Yesterday, I had a chance to spend the morning with some really smart mobile companies. These are folks actually implementing programs here or in Europe. They were all interesting for different reasons. (the common thread is that they are all investments of our parent - so full disclosure)
m:metrics
One - m:metrics - is a service we use within my team. Evan Neufeld gave us an updated overview of their data on mobile usage in the 6 countries they amass this data on: US, DE, FR, UK, IT, ES.
Their Mobile Lens service is syndicated data on installed base and usage. And they are very detailed. Most of the data he reviewed yesterday was US centric by request, for example:
- 10% of users create or share content (presume this does not include simple text messaging and does include things like photo sharing)
- 30 million people use photosharing
- There is a 6% 3G penetration
- Mobile revenue (usage plus advertising) will be a $4billion-plus business by 2012
Iconmobile
This is a German firm that we have a stake in that is doing some truly awesome stuff. They have a great understanding of what makes mobile experiences successful. In general, the group debated some of the recent efforts by others in the mobile space including ESPN's foray and Vcast and others. Here are some points that came out of our group:
- mobile strategy and implementation must be integrated into other interactive and marketing, not a separate unit doing it's own thing. The insight here is that simply porting video over to the mobile platform may not be as successful as a program that has hooks into other channels and experiences (e.g. contests and activities that create galleries on Web pages, voting that gets tallied and displayed elsewhere, even the ever-popular interactive billboards) This means that try-and-learn programs are complicated. If all we do is port client video over, we shouldn't expect great results.
- No one knows the real appetite for watching video on the mobile device although at least one member of our troop just got back from seeing a device demo in Japan that really made them drool. Most seemed optimistic. I still love watching video on my iPod, so I am a good customer-candidate. The price point of most mobile video providers (e.g. $15.95) is probably holding back adoption.
- According to Evan, users in the installed base (admittedly small compared to potential market), appear to be open to consuming advertising especially if it offsets usage costs.
- CPMs are all over the map for mobile advertising from .20 cents to $20
- There is no standard measurement model right now. Each of our companies is modeling a specific measurement criteria for each engagement vs. there being a standard. This sounds very much like what we are experiencing in social media right now.
- Audience segmentation is often better informed by the demos associated with particular handsets (mobile measurers like m:metrics know the handset, handsets have particular consumers, etc...) than by some super fancy data fusion (there was some debate about this)
Back to iconmobile. Their work is truly wonderful. They are very design-conscious and are spreading the gospel of care in the interface design amidst a world of carriers that often put out a poor user experience. They are also creating some inventive applications from tools and applications to more entertainment-based experiences like the serial soap on Mittendrin.tv.
It's going to be a fun year in mobile.
We are in the try-and-learn phase of mobile. Many clients will recognize the need to use this year to get smart by deploying programs. Others will be cautious and critical waiting for the real audience
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