which its customers (none of whom are on contract), receive free calling minutes and texts in return for watching adverts. It has been hugely successful, signing up 50,000 customers in the first two weeks. As of 6^th March users had collectively earned 5 million minutes of air time.

Now Virgin Mobile USA has added another level of sophistication, moving Sugar Mama users between the desktop and their mobile and back again to complete a single, reward-earning task with only a 4% drop-out rate. As Mr Kelliher put it, “This is one of the coolest things…they don’t think about using [a means of communication] vertically, only about communicating digitally”.

Consequently, the key to exploiting the Long Tail and Short Head models in different media for cross-selling is timeliness and cross-platform coordination. A triple or quad play service provider needs to be able to offer a Have You Seen Her ringtone or ringback, wallpaper, video clip and track download on-deck as well as promoting a pay-per-view offering of the Chi-Lites performing the song and/or other artists who’ve covered the song (MC Hammer) and/or other Chil-Lites hits and/or if ‘you liked that, you’ll love this’ recommendation. And of course, the same type of offerings for those who prefer to go to the service provider’s online portal to get at the goodies.

It’s a way of mining the Long Tail. To do it effectively, service providers need a sufficiently flexible platform from which to launch a diverse array of products quickly, including in real-time if appropriate, such as to coincide with a concert; they need to lead innovation to exploit the limited window of opportunity for content-related offerings. But that’s not all.

In this very new world of cross-platform selling that exploits the Long Tail and Short Head simultaneously, they also need to be able to capture and analyse customer preferences and lifestyle to support one-to-one marketing and gain a deeper – as well as wider – understanding of their customers, what they like to do and how and when they like to do it. This knowledge will contribute enormously to all sorts of future campaigns that win by a Short Head, pulling the Long Tail with it.

First published December 2007 on the Pontis blog: http://www.pontisblog.com/2007/12/11/long-tail-short-head-unprecedented-cross-selling/#more-44
Written by Bena Roberts (Edited by Annie Turner).

Mobile Search

2008-04-25T13:25:46Z

History is not repeating itself. Mobile data is not yet a cash cow like voice and SMS. The big Internet search brands' investment in developing technology, running search services and the costs of incentives that must be offered to get onto operators’ decks are not providing a good enough return on investment. They are obliged to push models based on pay per click or use to generate revenue, which they also have to share with operators. Yet these charges put consumers off using the services.

This is the reason for the brands' deafening silence at the moment in the mobile search market: they are all trying to work out a viable business model.

Yahoo! was bullish back in January 07 with its launch at CES, but there are figures available about the uptake and use of its monolithic search services. Since then 3.0 and other changes show frustration also from Yahoo! trying to get the model right.

Over the same period (07), Microsoft’s profits have increased by 13% and Google’s by over 40%, but none of this growth is coming from the mobile market. The growing online advertising market is still their bread and butter.

AOL, a late comer to the market, has ramped up its branded search entrance, offering some impressive solutions, but only within AOL Europe and MVNO Deutschland. AOL is still very much for early adopters, playing catch-up in mobile search.

So where does this leave white label companies?

White label search is in a potentially strong position.

Operators are finally realising that they are weakening their standing with consumers by offering Google and Yahoo!’s services, and are now looking to rectify this with own-brand, white label services.

White label search providers cannot offer search services free of charge because of venture capital investment that force them to pay attention to their bottom lines in the short term – VC funding is all about fattening a company up for sale in fewer than five years.

This means that mobile operators are being forced into another round of spending on mobile data, which they endeavour to recoup from their consumers, which in turn inhibits take-up.

The Catch 22 situation escalates as the white label providers push advertising onto operators as a sweetener for their investment, with the promise of faster new revenue streams from data services.

Operators find themselves with search and advertising services promising to be the two-headed saviour of their data services despite a glaring lack of a concrete evidence.

Where does this leave consumers?

Consumers are faced with a larger choice of search and data options, on and off-portal.

They are confused about the cost of using the services due to poor communication and inconsistent approaches by operators.

Consumers start to download clients that are free and promise a straightforward interface without being fully aware of the cost. This leads to an initial surge in the take-up of new services followed by a sharp reduction after the bills hit home.

Consumer are served adverts within search results and, in the case of click to call, need to add the cost of a phone call to that of the search.

Mobile operators try to encourage users to enjoy search in a multitude of different ways (see the September issue's analysis of T-Mobile's user interface for its portal which deploys five different search engines), but what is free, what is included in portal use and what costs money to access is typically not made clear.

Conclusion
The cost of mobile search continues to dampen consumer demand. The fact that its costs are not easy to understand means that mobile search uptake, revenue and results are faring poorly. Google is a big brand on the Internet, but Vodafone and T-Mobile are big brands on the mobile web that also need to earn euros from hosting and managing services.

Mobile search will not become the hugely popular consumer service it should be until prices come down. This is not about the price of the device or the cost of the voice contract, so much as the charges for using mobile search and portal services. Transparency is needed, but attempts so far are not close to being good enough. There are many “unlimited” data bundles, but in fact they are all restricted. Data rates are capped at speeds that are risible in the fixed world, while fair use policies are fair to the operator, not the consumer, although they vary considerably.

ChaCha Mobile Search drops the guides?

2008-04-01T14:14:15Z

I saw on Tech Crunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/31/chacha-ditches-guided-search-model-i-love-to-hate-this-startup/ that ChaCha was ditching its guided search. This is something we predicted would happen and here is part of an article written by BKI Media published in December 2007.

ChaCha was co-founded by Scott A. Jones and Brad A. Bostic in 2006. Mr Jones is the inventor of the voicemail system used by nearly a half billion people worldwide, who was able to “retire” at 31 and go on and invent things like Gracenote which allows you to see what’s on a CD in iTunes etc. Mr Bostic has led a number of unspecified start-ups.

Unfortunately, ChaCha is more of a bum note. The plan is that consumers’ queries are answered, free of charge, either by a user texting their query to 242242 (ChaCha) from within the US or online at www.chacha.com. If you choose the mobile approach, your query is always addressed by a “guide”, that is, a human researcher who provides the answer plus the web page/source of the information. This is also known as social searching.

The website gives you the option of searching yourself or asking a guide to help. Users aren’t obliged to register for a free account, but they have to if they want help from a guide and if they do so, their search mobile and online search history is saved, in theory speeding up future answers. (I tried asking how much it would cost to send the SMS and also if the service is available anywhere in the world, but kept being told I couldn’t register because I got the Turing-type numbers wrong, which I hadn’t. I had four failed attempts in all.)

