Cellphones Aren't Just For Word-Of-Mouth Marketers Anymore

This Tuesday I attended the Adweek Media Interactive Marketing Virtual Conference and Trade Show. I attempted to watch the live showing of the keynote speaker at 11 a.m. but the quality wasn’t to specs and I couldn’t get much out of the presentation. Therefore, I waiting for the archived versions of the presentations to come out and I watched the one titled “Harnessing the Latest Tech Advancements to Reach.” The topic discussed was about mobile phone advertising. There were three speakers present and they each discussed different aspects that were accompanied by slides.

The first speaker was Brian Morrissey who is the Digital Editor for Mediaweek. He gave a lot of general overviews that set a platform for the other two speakers. This included introducing mobile phone advertising as the most upcoming form of media. People who use their phones for anything more than texting or calls is hoped to grow with incoming generations and developments. Statistics show that not many people trust this form of media advertising and this is a huge issue. However, 89% of major brands say they will be taking the challenge on within the next year. Popular forms of advertising with this media are search engines, video networks, and applications marketing.

The next speaker was Nicholas Covey, the Marketing Analytics and Development Manager for Telephia Research. He displayed a lot of statistics for mobile usage. Mobile video is the fastest growing niche. Areas such as texting are the highest used cell phone features. As far cell phone users, a high percentage finds mobile advertising unacceptable, as a solution to this a slightly large percentage said they wouldn’t mind the advertising as long as they were receiving something in return. A disturbing user statistic was that a very low percentage says they expect to see more ads on their phone. In light of many companies’ intentions, these people are likely to be blindsided. Covey also showed a lot of mobile statistics as they relate to television. Channels like sports, weather, comedy would be popular mobile presences. The shows Deal or No Deal and American Idol were top players in currently advertising via text message.

The final speaker was Kevin Perkins, the CEO of Greenlight for Neilson. He focused on the challenges mobile advertisers currently face and will face in the future. Right now banner and advertising is hardly making any sort of profit. Clear, effective communication must be made if a consumer is going to respond. Guidelines for ads are very restrictive. Advertisers have to be creative in order to work with these measures. In order to get a response ads will need to be easy, use a pull method that lets users initiate contact, and be relevant to what the user wants.

Overall, the presentation was enlightening and ran well. I felt like I gained a fair amount of knowledge. Being in the field of marketing, it always feels good to discover something new and upcoming.