Archive for March, 2009
In This Digital Age, a Big Ad Budget Alone Won’t Cut It
Viewpoint: Win Over Better-Informed Consumers With Product Excellence, Innovation and Accessibility
Published: March 30, 2009
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| Ajaz Ahmed | |
Economic theory holds that when customers are rational and know all things about all products at all times, they will always make the best decisions regarding purchase. It sounds obvious, but in our age of convergence this poses a real challenge for brands that market in the old, Don Draper style: by creating advertising messages that aim to stoke unconscious desires in the consumer’s psyche rather than developing better products, service, value and experience.Indeed, the stealth, speed and agility offered by today’s digital technologies could well be creating the conditions for what economists call the perfectly competitive market across many industries. This sets the stage for an ideal environment for consumers, with free-flowing information about products and prices resulting in the best outcome for the buyer. But it also means that loyalty to brands is transient, as search engines, sophisticated price-aggregating services, unbiased sources and other online facilities that provide instantaneously updated data enable the relentlessly innovative and more-accessible organizations to rise to the top while others languish beneath.
Call it the brand paradox. On the one hand, the convergence of media and technology makes a strong brand essential to any business. Companies without one will simply be lost amid the torrents and gigabytes surging across the world’s networks. On the other hand, the on-demand reality pulls apart the traditional brand building blocks, so it’s time to do some reinventing.
As advertising evolves, it must provide real answers to real questions, not canned information; it must offer interactions that satisfy real needs, not blanket persuasions; it must create communities that actually speak to one another, that are not just content with aspirations. And these processes do not necessarily, or ideally, all take place together.
Transformation, innovation and constant reinvention
Work that provides information about a product’s features and benefits has to be separated from activity that attempts to satisfy consumer aspirations. The way to do this is by building a community around the brand so that the like-minded join. Both further distinguish themselves from ideas that create a direct, more intelligent, proactive relationship between buyers and sellers, and from storytelling that takes a multimedia approach to enhancing a brand’s image.
Marketers also have to start asking the questions that should remain at the top of their agendas throughout the transformation: What new ideas and innovation will enable us to cut through the clutter and get people talking and keen to share? And what new capabilities and services will enhance the value of our branded product to our customers?
It will also require organizations to define their brand values more clearly and instill them throughout all customer interactions — since everyone and “everything” that relates to a customer is effectively part of the brand, as we now know.
In the current era of information overload — where attention-deficit disorder combined with time starvation has rapidly become the norm, where people have access to significantly more content than they can possibly assimilate — how else is it possible that people are able to filter through the masses of data to make the best decisions? Unless consumers are willing to share a brand’s ideas and its constituent parts, then the chances of being heard through all the noise are remote.
The arrival of ‘Channel Me’
Indeed, the first act in the process has already started. This is why multi-taskers are, perhaps subconsciously, unbundling conventional advertising messages from their lives, not only through their active use of content-on-demand services and DVRs but also by creating all-embracing, personalized feeds or interactive channels that include only the family, friends, associates, organizations, information and brands they choose to engage with. Consumers are increasingly the mouthpiece and amplification for brands that provide some kind of social currency or kudos. This constantly changing “Channel Me” provides a sense of control and a convenient escape from the shouting, jingle chanting and brand-name blasting that old-school advertisers use to imprint information on the brain of a couch potato wondering where his next snack will come from.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR | |
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Ajaz Ahmed is chairman of AKQA.
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It’s not really surprising that conventional advertising messages should fail to translate in this world. Brands were created for producers to enable factory builders and assembly-line inventors to tout the virtues of their newly mass-produced wares to the vast markets they hoped and prayed were waiting for them. The web, by contrast, was created for consumers, to provide a way of picking through and making individual sense of masses of information and goods. Not only does this imply a change of perspective, it also, by definition, necessitates a complete change in the way in which advertising carries out its various functions.Consider three moments from January 2009. When, on Jan. 20, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the U.S. in front of the largest crowd America had brought together on any previous occasion, the majority of people who were not in Washington to experience the historic celebration saw it unfold by turning to the web and their mobile devices. Never before had internet traffic hit the record peak it did at the start of President Obama’s speech, as millions around the world watched, read, participated in and shared the moment.