Ultimately the plan is that users can call ChaCha and ask a question, a guide will listen to that question, find and type the answer, then send it through a text-to-speech program. ChaCha’s system will call the user back and relay the answer in a recorded computer voice, which of course often might be very helpful for someone on a mobile, for instance, if they are driving.

Also, this is a much, much better bet for answers than the other way round (speech-to-text, which is fraught with problems, as anyone who has ever tried to use SpinVox will know), but it doesn’t get over the hurdle of the guides, which are central to the entire proposition.

Guides work from their own PCs at home. SMS guides are paid USD 0.20 per transaction while online guides are paid USD5 per search hour. They can be paid via a debit card through First Internet Bank of Indiana, or by direct deposit to be paid once a month if their earn USD 100 or more. That’s certainly going to take some doing on the SMS front.

Who guides the guides?

Much depends on how well trained the guides are (which for the tiny amounts they are being paid seems to be asking a lot) at using the tools that ChaCha claims to have that enables them to provide better, faster responses than the ordinary searcher. To up the ante, guides are also ‘categorised’ and allocated to certain queries, apparently, according to what their areas of personal expertise are and they have access to each other for help.

However, there are rumours that 90% of all queries are spoofs by pranksters and apocryphal-sounding tales of clueless guides abound (Guide in response to a query: What’s Digg?, for instance). It is thought ChaCha has around 12,000 guides on their books, although there are no set minimum hours.

Arguably the service isn’t aimed at the tech savvy and early adopters, but people who can’t easily navigate the web on their own or who want information on the hoof and can’t cope with mobile search themselves. Still, the calamitous decline in usage over the course of last year suggests that it hasn’t got the offer right for anyone. It surely isn’t any faster or easier texting ChaCha a question such as “What time does XX close on a Wednesday?” than phoning XX to find out?

Flawed business case

The user experience is fraught with difficulties, but so is the business model, which relies on advertising for its revenue, providing the service to users free of charge. Again, it’s hard to see how the Comscore figures are going to tempt big brands to part with wads of cash, especially as ChaCha is becoming something of a laughing stock amongst the cognoscenti.

Another big challenge, both in terms of attracting mobile users and advertisers, is that it’s off-deck – carriers haven’t exactly been queuing up to put it on their portals. The company is hoping to raise its profile at the forthcoming Sundance Film Festival which opens on 17th January in Park City, Utah in the US. At the event, ChaCha will send out droves of scouts to compile real-time information on the films and event, then send it to ChaCha guides who can answer questions from festival attendees walking around the venue. Last May, ChaCha announced a partnership with blinkx to facilitate video search, which might have a role to play at Sundance. In the longer term, we cannot see that Sundance will save it though.

(To read the conclusion - please email me).

Implementing a Mobile Advertising Campaign MasterClass

2008-03-25T14:39:24Z

I will be giving a Mobile Advertising Masterclass at this conference in Singapore in May. Here is the agenda and GoMo/ Mobile Seo/ msearchblog Readers can benefit from a considerable disount by mentioning GOMO during the purchase process.

http://www.iqpc.com/ShowEvent.aspx?id=76380

A 08:30 – 13:30 [includes Working Lunch Break]

Getting Your Mobile Plan Going: Practical & Proven Tips on Successfully Implementing Mobile in your Integrated Marketing Strategy

This masterclass will give brands and media companies the foundation they need to start and implement a mobile marketing campaign. It will look at PPC and search campaigns and strategies in which they can be implemented into the WAP portal. The session will also touch on Mobile Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the demands brands have for mobile advertising and marketing. You will also be guided through the differences between a WAP site, a transcoded site and a mobi site. After this masterclass, brands and media companies will know how to launch and what to consider when implementing a mobile campaign.

Tailored for media brands and agencies:
·       Mobile is the new media and the next generation of marketing communication
·       Pushing a brand via mobile is essential – but how? Techniques and practical skills to do it right
·       Understanding what mobile search entails and how it can change the effectiveness of your media campaign with integrated mobile advertising
·       What is the most important aspect of a mobile media campaign and what are the differences between mobile search and advertising?

Bena Roberts

About your Masterclass Leader

Federated Mobile Search

2008-03-20T07:14:00Z

I just wanted to point out that Medio is a much bigger competitor in the white label mobile search space than MCN and this was not the fairest comparison.

This was pointed out to me and Federated is just a minor part of the value chain. Medio commands a lead in white label search in North America and MCN is building its federated search business well in Thailand, Finland and Japan.

What is the difference between MCN and Medio System’s approach to federated Search? Federated mobile search is an area that is causing confusion in the mobile search market because there is no single definition.

According to Peter Jacso (2004, Wikipedia) federated search consists of:

1. Transforming a query and broadcasting it to a group of disparate databases with the appropriate syntax;

2. Merging the results collected from the databases;

3. Presenting them in a succinct and unified format with minimal duplications;

4. Providing a means, performed either automatically or by the portal user, to sort the merged result.

This is different to traditional search, which uses spiders to crawl data and get results. Often the same result can appear several times during a web search, whereas using federated search, the results are categorised and searchable without having to click through every result.

MCN has been a early mover and innovator in federated search. Its patented technology, Query Broker and Taxonomy, delivers results via one interface from any content source. Federated search is MCN has been core offering since the company’s launch in 2004.

The company’s mobilesearch.net offer is THE example of federated search and shows how relevant results can be delivered in two to three clicks.

Just recently Medio Systems, a mobile search company that has used the traditional search engine search method of crawling to access and retrieve information announced that it was adding federated search to its model.

MCN’s Federated search definition

With MCN’s search a “single query can be brokered in real-time to access content distributed across multiple search engines and content repositories. Results are returned to the user as actionable content (music, games, images), as links to additional information (business addresses) or in whatever format is most appropriate.”

MCN has adapted the core elements of federated search, increased scalability to respond to the larger mobile community ecosystem and added the appropriate tools, business interfaces and monetisation methods to create the ultimate solution for mobile search.

Medio’s Definition of Federated Mobile Search
Search results that include both on-deck content and mobile web results into an index from top search engines for the most complete search experience possible.

So MCN the company has created a plug and play federated search system that orders and structures content from operators and content providers in a way that is easy to find, access and deploy (and has done so within six weeks). The company offers a pure content discovery solution for operators and vendors.

Medio Systems, on the other hand, is continuing to use crawling and indexing from traditional search, but is also bringing off-portal content to the party and federating the results of that off-deck content to improve the original on-deck search. Medio will broker results from search engines and merge them within the results of a specific query.

Critical comparison

MCN: Medio’s entrance into the federated space is vindication of what we knew in 2004 – crawling is not enough.

Medio Systems: This is not a question of whether or not crawling or federated is best. Crawling WAP sites is working and Medio is serving customers’ needs by offering brokered results from branded search engines.

