Although the industry is immense, it is not at all homogenous, with differing devices, networks, services and consumer behaviors throughout the world. This detailed report from Deloitte provides an interesting look at the current state and important trends in the global mobile industry.

Some of the main topics investigated included the diversity of devices, and the growing number of devices that people own or have access to. In fact, for many countries the average is more than 5 devices, and for some developing countries it is up to 8 devices.

Another key factor is the variation of mobile device ownership and usage by age, especially for the 55+ age group. In many developed countries fully a third of the over-18 population is over 55, and by 2050, 17 developed countries are expected to have a median age above 50.

Not only is the smartphone penetration for the 18 to 34 year old segment over twice that for the 55+ segment, but also the 55+ group uses less of the features of their device. The chart below looks at the percentage of smartphone owners that have never downloaded an app, and compares the over 55 group with the overall average.

The report also shows that tablet ownership is much closer between the age groups, indicating that perhaps the larger form factor device will be the preferred mobile platform for and aging population.

The survey covers many other topics, including the evolution and key trends in the area of messaging.

The MMA has released its latest “Consumer Briefing” report into mobile donations in the UK, French and German markets.

The report shows that in some countries, mobile is already the most popular way for people to donate to a charity.

Following the Haitian Earthquake, it was widely reported that Mobile had played an important role in raising the required money for the relief efforts. This MMA study puts some solid numbers behind these reports, showing that in Europe that 21.4% of donors made their pledges via SMS and 7% by visiting a charitable website from their mobile device.

This means that a total of 28.4% of those who gave money to the Haitian appeal did so via their mobile device, which shows how important a medium mobile has become in order to allow people to help victims and charities.

The figures vary slightly from country to country, with French people emerging as the most likely to use their mobile device for charitable donations with 30% of all donors choosing to do so via SMS. Germany came second with 26% of all donors using SMS as their medium of choice to donate to the appeal.

However, when you add in those who donated through a website from their mobile handset, mobile emerged as the most popular way of donating for in both countries.

The UK was lagging behind with only 9% of donors using SMS and 8.6% visiting a website from their mobile device. However UK consumers described themselves as the most likely to donate by mobile in the future, with 19% stating that they were likely or very likely to do so, followed by the French with 16% and the Germans with 11%.

“Humanitarian disasters demand immediate response, and the donating public appears to recognize the effectiveness of texting and using mobile generally as a way to help those in need, when they need it,” said Dr. Peter A. Johnson, VP of Market Intelligence for the MMA

The report also provided some interesting insight into which practices would encourage greater rates of donations via the mobile device. It found the following key points would help:

• Guaranteeing that mobile numbers would not be retained or contacted again
• Making it clear how much of the donation actually went to the charity
• Not fixing the amount that a consumer is able to contribute so that they can decide how much they want to give.

To read the full Press Release please click HERE

December 9 to 10, 2009
Paris, France

LeWeb brings together the best and the brightest people of the web industry from attendees to speakers. Take advantage of a unique setting of networking areas around the main stage to meet your peers, to get inspired, to grow your business, to develop partnerships…

The theme for the 2009 LeWeb Program is “Real-Time Web”

The real time web is taking the world by storm! Twitter has grown exponentially in one year with an extremely simple service that does only one thing keep you in touch with what your friends are doing, in real time. Facebook entirely redesigned its most important assets, its home page and opened its feed to third parties.

Register now to be in Paris on December 9 and 10.

The Role:
As Media Director, you function as a key member of the Media Planning Buying team and are responsible for overseeing the translation of media strategies into final recommendations based on the client’s campaign goals and objectives.
• You are in charge of Media plan for Europe (especially UK, France, Italy, Spain & Germany).
• You lead all day to day operational aspects while mentoring and leading planning team of 5.