The following day, Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, announced the company’s most recent results at its quarterly earnings call. Despite what is now known as the most challenging economy in several decades, Mr. Oppenheimer had good news. Apple reported its best revenue and profit in the company’s extraordinary 33-year history. In discussing the results, Mr. Oppenheimer said to an attentive audience of analysts and investment bankers: “We entered the holiday season with our best product lineup ever, and our customers responded.”
Also in January, metrics firm Compete reported Facebook had grown its number of unique users in the U.S. an astonishing 85% in 2008. Only a matter of weeks after, Facebook’s lead over its closest rival had grown a further 15%. Internationally, Facebook also has unequaled success. By the time its fifth-birthday celebrations were in full swing Feb. 5, Facebook had already become the largest social network — an operating system for many people’s lives — with more than 150 million active users worldwide.
Undeniably, President Obama, Apple and Facebook embody the rising power of today’s curious, informed, knowledgeable consumer. How is it that these brands are able to plow the same field as their competition but reap the rewards, taking up positions close rivals must have hoped would be their own? Winners in today’s massively competitive, and arguably more meritocratic, marketplace are not differentiated by the sizes of their advertising budgets. Differentiation comes from a relentless focus on product excellence, simplicity and accessibility, combined with a hunger for improvement.
Is the dark cloud of dominance without innovation now finally behind us? Is the era when an inferior company could outspend a superior and often smaller rival to gain a distribution or market-share advantage now over, with the growing majority of people empowered, adaptable and able to make intelligent, informed choices without needing to be interrupted, surrounded and even insulted by countless commercial messages? If it isn’t now, it soon will be.
Skype Announces Service for iPhone, BlackBerry
Photo: REUTERS/Vivek Prakash
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Skype is planning to launch its service for iPhone users on Tuesday and for BlackBerry in May as part of its effort to expand beyond desktop computers.
Skype has been pushing to make its service work on the most popular advanced phones with an aim to expending its more than 400 million users who were mostly lured by the promise of cheap and sometimes free calls made using its computer application.
Skype Chief Operating Officer Scott Durchslag said he has high hopes for the application’s success on Apple’s popular iPhone as he expects Skype’s most feature-rich mobile offering to appeal to new and existing customers.
“The No. 1 request we get from customers is to make Skype available on iPhone. There’s a pent-up demand,” Durchslag said in an interview before the CTIA annual mobile showcase in Las Vegas, where Skype plans to launch the service on Tuesday.
In May it will launch Skype for Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices, which popularized mobile email. It has already announced Skype for Nokia phones and for phones based on Android, Google Inc’s mobile system, and Windows Mobile, from Microsoft Corp.
CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood said the new applications give Skype a chance to boost its mobile phone position, which has been weaker than that of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter or News Corp’s MySpace.
One of Skype’s unusual iPhone features is the fact that it allows subscribers use to the phone numbers in their existing iPhone address book so they do not need duplicate lists.
“Whether you’re Twitter, MySpace or Facebook you want to be embedded in the address book,” said Wood. “This puts Skype firmly into the game.”
Skype’s iPhone application will be free to download and will allow free calls between Skype users. As with Skype on the desktop, fees will be charged for calls to traditional phones.
The service will also work on later versions of Apple’s latest iPod Touch device, which has Wi-Fi links but no cellular connection. The iPod Touch launched September 2008 has a microphone, unlike the first iPod Touch launched in 2007.
While Skype video is very popular with desktop customers, Durchslag said that the company is still considering whether it will offer video for the iPhone or other phones.
“We’re considering video carefully but we have a really high bar on the quality,” and how the user interaction will work with other applications on iPhone, he said. “If we do it we will have to do it incredibly well.”
CCS’s Wood said that if Skype can replicate the popularity of its desktop video feature on the cellphone it would help a mobile category that has been slow to take off, as well as boost its own status in cellphones.
“I’m firmly convinced that if Skype could find a way to bridge all those cellphone cameras and laptop cameras it might kick start a video telephony opportunity,” he said.