MCN: As the leader in federated mobile search, MCN is already able to integrate, manage and view reports from multiple content channels or segments chosen by the mobile operator or content provider. This means that revenue generation is almost instant.

Medio Systems: Mobile search is not only about speed of results, but also relevance, advertising, behavioural analysis and organic results. The mobile search.net is rigid in that users always get similar results. With Medio the most relevant results come first and are not rendered in a particular way, rather they are returned and displayed with appropriate answers in mind.

MCN: User interface is paramount in mobile search. This means that MCN is also able to provide operators with advanced services – from recommendation engines to cross-promote push and sell services – that will make the solution richer and get users what they want faster.

Medio Systems: Recommendation is one channel, but Medio’s ActiveRank algorithm uses keyword relevance to ensure that search results are found first – not similar results or near matches.

MCN: Dynamic search is what MCN is about. Since its launch it has been focused on brokering results in real-time. This means that query results are returned and sorted into a single ranked display. MCN has taken this concept built the Query Broker technology around it and the result is the Mobilesearch.net Search Management platform.

Medio Systems: With eight deployments in seven countries Medio is already a leader in integration. The goal now is to deliver off-deck results to enhance the user experience. Our use of federation with Google and Yahoo! results is no different from MCN’s ability to generate federated results from different mobile advertisers.

MCN: MCN is the Rolls Royce of the federated mobile search space and Medio’s is jumping on the bandwagon with a Ford imitation.

Medio Systems: Medio is no imitation. There is no question that federated search is a strong option for mobile and Medio supports the best technologies.

Conclusion

The argument for crawling vs federating is one about made for mobile vs replicating the Internet. The two schools of thought vary on this and the fact that Medio Systems has introduced federated search to its portfolio leads us to believe that a new alternative for the mobile Internet is available – combining what is good from the Internet with made-for-mobile.

This is way that MCN has made federated search its own. It has added to the traditional Internet search, enhancing it to create a deeper system that is more appropriate to the mobile services it promotes. The notion of brokering the results should enhance the medium – as long as the net is cast sufficiently widely and the brokering mechanism is always biased towards producing apt answers the first time.

Mobile Barcodes

2008-02-22T14:14:12Z

Mobile Barcodes 101: Understanding Mobile Barcodes (sponsored by NeoMedia Technologies)

Mobile barcodes are on the verge of becoming a global phenomenon, but what exactly are they, what do they do, and for whom? We became familiar with the original, linear barcodes (or 1D), from our supermarket shopping in the 1980’s (although the technology was patented in the 1950’s). They comprise a series of vertical black lines and white spaces of variable width, representing numbers, which are read (or decoded) by a barcode reader to extract the information they bear.

However, as barcodes were used in an ever greater variety of environments beyond straightforward stock control, they became longer and longer as people tried to pack more information onto them. A new generation of barcodes was devised in the 1990’s, usually referred to as 2D or matrix codes. They are formed by patterns of black and white squares arranged on a (usually) square grid and can encode thousands of alphanumeric and other characters in virtually any language. Immediately the size and capacity problem was solved, opening the way for applications that had never been considered.

Another radical and exciting advancement in barcode reader technology allowed the camera in a mobile phone to act as a reader. Mobile phones can now be enabled to read a variety of 2D mobile barcodes. These include QR codes, Data Matrix, Cool-Data-Matrix, Aztec, Upcode, Trillcode, Quickmark, shotcode, mCode and Beetagg.

The vast majority of symbologies are in the public domain, which means they can be used by anyone without restriction and without payment of a fee or royalty. This public approach gives rise to internationally recognised standards, global interoperability, and creates an economy of scale. This is a great boon for advertisers and consumers (both of whom are the mobile operators’ customers) because only one software client is required to read any code. For the operators, this translates to greater choice and more competitively priced equipment.

Unfortunately, some barcode developers have chosen the proprietary route, which means they keep control of their own codes, the information that is permitted to be encoded and charge a fee or royalty for their use. These issues and the lack of interoperability usually means that proprietary barcodes tend to be used in controlled, closed environments, rather than in open, public systems around the world.

The most common use of mobile barcodes is to request information or a service or content from a Web site. It might be details of a promotion, or a discount voucher via SMS or MMS, or to activate a download such as a ringtone, music track or game, or click to call an IVR or human agent, or buy a travel or concert ticket. The advertiser pays the set-up costs as well as its operator partner on a per-click, download, view, redeemed coupon, ticket sale or call, depending on the campaign.

The key is that mobile barcodes are a pull technology, a permission-based way for a consumer to engage with an advertiser or medium. This is a very important attribute since there is a great deal of consumer angst and regulatory concern about intrusive mobile marketing: mobile barcodes are a world away from pushing unsolicited spam via SMS or MMS. Big brands are understandably wary of engaging in any advertising activity that compromises their reputation by alienating their customers and have stayed away from these kinds of push campaigns.

The pull of mobile barcodes overcome these issues and offer a direct, accountable way of connecting with consumers. However, if mobile barcodes are to succeed as an advertising medium, a high level of back-office integration is necessary, which reinforces the importance of open standards for processes and interfaces. Operators will need to demonstrate to the world’s biggest brands that the barcode scanning transactions are accurate, reliable and defendable because they are going to charge that brand for every click.

The precedent is there: Google has built a multi-billion dollar, online business on this per click or interaction model with its Google AdWord/AdSense, which provides advertisers with reliable, accountable records of their users’ transaction history and an accurate invoice, plus timely and granular revenue share payments to other parts of the ecosystem. In mobile, unlike online, there is the additional challenge that these mechanisms have to work across carriers, across countries and across currencies.

So the stage is set. With 2D barcode scanning, advertisers have a reliable, permission-based mobile channel open to them. Consumers love them as an easy way of using mobile technology to engage with services and media they are interested in, as has been demonstrated in spades in Japan, where mobile barcodes are part of everyday life. This is because Japan is unusual in having a very dominant operator, NTT DoCoMo, which decided to endorse QR codes and ensured that all new handsets had QR code client software embedded in them. The rest is history, but this approach is not applicable to markets in most other countries, which typically have four or five operators competing against each other.

The challenge now is to ensure that any brand advertiser can run the same ad campaign in Singapore, London and Seattle instead of having to produce and run different campaigns in each country and for every operator. The inability to do this has been another big inhibitor to mobile advertising. Mobile barcodes have the potential to overcome these issues and become the mainstream, global phenomenon that they could and should be. However to attain this goal, the various parties that make up the ecosystem and the various warring factions within the mobile barcode industry need to come together and work on common standards* that will be to everyone’s advantage.

This paper was written independently but sponsored by NeoMedia Technologies

When two become one: Microsoft to buy Yahoo!