Key Responsibilities:
Recommend, Implement, Monitorize & Optimise Mobile Media Plans (Display, Search, SMS).
• Leveraging insight to develop effective and creative media strategies
• Providing maximum return on media investment for all clients across your portfolio
  – Oversee development, execution and maintenance of client media plans
  – Set realistic client expectations while trying to exceed them, by providing quality work in a timely and responsive manner
• Provide an excellent service from the media planning perspective in order to help solidify relations with the client and grow the future business and leverage more billings
• Manage a team of 5 Media Planner/Buyers

Key Qualifications:
You have a deep understanding of the Internet & Mobile Media Space thanks to a strong experience in a top media agency : you must have strong direct response planning skills and sound online planning and buying knowledge and experience including display & search.
You have exceptional thinking, communication and influence skills, leadership, and energy.
We seek candidates with enthusiasm for pushing the frontier of how marketing can evolve to meet the needs of an ever more powerful consumer.

• In depth understanding & background of media planning, negotiation, implementation and performance analysis.
• Experience in managing and developing junior staff. Ability to motivate a team of media planners buyers
• Exceptional verbal/written communication skills and solid presentation skills
• Proven ability to develop and maintain strong professional relationships with clients, colleagues and vendors
• Bachelor degree in related field or equivalent work experience
• English native or bilingual (French would be appreciated)

TheCompany:
Phonevalley is the pioneer and leading agency in mobile marketing.

Since its acquisition by Publicis Group in 2007, Phonevalley operates as mobile communication platform for Publicis Groupe networks (Starcom MediaVest Group, ZenithOptimedia, Vivaki especially).

With a global presence (10+ countries / 20+ cities), our goal is to bring our clients to the top communication on mobile phone thanks to our unique marketing experience and our best mobile technological tools

Phonevalley delivers premium mobile media planning and buying solutions, as well as a full mobile marketing service to its customers, such as O2, P&G, Toyota, Puma, L’Oreal, Paramount, Samsung, Richemond.

Package:
Working with a young, dynamic team, successful candidates will enjoy immediate hands-on client experience, training, work experience.
Salary £40k+bonus

To Apply:

Abphone has an interesting business, it has built a search engine and service focused solely on entertainment content – images, wallpapers, videos and games.

The fact that Abphone limits its scope of search to entertainment content means that it can use search algorithms that are more tailored to this type of content, rather than generic web search algorithms.

It can also develop the user interface specifically for this content. For example, on the Abphone service there is a “I’m Bored” button which will bring back some entertainment content that it believes you will like based on your past searches.

The company has recently had quite a bit of good news to report:

• Abphone entertainment search is now found on all 3 french mobile operator portals – SFR, Orange, and Bouygues Telecom.
• The audience for Abphone search has grown by more than 30% in the past year alone in major countries such as the USA, UK, France and India.
• Ad revenues in the same time period have increased by 40%.
• The latest Mediatech 100 report ranks Abphone among the 100 most promising companies in the medias and technology industry!*

Pierre Scokaert, CEO of abphone commented: “The future is bright for abphone because vertical search is ideally suited for the mobile web. In 2009, we look forward to extending our search offer to address new verticals, such as music and news.”

As mobile search develops, it seems more and more likely that there will be several types of search co-existing on a consumers phone. Rather than a single monolithic search engine as we typically see on the web, a mobile subscribers may in fact decide to keep a number of different search services on their device so they can get the absolute best results.

Read the full Abphone press release.

* Mediatech 100 report references some of the most successful and innovative companies in Europe. Mediatech 100 is a publication of Library House and is supported by Kemp Little LLP and NMA. The Mediatech 100 is a list of Europe’s hottest private media technology companies likely to have the biggest impact on the Mediatech industry in the future, selected by assessing companies using Library House proprietary data filters and by an expert advisory panel.

Several major mobile publishers in France have recently signed on with Microsoft. The deals will see L’Equipe, Boursier.com and Autonews (France) use Microsoft’s mobile ad platform, while a deal with mobile operator Orange will see display advertising from Microsoft in Spain.

“We are continuing to add to our already impressive portfolio of mobile advertising syndication deals and are excited that these companies have chosen to use Microsoft’s advertising platform moving forward,” said Didier Kuhn, CEO of ScreenTonic. “Through Microsoft’s experience in mobile advertising, we are able to offer end-to-end solutions that help premium publishers and mobile operators effectively manage and monetize their mobile ad inventory.”

