When Nokia, the company that designs 40% of the mobile handsets on the planet, decides that it is on the side of mobile advertising, then the entire industry, including the consumer, has to prepare for the mass arrival of advertising on their device.
And that’s pretty much what Nokia was saying to us last week when a fairly unnoticed web cast was made, by Mike Baker, head of the Nokia interactive advertising group.
The hard news was that the Nokia Enpocket acquisition has been integrated with both Nokia Advertising Services, its own ad network and with it Advertising Connector technology, the on-device software client that runs advertising services so far only on Nokia handsets.
It should not surprise us. Mobile handsets have overtaken fixed telephone lines globally in a ratio of around 3 to 1, mobile voice revenues have just last year globally overtaken fixed voice revenues, and one day there will be more video, more internet, more email consumed on a mobile device than on TV sets and PCs. It is the nature of making things mobile, they become more personal, more essential and it becomes our preference, under the right conditions, to use our own device, on our terms, wherever we are.
Nokia now sees all this extending to advertising and sees itself as having a greater edge in mobile advertising than either Google or other pretenders like Yahoo, AOL or Microsoft, quite simply because it has more of the mobile equation in place. There are 3.3 billion handsets, 1.5 billion TVs and 1.1 billion PCs so there are 5 billion advertising targets to reach out to.
Nokia points out that it in interactive advertising, adverts where people can reply to the ad, which is growing the fastest in the $495 billion advertising market, on the way to $553 billion by 2010. Most observers (PriceWaterhouse Coopers and Zenith Optimedia) reckon that interactive advertising, a phenomena begun with, but not limited to internet advertising, will make up $100 billion of that, and beyond that mobile interactive advertising will reach $19.1 billon by 2012 growing now at 69% compound annual growth rate.
What’s more Nokia is advising its operator base that there are key triggers to get a fair share of that ‘ the reach is already double of any other media, and the advertising needs to be personalized and relevant to mobile users, and subsidies, either of the mobile internet browsing experience of the advertising device need to happen first, and that more commerce will eventually be done on devices that people always have with them.
Nokia sees this spread across simple display banners, internet click throughs, couponing, email and SMS alerts, location-based targeting, image recognition and is trying to position itself to make separate headway in every area of the advertising landscape, and offer a product ‘ its Ovi portal for premium advertisers, Nokia Maps for local advertising using location services, through software tools such as Widsets and Mash ups and in partnership with Google on global internet search. Nokia says advertisers are asking for advertising that is easy to do, so works preferably through a browser, and says advertising has to be better integrated into content than it is today in TV advertising, by which we understand that content has to contain or link to advertising, rather than be interrupted by it.
Nokia revealed details of a campaign for Mercedes it has completed in the US, where it arranged 1,000 vehicle test drives in a specific region, through mobile marketing alone, and did it more cheaply than internet advertising, with the results, compared to a control group, showing that the recipients thought higher of Mercedes after the experience and were more likely to buy.
Through surveys among US handset owners Nokia has mapped out future advertising revenues with mobile video and mobile TV, unlikely to make huge in-roads into advertising, partly because these are controlled right now by broadcasters, and saying that internet browsing, search and location based search are the big three in the future, with direct marketing through SMS likely only to work in developing countries and falling away once a more sophisticated audience is built up.
‘Already 32% of US consumers say that they are happy to have advertising on their phones, as long as it lowered the total cost of owning a handset, and that 14% were happy if the advertising was always directly relevant to them.
One final warning that Baker talked about was being mindful and respectful that this is a personal device and is on personal time, and that advertisers need to make sure that the user remains in control of the experience, not the advertiser.
While mobile advertising may fill most consumers with horror, regarding it as little better than email spam, the fact that this week the Mobile Marketing Association added a further 51 new member companies to swell its numbers to over 650 merely endorses the Nokia idea that advertising is coming to your handset, and at best you can hope that it is all done in the best possible taste. Perhaps our forefathers felt that same when the first advert ran on TV and look what that’s turned into.