Mobile Advertising: MoPhap Claims 'Cookie' Solution Serving and Tracking Ads

There's a struggle brewing between mobile network carriers in the U.S. and just about everyone who wants to put content or ads on cellphones, smartphones and other mobile devices. Walzcak spoke about going around the mobile carriers if they won’t allow publishers to build a simpler means for serving and tracking ads, and collecting revenue.

Executives and analysts from ad agencies and mobile advertising startups to major publishers and TV networks are grumbling about the lock carriers have kept on networks, devices and cash. The model "is broken in this country. The incentives are not in the right place," George Kliavkoff, Chief Digital Officer of NBC Universal, said to media industry executives at a recent Jack MyersDigital Video Breakfast. "The carriers share nine percent of the revenue with content owners, keeping 70 percent for themselves." Echoing the sentiments, Playboy President, Media and EVPBob Meyers told Jack MyersMedia Business Report in an exclusive interview that the magazine, unable to reach agreement with mobile carriers, was "going around" them with its free mobile site.

Mobile should by now be a new frontier for distribution and revenue. Ogilvy Interactive estimates that 200 million U.S. phones are enabled for text and image messages, 185 million for Web browsers, and that some 12 million can handle video. Jack MyersMedia Business Report’s annual ad spending forecast in 2007 predicts mobile ad spending will balloon from $360 million in 2006 to more than $2.4 billion by 2009. That promise is an important reason Google will join Verizon, AT&T and others in an auction in January for at least $4.6 billion in wireless spectrum that becomes available after broadcast TV converts to digital in 2009. The FCC is requiring the spectrum be opened to any kind of mobile device. Google shook the industry last month when it announced a consortium of more than 30 companies in an "Open Handset Alliance" to develop a platform called Android, which Google Director of Mobile Platforms Andy Rubin called "the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices." Weeks after the announcement, Verizon said it would allow any device that meets its technical standards on its network, and AT&T noted it already allows any compatible device.

For consumers, advertisers and content providers, the new openness is good news. It could help push data plan prices down and even shake up restrictive contracts, spurring consumers to finally use their whiz-bang wireless handhelds. "There’s a huge disparity" between the number of data-enabled phones, and the number of people using them fully, Ogilvy Interactive’s Senior Strategist of Digital Innovation Ben Ezricksaid at another recent media gathering. Evan Neufeld,VP and Senior Analyst at mobile advertising and audience measurement company M:Metric, told Jack MyersMedia Business Report in an exclusive interview that only about half of mobile users in the United States use text messaging and about 12-15 percent use their browsers. "We’re in a very kind of protean phase," he said, "where we’re trying to understand consumers on their phone for voice and other applications." (JackMyersMedia Business Report will be issuing in early January its Household of the Future Report, a major study conducted among 8,000 Americans on their usage of mobile and other media technologies.)

Content providers and advertisers meanwhile increasingly call for consistent ways of tracking and measuring on mobile, an issue MoPhap is addressing. Microsoft this week said it’s putting display ads on its MSN Mobile platform, but that doesn’t solve issues for an advertiser who wants to buy a comprehensive plan across mobile Web sites, carriers, devices, in text messages, "click to dial" campaigns, video and other mobile media formats. There is nothing analogous to the "persistent cookie" that has allowed everyone from ad giants DoubleClick and Avenue A to behavioral targeters like Microsoft’s aQuantive and AOL’s Tacoda (JackMyersMedia Business Report, August 6) to track, serve, measure and audit ads across the Web

In Europe and Asia, there’s already proof mobile media can work. Publishers and broadcasters like Japan’s Asahinewspaper and Norway’s NRK report mobile revenues in the tens of millions of dollars, much of it from ads. eMarketer predicts $16 billion in global mobile advertising by 2011. That’s too enticing an example for U.S. content providers to allow carriers to continue to squeeze them out. And if the carriers can’t strike mutually beneficial deals with content providers, they’ll find themselves subject to end-runs from small startups and established behemoths in an ever more open mobile field.

Bob Walczak can be reached at contact@mophap.com
Evan Neufeld can be reached via eneufeld@mmetrics.com

Dorian Benkoil is a regular contributor to Jack MyersMedia Business Report.

This special report is underwritten by Teletrax, "the leader in digital watermarking for video media tracking, measurement and intelligence." For more information, contact: Peter Winkler at pwinkler@teletrax.tv. The editorial content has been prepared by Myers Publishing with no involvement or approval of sponsors.