Media Week

We talked a while ago about how mobile usage – just like web usage - will be about services rather than content. Thankfully, new figures suggest that wasn’t complete tish. But what does it mean for media owners and advertisers?

Nielsen said that mobile internet usage shot up 25% in the third quarter of this year and the five most popular sites were BBC news, Google search, BBC weather, Facebook and Hotmail.

Kent Ferguson, senior analyst at Nielsen, said of it all: "The fact that weather, sports, news and email sites make up the majority of leading mobile sites shows that mobile internet is mainly about functionality and need at the moment, as opposed to the more entertainment and e-commerce-focused make-up of the leading PC-based sites."

So, now there’s (even more) facts to back up the theory, what can be done about it? Well, as advertisers we shouldn’t be thinking about what content it might be right to tie our advertising to, but what it is mobile users might want and need from our particular brand.

I’m Toyota (picked at random  - well done them). Should I pump out my 30-second spots wherever mobile TV appears? Should I put banner ads on Autotrader’s mobile site? Well, I could. But, better to pick services that my customers want – and that fit the brand – and deliver those. ‘Today. Tomorrow.’ is the company’s current UK positioning. So, journey planners? Travel news? Traffic problems based on your GPS positioning? I’d be all over it.

Toyota could of course do all this work itself and seek to build a mobile site all around this kind of stuff. But, personally - and here’s where the media owners come in - I’d be after an expert brand that has the resources, infrastructure and credibility to attract my audience. And that’s when I’d be on the phone to Autotrader.

I’m positive that mobile ad banners will grow as a revenue source. But I’m equally positive that their value to advertisers will diminish – just as they have on the web – and soon prove an unprofitable format to support. Understanding that digital is about service, not content, will help media owners avoid that issue sooner rather than later, and have something useful to say for themselves the day the Toyota call comes in.

First, no apology, for writing about handsets. For media types, this might sound irrelevant, but the handset - in planet mobile - is everything.

As forecast, the iPhone has forced everyone to raise their game so that, not long from now, everyone who matters to advertisers will have a handset in their hands that they can reach.

For example, the first 'G-phone', T-Mobile's G1 is out there and being loved by its users - despite it being very much version 1.0, Blackberry has responded with the Storm and HTC is launching the Touch Fuze in America. All these devices have touch-screen interfaces. Let's remember that almost no handsets had this before the iPhone came along. Chiefly, touch screen allows a wad more space for your screen which, when it comes to media consumption, is crucial.

But, the three competitors are also seeking to fill the iPhone's gaps. First among these is that it has no proper QWERTY keyboard. If you want to use your phone for email and work stuff that too is a usability must since, as good as the iPhone's touch keyboard is, it can't match a slide-out, 'proper' keyboard.

All that means that, if you want to use your phone for email - and, let's face it, most 'ABC1s' do - then there are more and more options out there attempting to steer you away from an iPhone. So, competition is doing its bit to deliver handsets that genuinely can handle all the advanced stuff we need users to be doing to make the mobile a viable media (and thus advertising) platform. Which one would you choose?

The standardisation of mobile operating systems has truly begun as Motorola says all its future devices will have either Windows Mobile or Android as their base system.

It means the manufacturer has cancelled phones due for release this year that were not based on these two and is also a sign that Nokia’s full absorption of Symbian in the summer will most likely reduce that business to a Nokia-only solution. For the mobile industry this is all good.

What it means is that service providers (let’s say Google) and developers (e.g. games people) can begin to focus on building stuff for particular manufacturers rather than for particular operating systems that then need to be adapted for each manufacturer and each handset. The result should be mobile services that are much more usable.

Of course having Windows and Android in the same stable will produce some interesting conversations for Motorola, as well as insight into which system suits which phones. Google and Microsoft are now truly squaring up to each other in mobile. Who are you backing?

It’s been said that if you can think of it, then there’s already a magazine about it. The relaunch of the MMA is a reminder that you can also bet there’s at least one trade body to represent its interests. And so it is in mobile.

Consider online advertising. Control over that particular space is fought for by every single advertising trade association that existed before it came along, plus a complete set of new ones, including one for every specialism you care to name - ad sales houses, search, affiliates, and web analytics to name just four.

The IAB has a rightful claim to consider how the mobile internet might work as an ad medium. Then there’s the GSM and the MDA, which both act on behalf of the operators. The DMA and the ISP (I hope you’ll forgive my dropping of journalistic convention by not spelling out every abbreviation) have had mobile interests for a while. But the equivalent body to the IAB when it comes to mobile is the MMA, the Mobile Marketing Association. And this, after a significant period of hiatus in the UK, has relaunched. So what should it concentrate on?

Here are the three issues I believe it should be focusing on to the exclusion of all others:

1.       Measurement

The GSM, in league with the MMA, IAB and others, is already working to develop a metric for mobile site audiences. This really is a crucial task. As we’ve said before, the web never had a single measurement for site traffic, which hampered agencies’ ability to compare media owners and buy space on a level playing field. Developing one for the web – as is happening now – is a painful process of reverse engineering. For mobile to get this sorted out would help immensely as agencies start to buy mobile ad space in greater volume.

2.       Mobile search

How people will search on their mobiles compared with their PCs is not yet fully understood. Two factors suggest there will be differences: first, inputting text is trickier, which will affect the length and nature of key phrases and, second, people’s searches will be different based on their altered needs when mobile.  Given that mobile search is likely to be the commercial path of least resistance for advertisers and media owners, the MMA needs to provide insight for its members on these kinds of issue.

3.       Mobile TV

There is no question in my mind that, within five years, the bulk of commuters will be watching televisual content (not broadcast TV) on their way to work, just as they consume audio content now. The question is how it will be monetised. Pay-per-download services are bound to get traction but, given that TV comes from a world where content is, predominantly, ad-funded, perhaps it will have more luck than the record labels in integrating advertising. The MMA should investigate.