SubscribeMobile advertising discussed on Mobile Monday Shanghai
Yesterday I was at Mobile Monday Shanghai, first such kind of events in Shanghai. It’s located at Kathleen’s 5, a bar in the old Shanghai Library. I have uploaded some photos to my flickr account.
This is the second chapter of Mobile Monday in China. Mobile Monday Beijing launched in May 2006. Since that MM Beijing has been organizing regular sessions in monthly frequency. Mobile Monday Guangzhou is going to launch soon.
The Shanghai chapter organizers include Bruno Bensaid, Sage Brennan of Pacific Epoch and Ranjit Singh of Fugumobile. The topic we discussed is A Willing Suspension of Disbelief: has mobile advertising Arrived? Four panelists showed up in yesterday’s session.
The first presenter is Joshua Maa from Madhouse. Madhouse is an intelligent mobile advertisement agency. Their business is to provide technologies to help advertisers to target the right user. They identify mobile user’s profile based on information like the brand of his mobile phone, the mobile carrier he uses. And they provide report to advertisers about click through of their advertisement. This is pretty much like Google Adsense.
The second presenter is Alvin Wang from mInfo. I remember mInfo has presented in Mobile Monday Beijing. They are a natural language mobile search company. Their search interface include SMS, Wap and IM. Alvin compared the efficiency between push and pull. The conclusion is that pull is much more effective. My question is that using their service is like querying an advertiser’s database. I wonder if they list unpaid useful information.
The next two sessions is much more shorter. Because it’s late and everyone is hungry.
Aileen Ku from MindShare Interaction mainly showed us the effectiveness of a promotion case. What MindShare is doing is to provide solutions like how to design you advertisement banner and where to put them.
Don His of Henbang Media Group gave a ten-minute talk about why advertisers and portals need a bridge to connect to each other. The name of his company means very good in Chinese.
Summary
Does mobile advertising make sense to me? No. If I have 20 minutes to kill. I will go to Bloglines mobile version to go through my feeds. If I want to do search, I will launch Opera Mini and go to Google anyway. Maybe I am not a typical mobile user. How do you use your smart phone?
Mobile advertising is still based on the assumption that users don’t know how to tell advertisement from real content. Mobile portal site is still their main analysis target. As portal sites has become less important on the Internet. The same thing will happen on mobile device too. I bet they will have to change their analysis model soon.
And have you heard of content compressing technology? Such kind of technology will just filter out content suitable for your mobile device. So which part is thrown away? Advertisement of course.
The next Mobile Monday Shanghai session is going to be in November. The topic is user generated content. Looking forward to what interesting companies will show up.
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3 Responses to “Mobile advertising discussed on Mobile Monday Shanghai”
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Hi Chen,
Thanks for your report, very instructive.
I have a few adjustments to make:
(1) Mobile Monday Beijing started in March 2006 and had its 6th session in September
(2) mInfo did not present in Beijing, you might have confused with cGogo for the Mobile Search session in September (http://www.mobilemonday.cn/?p=47)
(3) I read your first line of summary “Does mobile advertising make sense to me? No.”
and I must say I am very surprised by this statement. Maybe the presentations in Shanghai have not been convincing, or maybe you are just stating you don’t feel mobile advertising is relevant to your particular taste… Because there is no real debate here: mobile advertising is already happening with good success for USERS in Japan, Korea and getting popular in Europe.
Let me mention one case: Tsutaya, a DVD/CD/video rental store chain in Japan gets a boost in sales every 2 weeks by sending a free message offering 50% discount to its members (you become a member the first time your rent something, so they have about 10 million members). Because it is mobile, they send the message at lunchtime on Friday and people stop by in the evening or the week-end to rent not one, but 4 videos and are much less picky because it’s cheaper. The result: mobile marketing creates a lot of customers, who come to rent more and more various products! And they are happy!
Your reaction to mobile advertising might have come from the experience you have from email or SMS spam, but if you think about a TIMELY and FOCUSED advertising message RELEVANT to YOU, you will understand how much sense it makes, and how convenient it is.
If this was not enough to convince you, I suggest we talk again in 24 months once the market is more mature.
As additional sources for inspiration on the topic, I suggest the report we did in April on mobile advertising here: http://www.mobilemonday.cn/?p=20
In addition, while almost all Japanese content providers gave up on China after losing money in shady deals, Dentsu (Japan’s largest advertising company), CA Mobile and Cyber Communications (among Japan’s largest mobile advertising company) are starting a mobile ad company in China from December (press release from Oct 06):
http://www.dentsu.com/news/2006/pdf/2006074-1003.pdf
– Benjamin
http://www.plus8star.com
http://www.mobilemonday.cn
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Chen wrote
“… Summary
Does mobile advertising make sense to me? No. If I have 20 minutes to kill. I will go to Bloglines mobile version to go through my feeds. If I want to do search, I will launch Opera Mini and go to Google anyway. Maybe I am not a typical mobile user. How do you use your smart phone?
…”
Chen, you have made an interesting observation .. IF you have time you will go to google. It implies that YOU will search whatever is top of your head at the moment. In a newspaper, I glance at the advertizements of MY interest and ignore others. IMHO, mobile advertizement is going to succeed if user gets control of what ads to get to his device rather than a steady stream coming to his mobile (and cost him money for downloading them).