See the full release on French publishers here.

At the same time, Microsoft announced the the launch of its digital advertising initiative in India, which includes a mobile component. Microsoft will provide display, rich media, contextual and video advertising solutions on their publishing partners sites. Already key publishers such as Hungama, Equity Master and Facebook have signed on.

The service will also enable advertisers to buy search keywords on Live Search deployed on Vodafone Live and display banners on the MSN Mobile portal.

Ad sales will be handled by NDTV Media, the exclusive sales partner for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions.

The key benefit for publishers was summed up by Shamsuddin Jasani, Business Director-Digital, Hungama, who said that with this initiative, he could now concentrate on creating compelling content, while Microsoft could monetise it.

Jaspreet Bindra, India Country Manager, Online Services, Microsoft, said, “With over 200 million mobile phones in the country, advertising solutions on mobile will help grow the advertiser base. Advertisers can now buy keywords on Live Search deployed on Vodafone Live and also buy display banner ads on MSN Mobile browse portal.”

Read more about Microsoft mobile advertising in India in an article in Exchange4Media here.

Bouygues Telecom is one of the leading mobile operators in France. Laurent Herbillon is Director of Service Development and Innovation, and is responsible for mobile advertising activities within Bouygues. Laurent took some time with us to explain the overall mobile advertising strategy at Bouygues, as well as the details of some recent business developments.

We’ve been working on mobile advertising for quite some time. A couple of years ago, we setup special areas on our i-mode portal and on our WAP portal for advertising, and we’ve been selling the space on this section to advertisers. Its limited to this certain area, its not banners all over the portal. Users can also subscribe to a push email message that informs them of the best promotions of the week.

Is this advertising space available to all advertisers?
We’ve actually been quite careful to insure that the customer’s first experience of mobile advertising is a good experience. At first we limited the advertising space to just 8 advertisers, and we’ve always worked with our agents to be sure we had high quality companies, products, and ads.

We’ve also made sure that with each advertisement there is a specific benefit for the customer. Its not just an advertisement, but by interacting with the ad there’s something special for the customer. By this I mean he might win a ring tone or a specific mobile discount. For example, we’ve done promotions with Marionnaud (a French perfume store) where the customer would get a discount simply by showing the banner on the mobile to the cashier in the shop.

And how have the results been from this advertising section?
The results have been quite good. For example, looking at campaigns we did with Peugeot, SNCF (French railway), Societe Generale, and Marionnaud, we’ve had click through rates of 16% to 20%, which is pretty high.

Also, a number of these campaigns were run simultaneously on multiple mobile operator networks, and the best results always came back from the Bouygues Telecom portal.

What factors do you think are responsible for this strong response?

I think there are three things that make the difference.

1. the way the advertising section is integrated into the portal makes it easy to get to the ads
2. the quality of the ads and the offers is good
3. the fact that it was not too “aggressive” towards the end user

We’ve learned from these trials that we have to be very careful with our ability to control the commercial pressure put on the customer, either by Bouygues or other players, and to make sure they don’t react badly to an overwhelming advertising campaign.

Do you have other mobile advertising projects underway?
Yes, we’ve also started building an opt-in database of consumers which includes significant profiling information. Its still quite small at the moment, but we’ve been able to start monetizing it and are learning in the process. And of course our plan is over time to build the size of that base significantly.

Let’s now talk about Bouygues’ overall strategy for mobile advertising.
Its very clear – our strategy is to use the advertisements to reduce the cost of content for the end user. We don’t see advertising as the next “revenue generator”. We think our top priority is to make content free, in order to increase the mobile multimedia penetration.

We will soon be launching a series of projects on our portal and in partnership with other content providers, i-mode and WAP sites, with the clear objective of making them free in terms of content charge.

What do you think about “ad supported” compared to “ad funded” approach?
When I say “free”, I mean free; its not a question of price reduction. Our customer surveys have showed that really there is no price elasticity. In the consumer’s mind, its either you pay, or its free. Customers are ready to accept an ad-funded service if its free, but something like a subscription discount to get advertising is not going to work.

