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Mobile improves effectiveness of cross-media advertising: ThinkMobile panel

By Dan Butcher

March 19, 2009

Nokia looks to engage

NEW YORK - Adding mobile to the marketing mix improves the effectiveness of cross-media ad campaigns, according to a panel at MediaBistro's ThinkMobile Conference & Expo in New York.

Companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Google and Nokia have all entered the mobile advertising arena aggressively. Panelists discussed how they are embracing mobile advertising, compared mobile tactics to online methods and talked about their approach to mobile.

"While mobile still isn't a line item in media budgets, the reach is there," said Michael Bayle, senior director of mobile adverting sales for Yahoo, Sunnyvale, CA. "Across the mobile industry impressions are in the billions and mobile page views continue to grow.

"You know you're crossing a chasm when you have to issue a press release detailing how much you're spending -- recently Land Rover and Jaguar committed $2 million to mobile, and that was a press-worthy event," he said. "Mobile is still nascent, but once you've got a rhythm behind it, it's transferrable across all the players and all media."

Mr. Bayle said brands are extracting mobile ad budgets from one of two places: from print and out-of-home above-the-line spend and below-the-line spend, especially digital ad budgets, which are transferrable to mobile.

Yahoo serious about mobile

While the mobile ecosystem is complicated, mobile does have differentiating characteristics, including targeting capabilities and unique metrics.

Many of the Internet giants have placed an intense focus on mobile, because that where consumers are.
Microsoft has a dedicated mobile team in charge of mobile display and search advertising,

"Today there is no reach issue in mobile, there's plenty of inventory, so there's absolutely no problem, but mobile advertising spend is still small compared to overall advertising market," said Marc Henri Magdelenat, director of mobile ad sales and marketing for Microsoft Advertising, Redmond, WA. "It's very interesting, though, to look at the growing mobile inventory and growing number of mobile page views.

"Mobile is exploding due to the the iPhone, due to the right price to browse on the mobile Web, the right devices coming out and faster networks providing faster browsing speed," he said. "We have the reach -- 1 billion page impressions per month."

Google search results on an iPhone

Microsoft ran a campaign ran last summer for the launch of the Warner Bros. Pictures' movie Get Smart, which combined different channels such as online, mobile and gaming, with advertising in all of them.

The campaign included banners on the Web and mobile and access to specific content on the Web and mobile such as viewing the trailer.

Comparing the efficiency of online on its own to the online-plus-mobile campaign, Microsoft reported numbers that show the impact of adding mobile to the mix.

Viewing intent of the movie grew by 49 percent among people exposed the mobile components of the campaign, while brand favorability grew 46 percent, demonstrating that mobile helped to increase Web numbers.

Mobile represented 15 percent of Warner Brothers' global ad buy with Microsoft.

AOL's Platform-A discussed mobile campaigns for Ford, featuring video in expandable mobile banners, and for Virgin Mobile, featuring cross-media campaigns with Web and mobile components to promote its Sugar Mama program and various Virgin music festivals.

"The huge potential is there and we can see the coming magnitude of mobile's impact on the advertising world," said Phil Miano, national director of mobile advertising sales for AOL'S Platform-A, New York. "We selling digital advertising and extending it to mobile."

Google said that its mobile division is second only to search in terms of staffing, and its mobile advertising team leverages all assets on Google, including Maps, search, YouTube and the Android operating system.

"Mobile is an extremely large part of Google's business going forward, and it's a highly staffed strategic initiative," said Robert Victor, product manager of emerging technology for Google's DoubleClick, Mountain View, CA. "Display advertising on mobile is very important, as is mobile search advertising."

Google sees the mobile industry as much further along than it was even a year ago.

What is the big difference between now and a year ago?

"We see a lot of value in the high-end mobile devices merging the technology of the Web with the unique capabilities of mobile, and we can extend our Web technology to mobile," Mr. Victor said.