While mobile Skype has been available for some time in other countries such as the United Kingdom, it has been slow to catch on in the United States partly due to carrier concern that it would cannibalize their phone call revenue.
In the United States for example, AT&T Inc has had a monopoly on calls made from iPhones, as it is the exclusive carrier here.
But Wood said that Skype has actually shown that it can boost consumer spending on cellphones as it encourages use of the phones for other services such as data.
For example he said that its success on networks such as 3 UK, owned by Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, suggests that carrier fears have been unfounded.
“The only area where I think there are some question mark is that it could erode roaming revenues,” he said, noting that some consumers particularly in Europe hesitate to use their phones while outside of their carrier territory because of notoriously high roaming fees.
“The carriers will be suspicious of this service but what we’ve learned from other markets is that (Skype) did not have the detrimental effect feared,” he said.
(Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
Apple Ads Breathe New Life Into Online Creative
TBWA/Media Arts Lab’s ‘Mac Vs. PC’ Synched Banners Inspire Sharing Among Consumers
Published: March 30, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — At an industry conference almost a year ago, Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer of TBWA/Media Arts Lab, deplored the state of online ad creative as “semi-nowhere.” It’s fitting, then, that arguably the most creative banner-ad execution of the past 12 months came from Mr. Clow’s shop.
The ads, for Apple’s Leopard operating system and its “Mac vs. PC” campaign, started showing up in spring 2008 in the form of synched ad banners running on NYtimes.com. In the fall, they started running on sites such as Yahoo Games, where iPhone ads appeared to interact with the content of the page — game play got so intense it “busted” the navigation bar of the page on which the ad appeared.
It was enough to inspire what is perhaps the ultimate reward for compelling advertising: consumer distribution. Fans of the “Mac vs. PC” creative on NYtimes.com, for example, captured videos of the ads’ animation and uploaded them to YouTube where, collectively, they got tens of thousands of more views.
Apple and Media Arts Lab weren’t the first to use such tactics. Synched banners have been around for years — an early version of an Applebee’s ad ran on iVillage a few years ago. And last summer Nintendo ran a trailer on YouTube for Wii’s “Warioland” game, in which the game’s action busted up the entire page’s navigation (the game has received 5.2 million views on the video-sharing site). But with Apple, creativity has been a consistent theme in all its web ads. And let’s not forget it was only a year ago — in this same issue — that Ad Age wrote about the brand’s paltry investment in online ads.
“Most online advertising still feels like it is a result of a conversation about click rates and the tactics of grabbing attention through gimmicks, as if tricking people to engage is a measure of true success,” Mr. Clow told Ad Age via e-mail recently. “But I believe creativity should be our filter. I want to see artists and idea people find more influence in this space.”
Saving online ads
His point of view has been gaining steam lately. The “semi-nowhere” remark last year was a prologue to the recent conversation about the dearth of online ad creativity. That discussion itself lies within a larger debate: Can online advertising, a once-promising medium whose momentum has slowed, be saved?
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Rich-media ads with a twist tout the iPhone as a gaming device: When the user tilts the device, the web page’s navigation bar follows along. |
When the web was conceived as a potential marketing medium, it had little to offer besides two-way interaction via the mouse and, thus, the click was born as a proxy for effectiveness.
The conversation about clicks is not a pretty one these days — fewer than 0.1% of display ads are clicked on, according to ComScore. And bemoaning dropping click-through rates as a sign display ads are dying is a big part of the problem.
“Simply put, we need a creative renaissance in interactive advertising,” Randy Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, challenged the industry at his association’s recent annual meeting. “Because of our direct-response heritage, we’ve toiled under the tyranny of the click for too long. … We simply have got to emerge from under the shadow of our technological wizardry and start paying attention to the power of great creativity.”
But few are doing that. According to PointRoll, the rich-media provider that worked with TBWA/Media Arts Lab on the ads, only about 5% of online ads served today include some sort of rich media. Why so few? Reasons range from budget (rich-media ads are more expensive to run) to the fact some publishers don’t accept a full range of rich-media ads, making them difficult to scale.
