Media Week

The FT has scored an editorial hit with its new mobile site, but what does the commercial side of the business make of it?

The FT’s Rob Grimshaw is right, FT users really could do with a quick way of checking the latest FT news and stock prices on the go (and on, specifically, their Blackberrys and iPhones). And the site delivers. Clean, simple, clear, FT ‘pink’, and all you really need or care about when you’re on the move.

But, the insight into how this new investment will be paid for is also interesting. First, there’s no apparent room made available for served banner advertising. So, while Grimshaw says clients are expressing interest in “sponsorship opportunities” it seems that is indeed what they’ll get, the fixed period ‘tenancies’ of web 0.5.

Also, there are new prompts for users to subscribe to the full FT experience, for example, to be able to customise the stock prices they see, driving, hopefully, the core business.

For the commercial teams inside the FT, this is all a much cleaner way to go about things than they had to get used to on the web.

The sell to media agencies, for example, is very straightforward. Reach this many people of this particular type for this period of time. It’s a clean sell that speaks well to press buyers, rather than the digital departments for whom mobile banners are likely to make even less sense than on the web. It also allows the FT to go after slightly younger AB1 brands since it can reasonably argue that the mobile site delivers a significantly younger audience than the paper.

Things bode well but what we won’t know for quite a while is whether it will make its money back or, God help us, make a profit. If it does, the FT can reasonably claim to be one of the few traditional publisher brands to have successfully navigated the digital storm. If it doesn’t, it’s back in the whirlpool.

A very interesting piece in Ad Age earlier this month explained in more detail the argument I’ve been making about where mobile fits in.

It says, essentially, that mobile is much better for response than branding. It talks about how mobile allows users to go ‘the next step’ – to lead-generation - in a way that backs up my [small] criticism of the iPint.

Through mechanisms like click-to-call and click-to-SMS, we can enable potential customers to do something fast and easy that, for us, generates a valuable lead and, for them, is just a step further in a journey they’ve already started. Why hold them up?

However, I’m just not sure about this continued ‘siloing’ of marketing (or at least advertising) into brand OR direct-response. My view – thoroughly contended by some I know - is that interactive channels blur the lines between the two so far as to make them disappear.

So, when Ad Age talks about the ‘brand vs direct-response debate’, I wonder whether we’re engaging in an argument that’s just not worth having. If a brand, for example, makes it easy to interact and ‘respond’ to a piece of their marketing, it makes me think better of it.
 

One thing you can be sure of in an ad recession is that budgets for unproven marketing channels get gone. This means that – as an ad channel at least - mobile will have to take yet another break; we’re probably another two years away.

Trying to view mobile [phones] as an ad channel in the first place is of course a mistake. In fact, the internet (whether web, email, IPTV, whatever) in general isn’t much cop at 'advertising'. As a marketing channel it’s the absolute business. But, because of its on-demand nature, its real strength is in only one of the four ‘p’s and that’s ‘place’. It is as a distribution channel that the web has proven most disruptive as any newspaper or retailer could testify.

Mobile, in my view, could be just as disruptive but, again, as marketing channel not ad medium – and again in distribution. It stands out most as the channel to deliver on people’s ‘here and now’ needs and as an enabling mechanic. Voucher codes, for example, are getting big in the online retail/affiliate sector. In the US, redeeming online codes in-store is commonplace. How better to do that than have the code sent to your mobile?

Nonetheless we will turn the mobile into an ad platform somehow – it’s what we know. But, now that the Bellwether report has confirmed our fears, we can expect any money that was set aside for its exploration to have been handed back to the finance director.