So in the next months we’ll be doing a trial of taking some of our most popular content sites and making them fully free. We now are working to setup the right process so we can sell the available space on the sites.

Which brings us to TF1. Can you tell me something about the agreement with TF1?
(note: TF1 is a large French TV broadcaster, and is also owned by the parent company of Bouygues Telecom)
Certainly. TF1 will be selling the ads for the Bouygues portal. They will also be serving the ads, using a technology from a company called CellCast. We decided not to develop our own ad server, as we want to focus on our core business. This is why we are partnering for ad sales and serving.

Will the other i-mode and WAP sites also sell their ads through TF1?
At the moment, the agreement with TF1 pertains only to inventory on the Bouygues portal.

Our approach with our content partners is a very open, flexible relationship. We had to choose an advertising company for our own inventory, and we picked TF1. We don’t want to impose our choice on other content providers. Other companies may already have existing ad selling partnerships that they will use. However, of course TF1 has a huge reach, and would be an ideal ad selling partner for other content providers that want to put ads on their sites. Its up to them to choose.

Overall, do you think that the mobile advertising will mirror online advertising development?
I believe the mobile phone offers some special advertising opportunities that we have not yet explored. So far its been very much a “copy/paste” of the web model, banners and search.

I think there are great opportunities with certain very specific types of operator inventory. For example when someone is downloading a game, or when they are dialing a number, or when they are launching a video, there is the chance to put an advertising message there. This is inventory that only exists on the mobile, and we need to learn how to use it.

Bouygues is also doing a lot of work on mobile commerce. How do you see mobile commerce working with mobile advertising?
The reality is that mobile commerce is still just beginning. Its clear that advertising is a good way to develop m-commerce, but its not enough. To start a ‘virtuous circle’ for mobile commerce, I think you need to have 3 key enablers in place:

1 – there have to be good m-commerce sites on the network
2 – advertising has to work to bring customers to the m-commerce sites
3 – customers have to have an easy way to pay

Although its early days, the parts of the m-commerce solution are starting to come together. We now have some good m-merchants on our site including e-bay, Amazon and some French m-merchants. And this summer we are bringing out an m-wallet which will ease the process of buying something on the mobile.

How will the m-wallet work?
Well we’re not going to replace banks – the idea is more simple. Customers will enter their credit card information and address into their phone once, and when they want to buy something on the mobile, they can just use this information. The idea is to facilitate the process of buying something on the mobile, because today its still very complicated.

“Contact-less services” is another technology that Bouygues has been working on, how do you see this working with mobile advertising?
I think that contact-less has a great future with advertising, because it lets you communicate with the customer at just the right moment. Let me explain.

When a customer has the capability to pay for petty cash purchases with their phone, the operator will in essence be “present” at this very critical moment. The operator will know exactly when the customer is paying, and there will be the possibility to send an advertising message, a price discount, or a customer relationship management interaction. This is a very critical moment to be able to communicate with the customer.

Last question: on a more personal basis, what one or two things do you think have to be in place for the mobile advertising market to realize its full potential?

Really I see two things.

The overall market, including the operators, has to learn what is special about mobile. There is a very intimate relationship between a consumer and their mobile phone. Its very different, it can’t be treated like TV or online. The industry will have to invent new formats that give specific benefits to the customers – just applying existing models is not going to help the market.

The second thing is that we have to help the customer handle the “commercial pressure”. Today our customers receive SMS and MMS from content sites and operators. If in addition there are lots of banners on the portals, its going to be too much. We have to find a way to protect the customer from feeling overwhelmed by mobile advertising. Or else we will kill a market that does not exist yet.

Thank you very much Laurent, we look forward to seeing all of these plans develop.

Minh, Nokia is world famous for making mobile phones, can you tell us why Nokia decided to get into the ad serving and ad network business?
One of Nokia’s overall strategic goals is to promote better consumer mobile internet services. Certainly we’ve been building additional features into our phones to do this, but we also thought we needed to help build the entire eco system. One way to do this is by helping the mobile ad business become successful.