2008-02-02T21:19:52Z

At the tail end of last year, I had some private conversations with Microsoft employees. Senior executives have been polite but afraid to really open up to me; as I feel corporations remain slightly nervous about talking to bloggers. So, I approached Microsoft employees via this blog. Employees that had signed up for the newsletter and asked for a “candid” chat on mobile search.

Not trying to sound cloak and dagger – I did realise quite quickly that Microsoft was “very committed” to mobile search. Teams of people were currently on mobile search courses and investment was on the agenda.
After these conversations, I expected some form of acquisition. But first FAST and then Yahoo! Both have taken me by surprise.

Surprise, not because they are not both a good catch – but surprise as I have to question the strategy.
In 2005, Microsoft bought what I can only describe as a superior mobile search company. In fact, it was a briefing with Motion Bridge in 2004 that started my hunger for search and advertising and a major reason why I wanted to focus on search.
In short, I was blown away with Motion Bridge. The company had a killer user interface and I saw huge potential.

But today is Microsoft a leader in Mobile Search? (In case you don’t know the answer to this – it’s no).
MotionBridge’s class has gone. Microsoft has unfortunately killed it.

So FAST was in trouble and has the enterprise edge – it was a clever move by Microsoft to buy it.

But Yahoo!?

By purchasing Yahoo! Microsoft is buying its way into the leadership of search and mobile search. Its winning an amazing quality advertising programme. I know the rates of mobile advertising campaigns and I have run several. As a very late starter Microsoft is not pulling in the $$ online or mobile with advertising.
Integrating Y! could be way for Microsoft to build a superior ad-sales network.

In terms of search, oneSearch is very good. Having tested all the offers, I would raise my hand and argue that the pure mobile search feature is one of the best available today. So if mobile is the key, rebranding oneSearch to mSearch (please notice that I didn’t say live here – as live is crap and Microsoft should focus on a new brand and new name then keep trying to invent what can only be called rubbish) and integrating the FAST mSearch platform might make it superior.
If you do a search on live now online compared to Google or Yahoo! Its clear that Microsoft is indexing social networking first it’s emphasising the results on 2.0. I like this, but it’s actually not what I want. I want answers and not necessarily to find “similar” or “new” content. I have to say I think this is the missing link with Microsoft at the moment.

On top of that. Microsoft has been useless at influencing mobile operators and getting on portals (apart from with Orange). More importantly, it wants to buy two companies that also has a poor track record of attracting operators (FAST and Yahoo!). If Microsoft wants to be successful in search, it should stop buying and start employing ex-operator employees in order to get back into the operators. This would benefit the company more at the moment to raise the presence.

I am going to think about this for a more detailed analysis – but Microsoft seems to be hungry for search and advertising and social networking but being hungry is not enough. On top of that who on earth is going to manage the acquisitions?

I think Microsoft is moving too quickly for its own good. I saw some real benefits with FAST in the lucrative enterprise sector. Also new Japanese mobile search engine makes Microsoft an overnight entrant and leader in Japan.

But – it’s all a bit of a whirlwind and the fact that Microsoft has killed Motion Bridge makes me a bit nervous.
On top of all of this – companies with little or no experience in different business are saying or claiming to be things that they are not. I have to say – its getting a bit boring.

3 is a media company. Nokia is an Internet company. Google is an operator (my words not from Google) and Microsoft is a bit of everything else. I am only using this example to show how fast things are changing and to highlight that it takes more than a name change or acquisition to actually “become”.

Mobile Marketing, the O2 Active Portal, Decktrade, m:metrics and the MMA: The Mobile 2.0 Analyst out now

2008-01-22T14:18:20Z

Rating: BKI’s publication The Mobile 2.0 Analyst is out now. Here are the highlights.
If you don’t already subscribe to this publication make sure you do to get the inside scoop and knowledge about mobile advertising, mobile marketing, barcodes, the mobile Internet and portals.

Mobile marketing - why it’s so hard to make it happen
No matter what the premise – whether mobile advertising in the case of the likes of JumpTap and Medio Systems, or more innovative and immediate clever bundling and response to what customers do in real-time as promised by Pontis – any company working within operators to up ARPU faces some tough challenges indeed. These range from a lack of scale to poor content, their customers being acquired by larger operators and piecemeal deployments.

Music is making itself heard on mobile, but it’s a faint echo
M:Metrics has just published figures concerning the growing audience for music via mobile. However, closer investigation of the figures makes less encouraging reading and they are set against the backdrop of EMI, the world's third largest record company getting rid of one third of its staff and scrapping multi-million pound advances to its top artists. Can mobile save the music industry or is it all over for the industry as we know it?

UK Operator O2 changes O2 Active, but it isn’t enough
O2 has redesigned its mobile portal to make it more attractive. It does look more appealing, but the downside is that it has failed to accommodate or shape the way users navigate. Even worse, it has made several fundamental design errors. How hard can it be?

Running a mobile advertising campaign with Decktrade
It is a common belief that text ads are more popular than banner ads online, but this is not necessarily the case for mobile. Mobile is a new medium and analysis of our USD50 Decktrade campaign found that a creative (graphic banner ad) achieves a greater click-through rate than a text link. A great deal of thought has gone into Decktrade, making the set-up fantastically easy (part from payment), but the reporting leaves much to be desired.

Are Western Europe’s consumers ready for mobile marketing?
The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has just announced the results of its inaugural Mobile Attitude and Usage Study for five markets in Western Europe. The study surveyed 1,535 participants in the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain. The MMA claims that it “provides actionable insights into the region’s consumer mobile usage by demographic group and awareness”.
Here are the key findings, followed by BKI’s observations.

Microsoft Buys FAST Search and Transfer

2008-01-08T14:48:42Z

Microsoft will pay USD 1.2 billion to buy the Norwegian white label online and mobile search solution company Fast Search and Transfer.

According to this source
FAST is profitable and the buy-out is a 42% premium over the current share valuation.

What we think?
FAST Search and Transfer had its hay day about two years ago when it became a USD 100 million dollar company. I will never forget the Fastsearch and Transfer first ever conference in the US. The focus was put sales and an aggressive new strategy was announced.

I fear that the aggressive stance was a bit too much as a few months ago the company gave an analyst conference where it committed to saving money and re-focusing on the core business.

In this light, a sale is not un-expected.

But what has Microsoft purchased?

Fastsearch and Transfer is a company that focuses on enterprise search. It has a long list of clients in the online space and was the initial mobile search provider for Vodafone back in 2002.

More recently it has signed a deal with Japanese company Rakuten and is creating a mobile search portal together in Japan. It also has partnerships and license agreements with InfoSpace (now Motricity) and mobilePeople. Its ambitions in the mobile search space haven’t been realized – but this is not because its technology is not strong.