Engagement is possible
Catherine Spurway,VP-strategy and marketing at PointRoll, said about 6% of users who see PointRoll-served ads interact with them, whether by mousing over them for at least a few seconds or performing some sort of activity within the ad unit, showing that when creative is good and engaging, people will engage with it. Online isn’t passive, she said, and “people should be able to engage with advertising the way they do the rest of the net.”
Ultimately the Apple ads work, both online and off, because they’re the starting point of a story. AKQA co-Chief Creative Officer Lars Bastholm called this concept “social storytelling” and said it’s even more essential online, since the water cooler is built into the system. The users that took the time to capture video of the ads on NYtimes.com and upload them to YouTube were continuing the conversation that TBWA/Media Arts Lab started.
Figuring out how to “let emotional ideas live naturally” is still something most brands struggle with, Mr. Clow said. In his mind, it’s not just about embracing the rational utilities of this space — search, information and functionality — something most brands are still trying to figure out. It’s also about creating desirable content that works for the audience and the environment.
“That is the stuff that gets discovered and posted on YouTube,” he said. “Because when you lead with being surprising or fun, people will pass your ideas around. But if brands force themselves into the wrong spaces, they will be called out or ignored.”
J&J Connects With Celebs, Moms in Social Media
Programs on YouTube, MySpace Plug Baby- and Body-Care Brands
by Jack Neff
Published: March 27, 2009
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — Johnson & Johnson is venturing into social media to back its eponymous baby- and body-care brands, putting considerable star power behind pushes this month and next on YouTube and MySpace.
The company is launching a “Big Bubblin’ Stars” contest on YouTube behind its recently launched bubble-bath product, offering a grand prize of $10,000 and a chance for the winner to become host of a channel launched in 2005. To enter the contest, moms upload three-minute videos of their kids.
Angie Harmon, star of “Samantha Who?” and “Law & Order,” as well as a mother of three, will serve as spokeswoman and final judge for the contest. It’s also backed by leading mommy blogger Christine Young of From Dates to Diapers and Walmart’s Elevenmoms network. In addition, J&J has tapped hundreds of bloggers associated with Mom Central.
Raising money for charity
Johnson’s Body Care, meanwhile, is using MySpace to enlist women to raise money for charities of their choice by hosting “cause parties” for which Johnson’s will supply lotions and body washes for guests. Grammy-Award-winning singer Ashanti is fronting that effort, and has already hosted her own cause party in New York earlier this month to raise $10,000 for the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem.
In both efforts, J&J is leveraging hot marketing topics du jour: social media and recession. The social-media aspect is obvious. The recession aspect is a bit more subtle. The YouTube contest aims to provide new opportunities for moms to use social media to supplement their income. The MySpace program looks to let women who may be out of work remain active by volunteering for causes important to them and enable working women to help out charities whose coffers have been depleted by the recession.
“Big Bubblin’ Stars gives moms a chance to win some money with something they do all the time, which is take videos of their kids playing at bath time,” said Rich Hildebrandt, group product director-new ventures for Johnson’s.
The economic appeal isn’t the primary element of the programs, he said, “but it’s certainly something we think will resonate with moms and give us maybe the pass-along value.” A lot of the initial interest in the program on Twitter or YouTube has been in the opportunity to host the channel, he said.
About engagement, not reach
Mr. Hildebrandt declined to disclose spending but said the goal of both programs is to deepen engagement rather than reach a maximum number of people. J&J will back the programs early next month with print and digital advertising and make extensive use of its BabyCenter site to promote its YouTube channel.
The body-care effort essentially makes MySpace host of the website for that part of the lineup during its restage this year. J&J opted for MySpace rather than Facebook because it was better suited for the effort, with more of an entertainment, gaming and beauty orientation, Mr. Hildebrandt said.
“Each of these open platforms has their own energy and role in women and moms’ lives,” he said. “MySpace is the best and most appropriate platform for us to celebrate beauty and a cause together with the overlay of Ashanti as the spokesperson.”
Creative B’Stro, San Francisco, handled creative for the YouTube effort, while MySpace is handling creative for the soon-to-launch effort there. Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Lowe, New York, handles advertising, while J&J-dedicated sibling J3, New York, handles media buying. RF Binder, New York, is handling public relations.