NBC approached Google's DoubleClick before the Beijing Olympics wanting to figure out how it could easily sell and deliver metrics to advertisers on the Web and mobile.

The company sold spots across all different media channels in Beijing, and saw a pretty impressive revenue lift, according to Google.

"Content is even more valuable in mobile than it is online, and it's important to assemble Web, mobile and video technologies," Mr. Victor said. "When it comes to cross-media buys, you need more tools than just mobile."

Many panelists stressed the fact that brands should combine mobile with all the other channels, including TV, online/digital and print, to take a global, cross-media approach.

Nokia -- an $80-plus billion company -- is unique among the companies represented in the panel because it focuses almost exclusively on the mobile channel.

In addition to its line of handsets, the company focuses on five areas of mobile: media, messaging, games, music and location-based services.

Its advertising services include targeting by location and demographics.

"We do see a tipping point in mobile, as we have many customers that spend on an annual basis in the millions, with a very high percentage of repeat purchases," said Tom Henriksson, head of Nokia Interactive Advertising, Espoo, Finland. "It shows that the business is growing a lot."

Nokia stressed that mobile includes display, search, messaging, pre-installed browser bookmarks on the 500 million Nokia phones sold annually and advertising embedded into applications.

Nokia said that about 15 percent of its campaigns are cross-media, where either a consumer starts on mobile and ends up on other media or starts on other media and ends up on mobile and maybe somewhere else after that.

Nokia ran a campaign for the Audi R8 where consumers could text in to get the sound of an engine revving on their mobile phone. Nokia placed mobile calls-to-action on billboards and magazine ads, and the advertiser deemed the campaign a success.

Nokia is also customizing mobile devices with brands such as Unilever.

The two companies partnered on a pink phone targeting the female demographic in Brazil. The phone was branded with Unilever's teenage-focused shampoo. The handset was preloaded with digital content that relates to the broader Unilever campaign.

"Mobile will play a huge role in advertising, because already today more people carry around a mobile phone than any other digital device, and in emerging countries it's the only digital device they have," Mr. Henriksson said.

"When you get the user experience correct you can create a very personal two-way dialogue with consumers," he said. "Mobile can provide three-to-four times higher engagement between consumers and brands."

The high-definition movie disc battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc can be traced all the way back to 2000, when companies began experimenting with using new blue lasers in optical disc systems.

Because the wavelength of blue light is shorter than that of the red lasers used in DVD, less physical space is needed to record each bit of data and so more information can be crammed onto a DVD-sized disc. This extra space was needed to store the new high-definition video and TV services that were starting to be commercialized around that time.

But what started in 2000 as technical research became a battle between the world's largest electronics companies and movie studios, with the consumer caught in the middle.

Here's a look at the major milestones from the first research:

2000

October 5 -- Sony and Pioneer unveil DVR Blue at Japan's Ceatec show. The format would go on to form the basis for first-generation Blu-ray Disc BD-RE.

November 1 -- Sony announces the development of Ultra Density Optical (UDO), a blue-laser optical disc format proposed to replace magneto-optical discs.

2002

February 19 -- Led by Sony, nine of the world's largest electronics companies unveil plans for Blu-ray Disc.

August 29 -- Toshiba and NEC propose to the DVD Forum the next-generation optical disc format that will become HD DVD.

October 1 -- Prototypes of both formats are unveiled at Japan's Ceatec exhibition. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Pioneer and JVC showed prototype Blu-ray Disc recorders while Toshiba showed a prototype under the name Advanced Optical Disc (AOD).

2003

February 13 -- Licensing of Blu-ray Disc begins. Player makers pay US$20,000 to license Blu-ray while the content-protection system license carries a $120,000 annual fee and additional charge of $0.10 per player. Media makers pay $8,000 annually and $0.02 per disc for the copy protection system.

April 7 -- Sony announces its Blu-ray Disc-based Professional Disc format for data archiving applications.

