Mobile will play an important role in the future of the industry

Shaun Gregory, managing director of media sales at 02, says forget the hype – 2010 is the year accountability arrives and the market fully embraces mobile advertising.

In the 24 hour period following New Year’s Eve we saw the most amount of text messages ever sent over the O2 network – 227 million text messages, 25% more than the previous New Year. Five days later and Google had launched the Nexus One, the first time the internet giant has introduced a piece of hardware, and it’s telling that it chose to do so in mobile. What all this shows is that the phenomenal growth of mobile shows no signs of abating, the mobile internet is growing at an even faster rate than the desktop internet did during the last decade.

We fully expect mobile to soon overtake the desktop computer/laptop as the primary access point to the internet for consumers. The iPhone was the game changer back in 2007 and marked the start of the mobile internet age. Since then, the growth in mobile internet use has been incredible. At O2, we’re currently seeing internet traffic across our mobile network doubling every four months, with an 18-fold increase in traffic over the past 12 months.

In this context, mobile increasingly represents one of the biggest media opportunities, certainly in terms of targeting and relevance. There aren’t many forms of media that provide so many rich experiences for the customer, and are in their hand and with them 24 hours a day.

Mobile advertising has been around for a while now but in my opinion has failed to truly deliver. It’s been too much about taking formats from the online world and crow barring them onto a smaller mobile screen. There hasn’t been enough focus on leveraging the true benefits of mobile to deliver highly personalised brand communications.

I believe that will change during 2010 as the market fully gears up to embrace mobile advertising. We’ve seen Google and Apple acquire two of the biggest ad networks on the planet, re-affirming their belief in mobile as a media channel. This is great news for the industry. Competition is a good for any growing market and both these companies have tried and tested models, a track record you’d kill for and a real ambition to move the market along. There’s also been a flurry of smaller deals, all of which point to a shake out in the market and period of consolidation.

2010 is also going to be the year that accountability arrives as the mobile operators co-operate more closely to make available consistent and transparent data from which to trade from. Media buyers will at last be able to view mobile behavioural data in a way they understand – uniques, page impressions, dwell time, etc. Watch this space for some exciting developments coming out of the mobile industry.

And finally we’re seeing new and innovative products coming onto the market which prove the benefits of personalised mobile media. Initiatives like O2 More match the data we hold on opted in customers with their own preferences to really pinpoint messages. A campaign we delivered for Fitness First targeting customers on the basis of location and interest in health & fitness delivered a response rate of 8.9%. This year we’re going to see lots more initiatives from ourselves, Orange and Vodafone which offer media owners a bouquet of products and services, particularly around messaging and personalisation.

As the ad market moves back into growth following the recession, mobile is going to take an increasingly important role in the future development of this industry. The hype is over, the reality is upon us.