Twitter to Offer Business Accounts, at a Price
Photo: REUTERS/Twitter.com
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Twitter is taking a much-anticipated first-step in its quest to parlay popularity into revenue by offering business customers an expanded range of fee-based services.
The company is preparing to offer commercial accounts in which corporations and other types of businesses pay a fee to receive an enhanced version of Twitter, a free service that allows people to send short, 140-character text messages to their network of friends.
“We think there will be opportunities to provide services to commercial entities that help them get even more value out of Twitter. If these services are valuable to companies, we think they may want to pay for them,” Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, said in an e-mail sent to Reuters.
San Francisco, California-based Twitter has enjoyed a surge in popularity since its creation three years ago, despite the fact that the company has yet to make any money. According to Nielsen Online, which measures Internet traffic, Twitter’s Web site had more than 7 million unique visitors in February, compared to 475,000 in February 2008.
Last year, the company turned down a $500 million acquisition offer by social networking powerhouse Facebook. And some observers have speculated that Google might have its eye on Twitter, because of Twitter’s real time search capabilities.
Twitter recently closed a round of venture capital financing pegged at $35 million by media reports, following two earlier funding rounds totaling $20 million.
While Twitter initially planned to begin seeking revenue in 2010, the company recently decided to accelerate the schedule and find ways to monetize its service this year.
On Monday, Microsoft and online marketing firm Federated Media rolled out a special Website dubbed ExecTweets that allows individuals to monitor Twitter messages of business executives.
Stone said Twitter has just hired someone to work on creating commercial products. He would not say when Twitter’s commercial accounts product is set to be introduced, but said it would be sometime in 2009.
“We have lots of time for experimentation with regard to revenue generation, so we’ll probably be trying a few different things this year,” said Stone.
(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing Bernard Orr)
Government Agencies Make Friends With New Media
By Chris Snyder 
March 25, 2009 | 6:11:15 PM
Web 2.0, meet dot-gov. Dot-gov, this is Web 2.0.
Or at least that’s the plan, now that the General Services Administration inked landmark agreements with several new media companies that clear up legal issues surrounding liability and government sunshine rules — thus easing their use by government agencies’ websites.
This announcement marks a big step for agencies that are trying to become more transparent and connect with citizens, but find themselves saddled with antiquated websites. Now that the bureaucratic brush has been cleared, government agencies will be free, for example, to embed videos and create photo widgets that citizens can embed into their MySpace or Facebook pages.
“We know that about every minute, 15 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube, and there’s about 50 million people that use Facebook, so we know that that’s where the public is going to get their information and they don’t necessarily always go to government websites,” said Martha Dorris, associate administrator of GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications.
The GSA ,which led the effort for 12 agencies over the past nine months, has finally worked out arrangements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv, saying these are “representative of high volume and innovation on the Web.” It has plans on expanding this list further, and is in discussions now with social networking sites Facebook, MySpace and Ning.
The microblogging site Twitter was already found to be compatible with federal policy, and the GSA even boasts about its own Twitter accounts in the press release.
The new terms of service were necessary because many of the current ones contained indemnification clauses, which the government cannot accept under a federal statue known as the Anti-Deficiency Act, according to GSA general counsel Michael Ettner.
“We found that there was not a good enough fit for what the Federal government would like to see in terms of our participation in these free social media sites,” he said.
President Barack Obama has been pushing for greater citizen involvement in the the government and has already made use of many social networks and new media outlets like Twitter and YouTube. On Thursday he will answer user-submitted questions through the White House website using Google’s Q&A platform, Moderator.
“It’s another example of why it really matters who’s president of the United States,” said techPresident’s Andrew Raseij about the GSA’s announcement. “Because we have the country’s first tech president, the speed at which the government can catch up with the private sector and use of technology is exponential.”
One issue that comes up with the increased usage of new media is that of tracking-cookies and privacy.
Federal guidelines prohibit persistent cookies unless approved by a department head providing a legitimate reason for doing so. The GSA says that this policy will not change with the new media agreements.
