Mobile industry moves to earn its place at the top table

Mobile has been dubbed the ‘holy grail’ of advertising given that it is already the most ubiquitous multimedia device in history.

Consulting firm FirstPartner has tipped the mobile advertising sector to top £1bn ($1.6bn) annually by 2015. But currently the market is worth only a tiny fraction that value and is still the minnows of the online advertising sector.

This month’s [October] “State of Mobile Measurement” study, conducted on behalf of the IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, crystallizes some of the mobile advertising industry’s challenges.  The survey of almost 300 US marketers reveals that almost a third (31%) of correspondents claim the lack of standardised metrics will continue to hinder their mobile advertising spend.  This response comes despite most correspondents reporting positive experiences of earlier experimental mobile ad campaigns.

Until the issue of standardised measurement can be redressed, it will remain an afterthought on most media plans according to industry sources. But moves are being taken make it a more viable channel for investment.

Most significantly, global mobile operator trade body the GSMA, along with research firm ComScore, is working towards establishing common advertising metrics with both its membership and media owners.

The scheme has taken place initially in the UK, where ComScore and the GSMA soft-launched the service Mobile Media Metrics (MMM).

MMM uses data from the country’s five mobile network operators to anonymously track mobile media consumed via cellular networks, which is then fed into a single data feed.  ComScore and the GSMA then make this information available to advertisers and media owners as part of a subscription product.

The latest MMM figures, unsurprisingly, show that Google generates just over half (53% of unique visitors) of all mobile web traffic while Facebook ranks second with a 40% share (see Fig. 1).

But media planners, including those already subscribing to the service, have indicated that MMM is not without its limitations.  When it comes to convincing clients to invest their increasingly stretched budgets via mobile further transparency is needed, they say.

Chris Bourke, MD of Havas’ mobile arm Mobext, says, “The main frustration is that MMM can’t tell us how many of the people on a given network are iPhone users.” Many clients want to plan and target by device users and iPhone users are a high priority, says Bourke. However, the confidentiality clauses Apple requires mobile operators to sign up to involving its products means they cannot share such information.

He adds that while the data is sound and can help convince clients to book a mobile campaign, the granularity of MMM data requires extra research from an agency if they’re to receive final sign-off.
This results in media planning agencies having to verify the data available through MMM which can delay time to market.

Since its launch in 2010, the major criticism of MMM has been its inability to decipher mobile media consumption over Wi-Fi. However, from next month (November) this information will be readily available which could prove a major turning point in how MMM is perceived.

Jeremy Copp, ComScore Europe’s VP for Mobile, says MMM will offer advertisers enhanced mobile media usage data, including traffic over Wi-Fi and demographic data, on a monthly basis from November.  “With this development we can see MMM starting to fulfill its promise of becoming a trading currency, says Copp.

ComScore has achieved this by working with publisher bodies, such as the AOP, to integrate its analytics tag with publishers’ existing tools to establish how users are accessing their site. James Tagg, mobile services director at Mobext, welcomes the development but warns that using this as a reason to inflate the subscription price could prove counter-productive. “An increase in the cost of MMM could mean it no longer  poses good value for clients. The product is already very pricey,” he adds.

Amy Gale, Mobile Marketing Manager for AutoTrader (one of the most popular mobile sites in the UK), points out the significance of  including Wi-Fi traffic data. “We’d estimate that roughly 50% of our app traffic is over Wi-Fi,” she says highlighting that app users account for 40% of total mobile traffic.“We’ve worked with ComScore [for tagging its site to analyze Wi-Fi usage] and definitely see this as giving us a better overview and complete picture,” she adds.

However, media planners also maintain that MMM has further hurdles to overcome before it can  live up to its promise of becoming the de facto standard for mobile ad planning. For instance, RIM’s encryption methods means approximately half of its devices still cannot be tracked according to sources. “That’s a very large, affluent audience that we don’t have clear sight of,” says Tagg. “If such holes [in the available data] remain then there’s a lot of gaps to fill in,” he adds.

Paul Goode, ComScore’s senior VP of industry relations in Europe, says his company is working to improve how it can measure traffic generated by RIM users. Industry sources suggest fully decrypting traffic generated by RIM may not be fully resolved until midway through 2012.

These issues aside, both the GSMA and ComScore are attempting to provide further analytics with MMM, especially distinguishing between ‘mobile app use’ and ‘mobile web use’. MMM figures broke-out traffic generated by both apps and mobile web traffic for the first time in May this year in a move that was universally welcomed by agencies.

April’s MMM figures revealed there were 8.8m unique UK mobile users accessing the web via mobile apps. Google Maps (6.4m), Yahoo’s Weather app (3.6m) and Facebook (3.5m) ranked as the top-three apps in terms of unique users (See Fig. 2). This compares to the total mobile browser audience of 21.8m unique users during the same period, where, similar to mobile app users, Google (11.3m), Facebook (9.1m) and the BBC (4.3m) were the most popular. ComScore’s Copp says that further information, such as more detailed demographic usage of apps, is in the pipeline.

With the UK market being used as a test-bed for such initiatives, it appears as if MMM is starting to deliver on its early promise after initial doubts. The GSMA maintains that plans are afoot to roll-out MMM beyond the UK. But a big question mark remains over the GSMA’s ability to launch a MMM-like service in the US, where mobile media usage is more advanced than in Europe.
US operators are unlikely to share their network traffic data, as willingly as their counterparts in the UK according to ComScore’s Copp.
 

“Historically, they just don’t work as closely as operators in Europe,” he adds. “Plus we also have a situation where the GSMA doesn’t have as much sway as the CITA in the US. For something similar to launch in the US, the onus is on the trade bodies to urge cooperation,” he adds.
 

Finally, there are further technical issues to overcome as not all US operators use the GSM telephony standard, some use the CDMA standard. This creates a technical nightmare when it comes to standardizing analytics, says Copp.
 

So while marketers in Europe edge closer towards forging standardized mobile advertising metrics, their US counterparts  appear to have a long wait ahead of them before such tools are at their disposal.

Interested in learning more about mobile advertising? OPS Mobile will bring digital advertising leaders and ops professionals together to discuss and develop best practices for operational excellence in a world of connected devices. Register today for OPS Mobile, AdMonsters’ mobile advertising conference, which will be held December 7, 2011 in New York.