Mobile Fix: All things mobile

Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, on mobile advertising, mobile video and mobile money…

We had a busy week last week talking with people about our exciting new partnership with PontoMobi – and we’ve already got two projects under discussion. If you would like a chat about how we might help on an imminent project let us know – we’re pretty confident we can reduce costs on the implementation and add value on the insight and the ideas.

And post last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we’re hearing the gossip and seeing people thinking through what we saw in Barcelona.

ReadWriteWeb look at what got the most buzz – with the view that Samsung did really well.

Enders analyst Ben Evans talks about Android going mainstream and becoming the defacto Operating System for featurephones

And WPP’s man on their Vodafone business came back from MWC waxing lyrical about the mobile opportunity.

Mobile advertising

This week we saw Apple drop the entry price for iAds – from $1 million down to just $500k. We know from case studies like Campbells that they work, but they are perceived as expensive. The space as a whole is still poorly understood – there are some issues holding the sector back – such as fragmentation and lack of good advice.

Measuring mobile

One factor that has held online advertising back has been questions over the veracity of the research and measurement. Whilst we think this is huge red herring, it’s vital that we don’t let such issues cloud the potential of mobile, so measurement is a key interest for us.

Ahead of meetings next week with some of the key players in mobile analytics and measurement we’ve found some good new stuff on how people are measuring mobile.

Avinash Kaushik (the don of web analytics) looks at how to measure click to call campaigns, and Google continues to add functionality for mobile to Google Analytics, so we’re now able to look at users in a really detailed way on Android.

Mobile Video

As mobile video continues to grow – with Sky promoting their mobile TV services in their new TV advertising  – YouTube are now offering brand dedicated channels on mobile.

We think that curating content is a huge opportunity for brands – and having YouTube videos in your mobile site or app will become a common tactic in the future.

As further evidence of how well video works on mobile, our friends at Livestation tell us that they had 12.5 million video streaming sessions of 10 minutes each in February alone across their mobile apps (Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, BBC World News and CNBC). Given their web service got around 25 million over the same period this is a powerful indication that people want video & news on their mobile

What’s holding location back?

The plethora of competing start ups in location is certainly driving location but the lack of standardisation over a specific location causes friction. Our cool office in Clerkenwell (desks available for rent) is fixed on any map because every map service uses the same core data to define the location. Yet if I check in on Foursquare, Facebook and Google there is no synergy.

Don’t hold your breath though. Facebook know that their robust data is a great asset for them.

Mobile Money

We’re currently writing a deck for our keynote at an upcoming Google event on Mobile Money and the space is fascinating – and moving very quickly.

This week we have seen mobile payment player Square drop their charges to drive volume as the landgrab gets underway. And we saw that one of the banks in the Middle East has earned a 300% ROI though innovations for their 2 million mobile banking customers

If you work in financial services and would like to attend this event, let us know and we’ll put you in touch with the organisers at Google.

Finally

We’re speaking at some great events in the next few weeks. I’m chairing the MediaTel mobile event where we have two great panels – operators and analysts on one and agencies, Google and Facebook on the other.

And we are delighted to be keynoting at the Mobile for the Cultural Sector event with another great set of speakers.

We produce Mobile Fix every week to share news and views on mobile and related topics. We’re happy for you to forward this to anyone you think might be interested in the mobile opportunity.

And of course if you, or anyone you know, would like some help in profiting from mobile we’d love to hear from you. We do Insight, Ideas and Implementation – just let us know what you need.

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