The White House already posts videos of Obama’s weekly address to YouTube, and Google announced that it recently redesigned a player that adds a cookie only when you play a video rather than just visiting the website.
The White House explains its usage of cookies by third parties in its privacy policy.
“A waiver has been issued by the White House Counsel’s office to allow for the use of this persistent cookie,” it reads. “If you would like to view a video without the use of persistent cookies, a link to download the video file is typically provided just below the video.”
The Department of Education and the State Department also post videos to YouTube.
A number of agencies have already been experimenting using social media, and will need to sign the new terms of service on a case-by-case basis.
“Agencies who already have a business case to use these tools will now have the legal footing to do it,” said Sheila Campbell, team leader of USA.gov Web Best Practices and co-chair of the Federal Web Managers Council. “We need to be using the tools strategically — not using the tools just for the sake of using them.”
She says a good example of this is the Centers for Disease Control alerting the public about the recent peanut recall.
“They could reach millions more people by putting this out on Twitter and Facebook, and where people already were on the Web,” she said.
Issues and solutions collectively negotiated include (as posted by GSA):
• Indemnification and limited liability: In negotiating the various agreements, we’ve been seeking to remove the indemnification clause (because agency officials cannot agree to tie their agency to unlimited liability in violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act), and to ensure that liability is limited and covered by federal law.
• Jurisdiction and choice of law: The proposed agreements must be governed by the law of the United States and by the relevant state law only in the absence of other federal law.
• FOIA: The proposed agreements recognize that we adhere to the Freedom of Information Act.
• Intellectual property: The proposed agreements recognize that our content is in the public domain.
• Advertising: Providers have assured that they will eliminate or minimize advertising and that they have no intention of adding advertising that they do not currently display. On YouTube, for example, they plan to remove the “Promoted Videos” module on playback pages.
• Grandfather arrangements: In the case of YouTube, previous “click through” agreements will be superseded by new agreements, making it possible to “cover” existing accounts, avoiding the need to close old accounts and rebuild content from scratch.
• Free service: In every case so far, providers will not charge federal account holders for the use of their services. These are not contracts; they are no-cost agreements. While fee-based “premium” services may be available from the same provider, those are separate arrangements for which the agency should proceed under traditional “procurement” processes.
Charmin Shows BlackBerry, iPhone Users Where to Go When They Gotta Go
Free Mobile App Provides Locations, Ratings of Public Restrooms
Published: March 24, 2009
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — After nearly a decade of providing free, clean public restrooms everywhere from state fairs to Times Square, Procter & Gamble Co.’s Charmin wants consumers to find their own — via a free mobile social-networking utility, SitOrSquat.
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| Charmin’s Sit or Squat iPhone app |
The wiki — housed on the web at SitOrSquat.com and available as a mobile application for BlackBerry and iPhone — launched in December with the goal of turning the digital masses into a mobile army of restroom reviewers. It both helps locate public restrooms and provides star ratings based on their cleanliness and other amenities.
Charmin can’t be accused of just trying to sell toilet paper: Unlike major rivals, it doesn’t have a commercial-bathroom business. Rather, it’s just another effort at nontraditional branding, a la the Times Square restrooms the brand has provided the past three holiday seasons; the mobile Pottypalooza program it ran from 2003 to 2005; or the “Charminizing” program in which it cleaned up public restrooms at state fairs starting in 2000.
As of last month, SitOrSquat had logged more than 52,000 toilets in 10 countries, more than half a million unique visitors and more than 1,600 downloads of its mobile apps. All those numbers are growing rapidly, and Charmin hopes publicity regarding its sponsorship helps them grow faster, said P&G spokesman Dewayne Guy.
As of today, a bottom-wagging Charmin cartoon bear graces the home page of SitOrSquat.com, though the brand image hasn’t been incorporated into the app.
‘Same experience away from home’
“We’ve been doing this idea of trying to give consumers the same experience away from home as they get at home for years,” Mr. Guy said. “This fits into that whole concept that you’re on the go, there’s some tension there; Charmin is playing hero.”
It’s not always easy to find a public restroom, he noted, particularly in New York, and particularly in Times Square at holiday time.
