Mobile Fix: iAds, iPad2 & Spotify
Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, on learnings from great events (talking of which, Simon is chairing MediaTel’s Come on Mobile… Stand Up and Deliver! conference next Friday)…
We’ve had a busy week – one pitch with an agency partner done and two direct to clients still ongoing. And we spoke at three – count them – three great events. A huge upside of speaking at good events is you get to meet smart people and learn lots. So much of today’s Fix is informed by our travels this week…
First up we spoke at the Albion Society breakfast and shared a deck that focused on the facts about the scale of mobile and pointed out some of the friction that is preventing brands from seizing this opportunity.
The other presentations by our friends Raam from Touchnote and Mark from Flirtomatic were excellent, as they shared the pain and pleasure of running innovative mobile startups. A new friend spoke next; Clive Dickens from Absolute Radio, who has made mobile a priority and is getting real benefits from this brand expansion. One thing he did share was that iAds have been really successful for him – both as an advertiser and as a publisher. We should see a case study on this shortly – although we get the impression that Apple are dragging their feet here.
The same day we presented to an arts and culture focused audience at the Mobile for the Culture Sector conference, which we really enjoyed too. There are some really interesting things going on in this space and we’re looking for a way to get involved. The Nokia app for the Museum of London that maps London’s music is a good example – although we presented a far better version of this idea to a high street music retailer last year, who eventually decided not to go ahead – so we’re looking for a new partner…
The third part of our tour was a Google Loves Mobile event focused on financial services. This was a very well organised event, attended by over 100 of the key people at leading brands in the sector.
We talked about our research into mobile and money around the world, and highlighted some ideas we expect to see in the UK this year.
Other speakers included Jon Mew from the IAB and Dan Rosen from AKQA – both excellent as usual. The Google speakers were very good too – in particular the demos were really impressive.
Seeing how well the new version of Android (Honeycomb) works on a Motorola Zoom tablet, made us think the iPad 2 may not have everything its own way. Especially as a number of commentators seem to agree with the view we took last week – that the iPad2 is more the iPad1.1 with little real innovation. Some even suggest that some of Steve Jobs’ pitch at the launch was economical with the truth and that Apple are a little worried about some of the competition.
But back to Google – as well as demos of interesting new display ad formats and new search formats, they showed two things that we were very taken with;
- The first is the next version of Google Translate – where the magical service that listens to your phrase and translates it into the language of your choice goes even further. Now you can choose conversation mode and the service allows two users to switch between languages.
- A really great demonstration of how combining mobile with cloud computing produces real magic – we keep using the old phrase “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Arthur C. Clarke). The second demo seems much more humdrum – but to us it’s a really big shift and we think this will be seen as a seminal moment in mobile.
Preview is a neat feature in mobile search that gives you an icon of a magnifying glass next to the search results. Clicking on this gives you thumbnails of the pages behind each of those results – so you can flick through them to select the page that looks like it has the best fit with your search.
But of course on mobile this also shows you which pages are optimised for mobile and which are not. As we know that people much prefer sites that work on their phone rather than ones you struggle with, we think this will definitely shift traffic away from non-optimised sites. We already know that the average number of pages viewed by a mobile visitor is far higher on a mobile optimised site.
We’ve talked before about the paradox of the Google Quality score not reflecting that a mobile optimised site is a much better experience for a mobile user. Well, Google has now introduced a subtle way of giving people a better experience – and of giving laggard brands a wake up call.
How will your site fare with Preview?
And still on Google, there is a great case study that shows the brand effect of mobile. Just as we have seen lots of evidence that online can and does affect branding, we’re now seeing that mobile advertising can and does too.
Of course to get the best from mobile advertising the creative needs to be great – as new formats roll out we’ll start to see really innovative creative work in this medium – seizing the initiative back from the pure technologists.
In other news, we saw Foursquare have launched a new version of their app – adding a new feature called explore, with recommendations based on your activities. We know some brands have been experimenting with tips to see if they can drive traffic in an unofficial way – now Foursquare have a way of doing this at scale and we expect this to be a big ad opportunity.
Talking about Absolute Radio, this has been a big week for digital music. Spotify hit one million paying users – meaning they make £10 million revenue a month. Other players are active too – We7 have launched a new service that lets you create personalised radio stations; News Group backed Beyond Oblivion have raised $77 million in new funding; whilst Mog seems to be aiming for a niche around the car and the TV.
Finally…
We’re out and about again – with a talk to our friends at DLKW Lowe today and at MediaTel Group’s Come on Mobile… Stand Up and Deliver! conference, which we’re chairing next Friday – today is the last chance to get the reduced price tickets (just £130)!
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