As a business, I have said from day one that FAST’s lack of amazing success in the mobile search space was due to lack of focus on marketing. FAST has prided itself as technology company meaning that winning and sustaining carrier sales very very difficult.

This changed with the partnership with InfoSpace and everyone know – that if there is one thing that Microsoft can do well its marketing. The sale of FAST to Microsoft is the step that Microsoft has needed to expand its business and make its search an asset not a hiccup.

More information, competitive actions and detail in The Mobile Search Analyst.

All articles on FAST here

Mobile search face off 2007 – Google, Yahoo! MSN, AOL vs Medio Systems, JumpTap, Infospace, FAST and MCN

2008-01-04T17:20:35Z

Gripping new analysis on Mobile Search OUT NOW

NEW LOGIN HERE

Video search – timing is all as the ecosystem evolves
Trying to locate and watch videos on a mobile phone is yet another painful and frustrating user experience. In the first instance, various service providers do their best to limit users’ search to the material in their library that they can charge for.

Mobile search face off 2007 – Google, Yahoo! MSN, AOL vs Medio Systems, JumpTap, Infospace, FAST and MCN
Mobile search divides into two streams – the main Internet search brands and white label search providers. The former were undoubtedly the winners in 2007, continuing to gain traction within operators’ portals. However, unlike the preceding year, operators viewed allegiances with the Internet brands more as a me-too, box ticking exercise than, rather than an urgent must-have.

Google lags, ChaCha’s investors blunder
End of year figures concerning Google’s apparently unstoppable rise online make eye-popping reading.

MCN teams with Yahoo! Japan, but what are the implications?
MCN has announced that its Uta Search music service will be available for the Yahoo! Japan search service. Yahoo! Japan Mobile is a subsidiary of Yahoo! Japan, which boasts 100 million page views per day and provides mobile service to the NTT DoCoMo iMode and KDDI/au networks. The two networks collectively have 80m subscribers.

Opera Mini 4: a user’s experience
I got off to a sticky start in my trial of the latest version of Opera Mini because these are the options the site gives you when you go to install it:

Mobile Advertising Part II JumpTap and BKI Media: Operators must beware the Trojan Horse

2008-01-02T08:55:05Z

Operators must beware the Trojan Horse

By Annie Turner, Director BKI Media

As the Trojans found to their great cost at the end of a ten year siege, a gift can bring serious consequences. Over the last few years, mobile operators around the world have been only too pleased to partner Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in their bid to create additional revenue streams through advertising, increased content sales or as the gateway to the wider Internet. As a matter of urgency, operators need to consider the potential consequences of these partnerships.

While most accept that the walled garden – or citadel – approach is coming to an end, operators rightly believe that extra sources of income from the Internet can help defend against them being reduced to a bit pipe by adding value for the user: if customers can find sufficiently compelling content on-portal, there is less motivation for them to leave it. If big brands are offering prizes and other incentives on-portal, then the portal is stickier and there is good money to be had from the advertiser (search and advertising are natural bedfellows – see the first article in this series at www.bkimedia.com or www.jumptap.com).

What’s more, if operators can leverage their subscriber knowledge and direct users quickly and easily to the content and/or information they are searching for, then users will reuse their service provider’s search facility repeatedly, in effect becoming the gateway, or portal, to the mobile Internet. With so much at stake in terms of revenue and even their role, it is easy to understand why the operators raced to partner the big Internet brands, thinking that their online success could be replicated, to the operators’ advantage, on mobile. They would have done well to heed the advice given to the Trojans by Loacoon (updated for modern politically correct times) – beware rivals bearing gifts.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have done well out of their partnerships with the operators. The operators’ cooperation was the fastest and most straightforward way of getting their search boxes and business models onto the mobile screen instead of struggling to establish a mobile presence from the off-portal wilderness. With the operators’ blessing, the big Internet brands have learned an awful lot in a relatively short time and have plans of their own, which don’t include the service providers.

The operators are in great danger of giving away the keys to their kingdoms. They have allowed the big Internet brands to form direct links with their customers and to establish themselves as mobile brands too. At the moment, the majority of subscribers still use their operators’ portals as the launch pad onto the Internet and the operators still have the opportunity to own the mobile experience – from voice and data to search and buy – in the medium and long terms. If they don’t seize this opportunity, the big Internet brands soon will.

The fact that Google has said it has no intention of making money from Android and the Open Handset Alliance is not the point. The danger for mobile operators is that Android is designed to be an entirely free, open source (Linux) platform that allows consumers to use whatever applications they like and go wherever they want, at will, with no recourse to the operator. This is nothing less than disintermediation – aka cutting out the middleman or reducing the operators to bit pipes.

Put another way, operators are perilously close to abdicating all control of their customers’ behaviour, which will result in their inability to capture revenues from all those value-added services that they have built their future business models on.

Looking the gift-horse in the mouth

It’s now or never for the operators. If they are to maintain their relationship with their customers in order to control and exploit their consumers’ behaviour, they must not delay. BKI Media has long argued that the only way operators can counter the incursion of the big Internet brands is to team up with white label mobile search providers, who have much to recommend them.

In the first place, by definition, they are not in competition with the operators because their contribution is invisible to the user.

Secondly, again by definition, white label mobile search companies specialise in mobile and understand that the mobile Internet is not simply about trying to squash the online experience onto a smaller screen. Life is much more complicated than that and Google and Yahoo! have been rather crude in their approach to mobile.

The Internet brands also need to do more work on their backfill results for search: algorithms that produce page rankings in terms of relevance online cannot be applied to mobile where pages do not ‘point’ to each other as they do on the web.

Also, Google boasts that its algorithms ‘learn’ from user behaviour, so for instance, when used online, it learns that the bottom two results on the first page were actually what the searcher was looking for. This doesn’t work on mobile because people don’t read down the list of the results, instead they are inclined to plump for a poor second best towards the top of the list. The algorithm adds this learning to what it knows about the user, although it is incorrect. Over time the problem is compounded as more inaccuracies are added.

To combine search and advertising successfully, white label search providers typically have a very good directory of WAP content to backfill with. They can force them to the top of the search results after the sponsored listings. The most important thing is that users get good results from search, on or off-portal. This encourages them to use the operators’ own branded service again and again, and to use their portal as the gateway to the Internet.

The white label search approach gives the user a good experience, produces more information about consumer behaviour (from which to build consumer profiles and give the individual better answers) and generates money from advertisers for sponsored links and banner ads.