A functioning mobile advertising industry will bring money to publishers, enabling more and better content and services. This will lead to higher levels of usage, more data traffic, more applications, and so on. Basically our view was there are two business models that could bring more money into the system – the subscription model and the advertising model. The subscription model has not proved viable, but the mobile advertising model seems to be doing very well.

Sometimes when Nokia has ventured outside its core business, it has upset other players in the industry . What has the reaction been to the Nokia Ad Service announcement?
To date it has been very favorable. We may have caused some concern with other companies that serve ads, but frankly Nokia is actually in many more parts of the value chain than any other ad serving company. And we’ve talked several of the other ad serving companies, and we will in fact most likely be partnering with them to share ad inventory.

For example, Nokia’s mobile site nokia.mobi is the most visited mobile internet site, with over 100 million page views per month. So in this regard, Nokia is one of the biggest publishers on the mobile internet. We are making the ad inventory on this site available through the Nokia Ad Service, which is a big opportunity for advertisers to reach this audience. Also, Nokia is a big advertiser. We launch dozens of phones each year and we advertise these heavily.

The second part of the Nokia announcement was the Nokia Advertising Connector. Can you tell us something about that?
It is a client software that runs on the mobile device and helps deliver ads that are more targeted and more relevant to the user. Basically as you consume media on your mobile (ie read newspapers, watch videos, etc) the software will build a profile of your interests, and that information will be communicated to the ad server and used to select and serve the most relevant ads. Currently its optimized for

Will Nokia keep this as a proprietary feature, or will you make the interfaces and functionality an open standard?
The final precise functionality of the connector is still being implemented, and not all of the decisions have been finalized. I can’t say forever, but at the moment I think we will keep it proprietary.

One of the biggest issues cited by advertisers is the fragmentation of the mobile advertising business – its hard for them to do large media buys like they are used to in other media. Will the Nokia Ad Service address this problem?
Indeed, the mobile ad inventory is quite fragmented today – it is divided by country, by mobile operator, by ad-serving network, etc. We think that the Nokia Ad Service will in fact give advertisers one of the largest consolidated opportunitites to place ads globally. Already with the nokia.mobi site we have 100million page views a month, in several countries which are available for advertising placements. And as we continue to add new publishers to the network, we are expanding the offer.

So if I was a publisher with a mobile internet site, and I wanted to join the Nokia ad network, what would I need to do?
Its very easy. First, you sign a contract with Nokia, which is non-exclusive so it doesn’t prevent you from also selling ad inventory elsewhere. Second, we give you code tags to put into your site to invoke the ads. And that’s it. We’ll serve ads to your site, and you can get full on-line reporting and start earning money as people click on your ads.

What is the business model that you use for Nokia Ad Service?
Today, most ads are being sold on a CPM basis. This is the business model that is most widely understood, and easiest to implement. We have the capability to support CPC and CPA business models, and we think these will become much more important in the future. The business agreement between the publisher and Nokia is a simple revenue share.

If CPM is the predominant business model at the moment, can you give us some idea of the CPM rates you are seeing?
The click through rates are typically quite high on a mobile campaign, maybe 10x that of an internet campaign, which makes the CPM rates a lot higher as well. The exact price depends of course on the publisher, the quantity, whether its run of site, etc. But for a general figure, around $40 CPM seems to be where the market is at the moment.

Last question – what is your view about the future of the mobile ad serving business?
At the moment there seem to be a lot of mobile ad serving companies and a lot of mobile ad networks springing up. I guess this is normal for a new industry in an early stage. But soon, I think there will have to be a consolidation in the industry. This is because the value of an ad network depends on how big it is: the bigger the network the better the reach, the more advertisers will want to use that network, making them more successful, able to acquire more inventory, become bigger, etc. So what is important is to get out there early, and build into a large network quickly.

Thank you, Minh Tran.

Read Minh’s blog for more on mobile advertising.

Nokia Ad Service press release HERE.