Handset targeting is something that many people mention. How does this work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Its not really an exact science, but you can ascertain a demographic profile of a consumer based on what handset they have. And once the campaign is running, you can continually see which handsets are doing the best and modify accordingly. So you build up a base of experience as to which types of ads will do best on which types of phones.<\/p>\n

Can you give us some examples?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One example would be 3G capable phones. If a consumer has got the latest gadget that costs \u00a3200 ($400), and they are using 3G services, they tend to be an early adopter. This is one of the media buying parameters that agencies are looking for, especially for financial brands or automotive brands. We’ve used this for example with a campaign for Citroen.<\/p>\n

Another example are the mobile handset manufacturers. Many of them are moving to mobile advertising because they can target specific ads to their existing customers. If they ran similar ads on the internet, the the effect would be diluted, because they wouldn’t know whether the consumer was one of their customers or not.<\/p>\n

What’s your view of location based targeting?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think this is an element that will open up a whole wealth of opportunities for mobile advertising, and will generate some really big campaigns. But its not quite there yet in my view for a couple of reasons.<\/p>\n

I don’t believe any of the ad serving applications in the UK are integrated into the location look ups of the operators, though it is on their road maps.<\/p>\n

Also the cost per location look up tends to be about \u00a30.05 to \u00a30.10 ($0.10 to $0.20), which can be more than the ad itself.<\/p>\n

Finally the current response time of about 4 seconds to get a location look up is too slow for effectively serving ads if you are trying to get any kind of scale.<\/p>\n

You’ve said that in addition to targeting, optimizing is a very important point about mobile. Can you explain this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once you have a campaign running, you need to start tweaking it. With mobile you can monitor many aspects of the campaign to see what is performing best, in terms of:<\/p>\n

– what sites are working best,
\n – which content areas of the sites,
\n – which handsets,
\n – what time of day,
\n – what day of week,
\n – which creative execution,
\n – which operator network<\/p>\n

Once you see what works best, you can start moving the budget accordingly.<\/p>\n

The key thing is not to wait, but to start right away and view it as an on-going process. In fact, the campaign management team in our company spend only 10% of their time loading up campaigns, and 90% of their time optimizing them.<\/p>\n

My final question is what do you think is in store for the mobile advertising industry in 2008?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think you will see a number of things happen.<\/p>\n

In general we’ll see the campaign budgets grow, though I think the spring will continue to be primarily “trial” size projects, with larger mainstream projects set for the second half of the year.<\/p>\n

Secondly, I hope that the various trade organizations will increase their efforts to bring advertisers and agencies on board by providing information and perhaps putting together some cross operator data about brand impact.<\/p>\n

Finally, from a creative viewpoint, I think we should start seeing more viral advertising on mobile. It is very popular online, but not yet on mobile. There is some great creative, and it could be a great opportunity for advertisers as they would get distribution for free without paying any media costs. <\/p>\n

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