Many mobile operators’ chief executive officers, including Arun Sarin, head of the world’s largest operator by revenue, Vodafone Group, have said they don’t want their companies to become bit pipes. They argue that their relationship with their customers is so powerful that no-one can take it away from them. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft demonstrably have other ideas, yet like Trojan Horses, while they are powering operators’ portals, advertising and search, they are devising strategies to disintermediate their hosts.

There is a small window of opportunity for mobile operators to avoid becoming bit pipes and evict the Trojan Horses from their citadels before the massacre of their value added services and revenues takes place.

Mobile Advertising Analyst, Mobile 2.0 Analyst, BKI Media Analysis 2.0

2007-12-18T19:28:49Z

Mobile Advertising two ends playing agains the middle? BKI Media Analysis 2.0

**The Mobile 2.0 Analyst is now saved as BKI Media Analysis in our new portal.
Why?
Because we are putting an end to the differentiation between Search, Barcodes and Advertising and creating an analysis eco-system that we can update immediately and not merely at the end of the month**

Mobile advertising: two ends playing against the middle

There’s a lot of bumping and barging going on between the advertising industry, the online social networking world and mobile – with concomitant damage.

Tensions grow between communities, brands and operators

Mobile operators took a step towards disintermediation when the signed up Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (GYM) to handle search for them. Users don’t care about Google courtesy of Vodafone, say, they just know it’s good old Google like at their PC.

UGC is not an instant, cheap fix for mobile communities

One of the first and longest lasting UGC businesses is teletext chat, set up in Germany in 2001 by Minick. The RTL and Vox channels (part of the RTL Group) generate around 200,000 premium rate messages daily. Senders are charged EUR

Adding voice, search and advertising business models to Second Life – now we’re talking

Social networking is flourishing and mobile advertising is mushrooming, but neither are making anything like as much as they could and should. The business models for social networking and mobile advertising are unsophisticated, at best.

The wholesale MVNO market – why applications, not voice, are king

Companies like Medio Systems and FAST that had relationships with the failed US MVNO Amp’d Mobile will know how risky the MVNO market is. Nevertheless, mobile operators remain eager to conquer the MVNO space, recognising that there is much as yet untapped potential. Most recently Deutsche Telekom announced that its goal is to target the MVNO market with wholesale solutions.

View from the top: Jonathan Bulkeley CEO Scanbuy, on mobile barcodes

The mobile barcode market is red hot, but arrogance, confusion and bitterness between players are creating a negative environment for the uptake and monetisation of the services. Barcode/tagging should be a killer app – if it survives the war of attrition raging over patents.

Next month: Decktrade Mobile Advertising campaign analysis

Buy now or learn more at BKI Media

What is Mobile Advertising?

2007-11-14T11:31:34Z

JumpTap and BKI Media: What is Mobile Advertising?

What is Mobile Advertising? BKI Media explores how operators can exploit search to drive new revenue streams from media, content providers and brands in a way that consumers find userful in this the first of four papers sponsored by JumpTap.

What is mobile advertising?

By Annie Turner Director BKI Media

Advertising presents a host of new opportunities and possibilities for mobile operators. It has the potential to drive additional revenue streams from media, content providers and brands, in a way that subscribers find useful. By exploiting that one-to-one relationship people have with their mobile phones, which is very different from their one-to-many connection with a computer, there is every reason to believe that mobile advertising will help create a positive, helpful environment for consumers – so long as appropriate measures are in place from the outset of every campaign.

As we have seen online, one of the most effective ways to drive advertising revenues without diminishing the users’ experience is for search to trigger the presentation of clearly labelled sponsored links in the results. It is paramount that these links match the search criteria and the emphasis must be on quality, not quantity.

To ensure this is the case, every time, the search engine should log each search and draw on everything it knows about customers’ behaviour to serve up the most relevant adverts. Logging and analysing how and what users search for and their click-through behaviour means that the operator can constantly refine their understanding of what the user wants and deliver it to them. So long as this constant process is underway, mobile advertising couldn’t be further from the misconception that it constitutes SMS spam.

BKI Media believes that mobile advertising could and should be about three things: monetising search for operators; providing customers with what they are looking for by linking the right advertising and search results together; and providing advertisers with an exciting new channel that allows them to engage with their target audience in a way no other medium has been able to do.

Done correctly, the result blurs the barrier between advertising and content to the advantage of all parties. Operators enable their customers to find what they are looking for, while the advertiser generates traffic (perhaps with the potential of conversion to sales, but that is not necessarily the aim). Consumers are likely to use search more because they found what they were looking for. It’s a virtuous circle: more users see relevant ads, advertisers sell more and/or drive traffic to their sites meaning operators can charge a higher cost per thousand impressions rate (CPM), up to EUR 20 to 25 (USD 28 to 35) or cost per call/click, as appropriate.

There is a school of thought that full page display ads and banners are the way forward for mobile advertising. They certainly have a role to play, but the same rules apply. There is no clearer indication of what the customer wants than what they are searching for – this information exceeds all other contextual or demographic targeting for banner ads. Display ads will only be successful if they are triggered through search to ensure they are presented at a time and in a way that doesn’t annoy and alienate the consumer.

Whatever the ad format, search engines are the most powerful way to target adverts, The best search engines work alongside the operators’ systems which track billing information, location and browsing histories for each user. This combination of a search engine and the operators’ network assets is the simplest, most effective way to deliver the most accurate search results including the most apposite adverts.

At the moment, 50% to 60% of ad campaigns involve a call to action, for instance encouraging the consumer to download a game or other item. These types of adverts used to account for a far higher percentage of mobile campaigns, but now advertising is fulfilling other roles like branding, or driving traffic to mobile sites. At the same time, there is a blending of different forms of advertising – including interstitials, sponsored content and video – as brands begin to move into mobile and more users have smart phones that can properly display these types of ads.

And brands are increasingly getting involved. Sony Ericsson recently promoted a new phone range and brand through sponsored search and measured the campaign’s success by how many users interactions it generated on its micro-site. MTV uses paid search to drive targeted traffic to its mobile sites and car manufacturers have been quick to recognise the potential of mobile advertising, for instance to encourage people to go for test drives. It’s no surprise that Samuel Martinez from BMW recently commented, “We believe mobile advertising contributes to the general cohesiveness of our communications strategy and will only become more important over time.”

Consumer electronics, TV channels and cars aside, makers of chocolate bars or soft drinks have used mobile to reach a mass audience, in particular as part of a wider (or 360 degree) advertising campaign. Cadbury’s ran a highly successful and innovative campaign in its home market, the UK, back in 2002. Coca-Cola has deployed mobile advertising in markets as diverse as Germany and Mexico over the last five years, simultaneously proving that funky downloads to the mobile are a natural fit for search-based advertising.