Indeed, with Starbucks starting to close stores, it’s getting a little harder.
This is the first time a toilet-paper brand has partnered with a downloadable mobile application, P&G said in its release. Other relevant potential mobile applications may not immediately spring to mind, other than perhaps text alerts when the roll is running low at home. But the technology doesn’t exist yet for that.
iPhone King of Mobile Web with 50% Share
BY Kit Eaton
Do people have a pent-up desire to surf the Web from their phones? Yes, if the experience isn’t a pale substitute for desktop browsing. Based on some fresh data from mobile advertising marketers AdMob, the one smartphone to deliver is, naturally, Apple’s iPhone.
The iPhone is winning the mobile Internet war by quite an astonishing margin. AdMob’s data, from its Mobile Metrics app, shows that, over the last six months, the iPhone accounts for fully 50% of all mobile browser traffic to Websites for U.S.-based smartphones, and 33% of global smartphone site visits.
RIM’s BlackBerry 8300 takes second place in the U.S., totaling 9.1%; globally, Nokia’s N70 handset is the distant runner-up to Apple with just 7.1%. That means that Apple’s share of U.S. traffic has risen 40% in six months, and 29% globally. Every other operator (except Android, which is new on the scene) showed a drop over the corresponding period.
Why are the stats so pronounced? The iPhone is just two units on sale in a cluttered smartphone marketplace, and Nokia’s handsets outsell everyone else’s in the world. One would expect that to be reflected in the figures.
But the real reason lies more in the relative quality of the mobile Web browsing experience. When Apple announced the iPhone, it touted it as a “breakthrough internet device” because it uses a Safari browser that has a common core with the desktop version. And it has lived up to its hype. The iPhone is so adept at viewing most Web pages (except those with Flash, but that’s a different debate), there’s little need for viewing specialized “m-dot” versions of a Website, tailored for the restrictions of mobile browsers.
Compared with the competition’s mobile browsing experiences, it really is a step-change up in user-friendliness. In contrast, it seems users of other smartphones, be they Symbian-based or running a version of Windows Mobile, simply don’t use their phones to surf the Web as much as iPhone users do, despite the millions more handsets on the market.
Essentially what the AdMob figures show is that the public really wants to have near desktop-quality Internet capability on their smartphones, and Apple’s the best at delivering that so far (in concert with its chosen service providers, of course.) Palm and Google take note, if you want your smartphones to succeed.
[Via AdMob via TechCrunch]
AdMob’s iPhone Ad Business Exploding (AAPL)
Mobile ad network AdMob has moved aggressively into the iPhone ad market, and it’s paying off. In the last year, the company’s iPhone ad business — measured by ad requests — grew more than 35x.
Last month, the company served up
1.2 billion ads worldwide to Apple (AAPL) iPhone and iPod touch devices, or about 18% of its 6.56 billion total ad requests. In Feb. 2008, it served up about 33 million ads to iPhones, or about 1.3% of its 2.56 billion total ad requests.
So while AdMob’s overall business has more than doubled year-over-year, its iPhone business has grown much, much faster.
Why? Much of the credit goes to Apple: It’s sold more than 30 million iPhones and iPod touches, most during 2008. But give AdMob credit, too: It’s been a leader signing up iPhone publishers to its ad network, including iPhone-specific ad units for apps sold through Apple’s iTunes App Store and delivered on the mobile Web.
Meanwhile, we’d caution paying too close attention to some other conclusions drawn from AdMob’s mobile metrics report, such as TechCrunch’s post claiming that the iPhone represents 50% of U.S. smartphone Web traffic.
TechCrunch got this line directly from AdMob’s report — but that’s the problem. While the iPhone may represent 50% of smartphone traffic on AdMob’s network, that is not necessarily an accurate depiction of the broader mobile Web. Why not? AdMob’s stats significantly favor the iPhone because of its vast ad inventory in iPhone apps — ads that are not available on other phones — and on iPhone-tailored Web sites, which won’t work on some phones.
So while AdMob’s stats offer a nice look inside their mobile ad business and could be directionally correct in a broader context, they are not an accurate, normalized gauge of overall mobile Web traffic.