April 10 -- Sony puts on sale in Japan the world's first Blu-ray Disc recorder, the BDZ-S77. It's based on a 23G-byte cartridge version of the BD-RE disc and costs ¥450,000 (US$3,815 at the time). The machine and a later model from Panasonic lack support for prerecorded movies that will launch later and prove an expensive early step into next-generation video.

May 28 -- Mitsubishi Electric joins the Blu-ray Disc group.

2004

January 7 -- Toshiba unveils its first prototype HD DVD player at CES. The player includes backwards compatibility with DVD.

January 12 - Hewlett-Packard and Dell put their support behind Blu-ray Disc.

June 10 -- The first commercial version of HD DVD-ROM is approved by the DVD Forum.

September 21 -- Sony announces the PlayStation 3 will use Blu-ray Disc.

November 29 -- Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO and New Line Cinema announce support for HD DVD.

December 9 -- Disney announces support for Blu-ray Disc.

2005

January 7 -- Backers of both formats promise players and movies in North America by the end of the year -- something that never materialized.

March 24 -- Talk and hope of a common format as Ryoji Chubachi, then Sony's president-elect, says: "Listening to the voice of the consumers, having two rival formats is disappointing and we haven't totally given up on the possibility of integration or compromise."

April 21 -- Sony and Toshiba begin discussions on the possibility of a single format. The talks ultimately go nowhere.

August 18 -- Lions Gate Home Entertainment and Universal Music Group decide to back Blu-ray Disc.

September 27 -- Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. put their weight behind HD DVD.

October 3 -- Paramount Home Entertainment says it will offer movies on both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

December 16 -- Hewlett-Packard decides to drop exclusive support for Blu-ray Disc and back both formats.

2006

January 4 -- Bill Gates announces at CES that Microsoft will offer an add-on HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 console.

March 10 -- Blu-ray Disc-supporter LG Electronics surprises the industry with news that it's developing an HD DVD drive.

March 31 -- Toshiba launches the world's first HD DVD player, the HD-XA1. It cost ¥110,000 (US$936 at the time) in Japan.

November 11 -- Sony's PlayStation 3, which packs a Blu-ray Disc drive, goes on sale in Japan.

December 29 -- Hackers report success in breaking through part of the AACS copy protection that's on both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

2007

January 7 -- Seeking to end the battle, LG Electronics unveils a dual-format player, while Warner Bros. shows a prototype disc that holds both an HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc layer so is compatible with players for both formats.

April 17 -- Sales of HD DVD players in North America hit 100,000 since launch.

August 1 -- Microsoft cuts the price of its HD DVD player for the Xbox 360 from US$199 to US$179 and starts offering five free movies.

August 20 -- Paramount and Dreamworks Animation both drop Blu-ray Disc in favor of HD DVD.

September 13 -- Sony says it will use Blu-ray Disc in all high-def video recorders in Japan.

November -- The price of Toshiba HD DVD players drops to US$100 with rebates as the holiday shopping season begins.

November 11 -- Sony begins selling a lower cost version of the PlayStation 3.

2008

January 4 -- Warner Bros. drops its bombshell: it will stop issuing HD DVD movies in the coming months and rely exclusively on Blu-ray Disc. In response the HD DVD Promotion Group cancels its CES news conference.

January 6 -- Akio Ozaka, head of Toshiba America Consumer Products, says at CES: "We remain firm in the belief that HD DVD is the format best suited to the wants and needs of consumers." In response Sony CEO Howard Stringer, with a grin on his face, says "All of us at Sony are feeling blue today."

January 14 -- Toshiba cuts the price of HD DVD players with the HD-A3 seeing a retail price of US$150.

February 11 -- NetFlix and BestBuy say they will phase out HD DVD.

February 15 -- Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, says it will phase out HD DVD by June.

February 16 -- Japanese public broadcaster NHK reports Toshiba has halted production of HD DVD players. Several additional local media reports confirm and The Nikkei business daily says Toshiba has decided to stop developing the format any further.