Indeed incentives have proved very popular with brands – from promotions to win prizes, from a free can of drink, to a cash prize, cinema tickets or a free pizza. The attraction for the advertiser is that it is simple to track how many people responded to the campaign and what the outcomes were. However, except for a few shining examples, the majority of marketers have a tendency to look at mobile as an advertising channel in isolation. With time, as marketers better understand mobile’s potential, this will change.

As mobile advertising evolves, operators are working to strengthen their position as the gateway to the mobile web. The plan is to capture the advertising revenue by logging and analysing information about users so that they can serve up a better experience and drive the volume of searches. As the volume of searches increase, operators will be well placed to translate the intelligence from the search engine into refined categories of user behaviour, built up from detailed personal profiles. Eventually hundreds of millions of searches will lead to the identification of precise, constantly updated and categorised users’ profiles, all which can be exploited and monetised.

Profiling is and will become ever more important to operators. It is the key to the future of mobile advertising: as long as they can provide good answers to consumers’ queries, consumers will use search more and more as part of their everyday lives. The results will include helpful adverts, which provide useful content and relevant information. In this way search will meet the consumers’ needs and the advertisers’ objectives while pouring money into the operators’ coffers.

Based on your behavioural profile, this article has been sponsored by JumpTap

Mobile Search Analyst November

2007-11-06T17:41:36Z

Mobile Search Analyst November 2007 - Headlines

The cost of mobile search
Mobile operators are trialling and deploying mobile search solutions and services globally. Pilots are changing constantly.

Yahoo!’s advertising vision is clouded
BKI Media has continually argued that Yahoo!’s different strategic paths obscures what it is trying to achieve in the mobile market – to the outside world and it seems within the company too.

Yahoo! Answers are integrated into oneSearch
oneSearch has been commended as one of the best mobile search services, but it still has shortcomings.

InfoSpace (Virgin Mobile) vs Microsoft/Motion Bridge (Orange)
The problems of mobile data user interface are well documented. The following is a pictoral analysis of how vendors and operators have tackled issues of user interface and where or how the search box is positioned is key to uptake and repeated use.

Is Nuance succeeding where others have failed in voice control?
Using speech to make data services easier to use or to control text messaging and dialling are seen as becoming a “must haves” on every mobile operator’s platform.

Microsoft Mobile 6 and Live Search – a view from San Francisco
This might sound like common sense, but after testing Live Search on an HTC device, rather than an Orange SPV handset, the user interface and experience improves remarkably.

Request a Free trial - email: bena@bkimedia.com

Mobile Search quiet at CTIA

2007-10-29T22:30:23Z

by Bena Roberts

At this year’s CTIA talk on mobile search and advertising was subdued.
Yahoo!’s bullish CES launch of Go! was replaced with zero representation; a few rumblings were heard from Google but the gPhone was not announced; AOL enforced the bullishness of branded search on the market with its new proposition and the silence of its rivals indicated that they might have peaked slightly early. Microsoft went all out on devices and its shares leap is more to do with an overall mood of evangelism from the Microsoft camp from providing community services than search.

On the white label side, JumpTap becomes an ad-server on the AOL portal; Medio is to provide search on the CBS WAP site; MCN is shortly to announce a new global territory deployment – but apart from that little else.

With regards to the biggest mobile search players it is important to note that JumpTap is pushing advertising within a branded portal that might cannibalise its own existence. On the other hand Medio is teaming up with a brand to push in-search advertisements as well. On face value I think that both deployments are interesting – JumpTap is still a trial according to AOL and Medio deployment is going live in the next month.

But what does this tell us? Has in-search advertising based on the relevancy of the search query won over banner ads? I think its too soon too tell. When I was out with co-founder of Medio Michael Luni Libes last week at CTIA he concluded that I put too much emphasis on banner ads and that search ads were the winner with the highest click through rate.

Thinking about it I still disagree; it is really too soon to tell as mobile search is still in its infancy (we are not in an online space and what is right for one market might not be right for another) and I believe that filling an ad (whether it is relevant or not) is (at the moment) more important to vendors, advertisers, publishers and brands than not serving one. So if search ads don’t push the information a competitor in the ad space will push a banner.

On the advertising side AdMob launched Tap Tap with a whimper proving that value is essential and driving traffic to publishers is vital for the ad market.

On the browser side Novarra extended an agreement with 3 Italy but InfoGin was the one with the lion’s share of new operator and vendor wins.

What does this mean? Has search and advertising peaked too early or is the taste of success OK but not profitable?

It’s a bit of both.

The Google and Yahoo! search boxes are now no longer an asset – they are more like a “me too”. This drives down the value; the position on the home page and also the need by the operator to push the services.

In return branded search engines are seeing strong results in the Internet and only blimps of success in mobile. So in order not to flog an unprofitable horse the mood shifts.
The cost of search needs to be qualified for mobile search to move forward but advertising is promising more services from a different crown prince which is making search harder and harder to assess and justify.

One thing is clear. Users want mobile services and hottest services now. Yoof are driving mobile; but they can’t afford to purchase data. Hence the lack of uptake in search. The Long Tail is not working and search providers are realising it.

Motricity to purchase InfoSpace Mobile Services (including Mobile Search) for USD 135 million in cash

2007-10-15T20:18:34Z

Motricity is a fierce content, storefront and billing infrastructure provider. It has access to the consumers and their use patterns – but until now has hosted other vendors search services. With the purchase of InfoSpace this will change. The eco-system of search, content and results including Motricity’s brokerage of advertising and marketing services will foster a competitor in the mobile search market.

GyPSii unveiling event Dorchester Park Lane

2007-10-03T06:29:58Z

The common mistake for new company start-ups in the white label space is to position new services as competitors to white label services. A baby can’t compete with a toddler and this new social geo-location white label search, community and GPS service from GyPSii can’t compete with Facebook.

But what it can do is provide operators with one significant part of the value chain that will allow operators to launch their own connected, branded or white label community to their own audience.

Why is this important?

Well basically, white label services are the good eggs right now. Operators haven’t got the potential of 2.0 and “their” ability to plug and play new communities funded by advertising into the portal eco-system.

So what about GyPSii

Well. GyPSii is a facilitator. It’s a broker for communities and connection via GPS. It’s a solution that will enable users to dynamically upload content to the Internet that is relevant to the place that they are in. This means: I am in Paris. I take a picture or the phone locates me in Paris. I am then able to instantly see the communities responses, recommendations and feedback on Paris. This is better than LBS “locate me now”. Its better, because it’s more accurate and the device not the user does the work so cumbersome requests for “where you are” are avoided.

On top this – there is huge untapped potential in the geo-locate advertising space. Go2 has started this assault. Companies like Loopt and Click Mobile are integrating bits of it into the community – but the opportunity is arising and is not already here.

