The second day of the SMX Expo began with a bang talking about Mobile Advertising. However after the night before with several attendees partying until the wee hours, the attendance was a bit lacking. Nevertheless, the show must go on.
The Mobile Search Advertising Panel started off with David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy at 360i. He talked about the big benefit of reach with mobile subscribers as the number of users at over 3B eclipses PC users, which are only at 1B. There is a shift when it comes to customer reach away from on-deck (carrier portals) to off-deck (Yahoo Go!, Yelp iPhone app, etc) where standard paid search can take place. Two examples of ad networks with paid search that are off-deck, he mentioned are Medio and Jumptap.
The off-deck benefit of integration with existing SEM campaigns are two-fold:
- Less competition for advertising (less brands are mobile as of yet)
- Large screen real estate (as a percentage, in comparison to the desktop)
He also mentioned that with voice search with advertising, there is 100% penetration!
He went on to say that the Apple iPhone is currently mostly web search. On the subject of SMS Search, there is large penetration, particular outside the US, and while there is a potential learning curve, there is also risk that it could potentially become obsolete with voice and web search becoming dominant. There is some promise regarding Visual Search, but is a Public Relations challenge since many previous attempts (QR codes, CueCat, etc) have created a fear-factor amongst users.
Michael Bayle from Yahoo had some insights to share about mobile advertising. He said that mobile marketing can be really confusing and is about a multi-channel to drive awareness, usage and response. Mobile ads can come in three types so far: Display, Sponsored Listings, and Rich Media. He showed a graph about Mobile Search in the US which showed a growth of 175% from 2006 to 2011 to a total of 56M users. Yahoo claims that in the US it is the leader with 23.5M users using them for search.
He concluded that Yahoo has come a long way since it started in mobile search. It’s now focused on answers instead of links; OneSearch 2.0 and Yahoo Go will start to take advantage of things like voice-enabled, search assist, idle screen search and more. More handset support for Yahoo Go is on the way.
What Do We Think?
Mobile Advertising makes me think of the story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s a crazy, surreal, and a lot of nonsense. But the few nuggets of truth and reality are starting to poke through the fabric of this story. The focus must be, as Michael pointed out, getting to Answers and not just causing fatigue through click distance to get to the end result.
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