We have been saying that the advertising market has to move to where all the new media is, on the internet and on mobile, for the past four years, and then we get a week in advertising like never before.
Nokia goes out and adds to its in-house mobile advertising software with Enpocket, leaving no-one in doubt any longer that Nokia’s new CEO means business when he talks about the company becoming a mobile internet player.
During the same week Microsoft says that it has added 20 new publishers since acquiring aQuantive, Google’s DoubleClick shifts its advertising servers to mobile, the US cable companies begin talking about their Canoe standard for interactive advertising, and MySpace says that it will begin to target adverts based on the interests noted on a member’s profile.
There are two clear wars in the advertising world, one is the shift in viewing habits from the TV to other forms of entertainment, most of which are based around the internet, and the other is the emergence of advertising on the handset, which doesn’t so much take advertising from elsewhere, as add advertising to parts of the day when it had previously been avoided.
And as if to underline the first battle, this week Nielsen said for the first time that advertising spending for the first half of 2007 in the US is down 0.5% over the same period last year. Internet spending is naturally up by around 23.6%, and apart from minor improvements in specialist magazines, and outdoor advertising and some sub-sections of the TV markets, all other advertising is down, Nielsen says, with radio and newspapers the worst hit of all apart from Sunday supplements. Advertising among the top 10 companies ad purchasers was off 7.3% from the same time period last year and General Motors continues to show the largest decline.
This is pretty much what you’d expect in a market that is starting to recognize that it is harder and harder to reach an audience that is doing multiple different things, with majors pulling their spend and trawling through new generation services looking for impact.
Enpocket is perhaps the company with the biggest head start in offering advertising campaign management on the mobile, and has been in operation for around 6 years, which is why it was a target for Nokia. But as if to undermine the announcement immediately DoubleClick said that it would move its Dart platform to the handset, allowing it to manage scheduling, targeting, selecting and delivering of all digital advertisements whether they are on web sites or a handset.
Enpocket has carried ad campaigns for PepsiCo, Ford, Toyota and Snapple delivering mobile ads via text, the wireless Web and video and picture messaging with Sprint Nextel the first tier-one operator to tap Enpocket to monetize its on deck inventory. Since then Vodafone and India’s Bharti Airtel have used Enpocket.
Nokia will now look to both monetize its own Ovi portal, with advertising around its music store, its N-Gage gaming and its mobile Mosh social networking site, as well as offering the service for other operators.
Enpocket is not Nokia’s first move into mobile advertising and back in March it introduced the Nokia Ad Service as a managed service and its Advertising Connector, as a way of automatically selecting the right mobile advertising format for each handset. It may have come up against Enpocket in the market and thought it was better to acquire it rather than compete.
Also this week InformITV tells us that cable executives in the US have been talking openly about the CableLabs Canoe, which is a yet to be revealed interactive advertising architecture so that there can be direct response to adverts served by cable operators without each company offering their own incompatible systems. There is not a specification ready yet this year, but interaction and addressability are great ways to enable operators to get the same or more cash for less adverts.
And Microsoft announced the Atlas Publisher Suite acquired with aQantive has attracted 20 more publishers and advertisers including SmartBrief, Reunion.com and Entrepreneur.com plus three IAC properties including CollegeHumor, Vimeo and 23/6 have gone live on Atlas AdManager.
Meanwhile the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), which represents 450 companies in mobile marketing, published its Mobile Advertising Guidelines for the EMEA region, as mobile marketing becomes more and more viable in Europe.
The guidelines tell how to purchase and use Mobile Web advertising, how to use Mobile Web Banner advertising, recommended aspect ratios and banner dimensions, maximum file sizes, file formats and other technical specifications. Mobile advertising is indeed here to stay.