So that was the good bit.

But now the not so good.

Nokia purchased Navteq. Nokia’s whole Ovi solution might be a thorn in the GyPSii side.

Google Maps Mobile and Live Maps are available and ready. But interconnecting with advertisers and connectors to facilitate a Google or Windows service will mean that the branded search or branded player (NOT THE MOBILE OPERATOR) will own the customer and the value chain.

If GyPSii can embed itself into as many devices as possible – or offer a direct to consumer download then it might be able to start to become a broker for services and a way in which GPS fans can connect. I don’t want to stick to only GPS fans – but it’s important to mention the lack of GPS affordable handsets in Europe today and the fact that in the next 18 months nearly all devices will be GPS enabled.
The concept of GyPSii is one of truly enabling cross-border global interaction of content from sources and new users that brings location and GPS (FINALLY) to the party.

There are a lot of other points and some seriously good questions from attendees at the event that I will write up in The Mobile Search Analyst. But

What do we think?
Geo-location is going to be huge. Its very early days. Search, advertising and community are the future and discovery and recommendation THE way of making purchasing decisions.

Mobile phones locating people and finding content in the local area is virtually impossible. But Nokia has started to experiment with location directory services which provide true local directory content to users. Nokia believes GPS, maps, navigation and the community is the next biggest opportunity. So does Google and now so does GyPSii. Everyone else now needs to wake up.

But last call. I hate the name Gypsi. But I do like (spell with me) GPSii – I think that the latter is the more effective than the connotation with travellers. But – hold on. This is a white label solution so the name doesn’t matter – it will be re-branded a brand, probably from a mobile operator.

Aha. Yes. This is white label. Yes! And that is the point.

BKI Media Update

2007-09-20T08:36:58Z

Many of you know that BKI Media is a start-up and we are currently in the final 50 for VC Running The Gauntlet funding. It's been a whirlwind recently and there is a lot of interest in us. Yesterday, I got a few comments from clients asking why we have renamed Mobile Advertising and Marketing Analyst Mobile 2.0. Then I also received three separate emails giving me positive feedback on my analysis that I would like to share.

Positive comments on our analysis all from CEO’s at Vendors in the mobile advertising space on yesterdays Mobile 2.0 Analyst:

“The style of this analysis is excellent. We know our competitors better, with your help – thanks”

“I did cringe when I read it, but you have a point and we will look at that moving forward”

“Great article, that’s for going into that much detail”.

Mobile 2.0 Analyst
So, we decided to transform Mobile Advertising and Marketing Analyst to Mobile 2.0 Analyst and we changed the style from high-brow articles to the same as we write for The Mobile Search Analyst. They are now purely competitive and focused on “success” for vendors in the mobile space.

We have launched the Devils Advocate where we pair of companies in the meanest way possible to try and highlight the strengths and weaknesses in a totally modern SWOT analysis style.

We didn’t get the same up take for The Mobile Advertising and Marketing Analyst as we did for The Mobile Search Analyst (the uptake has been endorsing). But we believe that the Mobile 2.0 Analyst is the bees knees and we invite readers for a one issue trial – but some terms and conditions apply.

Mobile 2.0 Analyst

2007-09-19T10:53:55Z

The AdMob equation: number of ads served vs value
Mobile websites are proliferating because of the increasing ease of creating and setting up a mobile channel and mobile advertising is mirroring that growth.

Analysis of an AdMob mobile advertising campaign
BKI Media signed up for AdMob services as a publisher and advertiser. This is what happened.

On-device portal advertising – future business models
Initially consumers perceived on-device portals (ODPs) as a gimmick designed to extra high and unnecessary data charges without warning.

Why hasn’t mobile got a ‘PayPal’ service?
Mobile is failing to exploit its potential as a means of moving money about – for a range of applications.

IM begins to gain traction on mobile
There’s a real buzz around the take-up of IM on mobile. Progress so far has been glacially slow, despite big pronouncements by a gang of operators at the GSM Congress in Barcelona in 2006, but things are moving now.

Case study: mobile ads and the cost of acquiring users
It has been widely argued that push advertising is not nearly so successful as pull on mobile.

Google new Mobile Adwords
Google's very clever tactics for mobile search AdWords. By now everyone is aware that Google will be including AdWords advertisements within Google Mobile Search results.

Google’s very clever tactics for mobile search AdWords

2007-09-14T07:58:44Z

By now everyone is aware that Google will be including AdWords advertisements within Google Mobile Search results. But having already tested mobile beta services for Google Mobile Adwords – BKI Media can show that this apparent “free” upgrade which will require consumers to “opt-out” is nothing more than clever revenue driving technique.

In our (BKI Media) mobile AdWords campaign** the average PPC rate is merely USD 0.05 to USD 0.07 per click. This implies that almost no other campaigns were bidding on the same keyword (mobile, mobile search, mobile analysis, ads…) which is why we can see a rank of 1.1. The inverse of this is that it clearly shows that Google’s collection of advertisers is sufficiently small and that there is very little competition.

Moreover, and more concerning,

1. The creative chosen by the advertiser to being edited by Google, without opt-in by the advertiser. Google ads are three lines of text plus the URL. On 98% of phones, Google will only show the first line and the URL.

2. The landing page is being edited by Google. So far, the word “adapted” from Google has been viewable via their transcoder. So if the advertiser’s page doesn’t include a lot of Flash or isn’t just a PDF, it’s “adaptable”. Thus the advertiser loses control of the look and feel of the click-through behavior. That’s what the advertiser is paying for!

3. If this were opt-in, and if that opt-in checkbox was clear in the true “adapted” experience from a feature phone, then this might not look so unethical. Certainly this is far from not being “evil” to Google’s half million customers, a.k.a. advertisers. This is equivalent of the New York Times (or any newspaper) charging their print advertisers extra for the number of online readers, and simply shrinking the print ad into a banner. Or CNN charging their TV advertisers for viewership from CNN.com, and showing 30 second TV ads on CNN.com video snippets. Advertisers, like most customers, like to agree to what they are buying, the polar opposite of having to opt-out being charged extra for unwanted goods.

If anything, this shows that Google has been unable to duplicate its success at signing mobile advertisers or converting online advertisers to create mobile campaigns. It reminds me of their updated mobile search offering, which merged Mobile Web into Web, as they couldn’t seem to come up with a good Mobile Web engine given PageRank doesn’t work in mobile yet.

More in AdMob vs Google Mobile vs Decktrade…. In Mobile 2.0 (formerly Mobile Advertising and Marketing Analyst).

** because this chart shows all our bidding and impressions and payment summary – I will publish it on our Mobile 2.0 site and not in the blog.