Skiing, Snow, Media and Mobile

About 15 years ago, during another big New York snowstorm, a Japanese TV crew caught me skiing up 8th Avenue from my then-apartment toward Central Park. I wouldn't have known about it, except one of my best friends, who is in Japan, asked if that could have been me skiing. (When he described it, I knew it was.)

Today, in another big snow dump, I had a very different, more communal, less surprising, and much more shared media experience. Skiing down Broadway then in Madison Square Park for a work break, I must have had my picture shot about about a dozen times. One couple told me they were from Barcelona. A Finnish man who MMS'd me the photo noted that Helsinki was similar in look to New York today. A blond woman who said she wasn't from New York shared another photo via email. An Indian mom and daughter chatted me up, asking if I was afraid to damage the skis on pavement.

It occurred to me how the image of my skiing on NY streets was shared to a wider group, geographically, with greater ease, and how easy it was for me to get a copy. How a larger number of people likely saw the video on Japanese broadcast TV, but that it got on the air that time through the filter of a cameraman who decided to shoot it, and a separate editorial chain all the way until air, and that the only personal connection happened when my friend happened to be watching, and gave me a call.

It occurred to me how much more communal the experience was today due to the media technology in everyone's hand and how I am now at least nominally connected a couple of them. Seeing those folks shooting my picture gave me a reason to talk to them, and them to me.

New world. I kinda like it.

HTML5 vs. Apps Is Not a Contest. Each Has Advantages

Joe Monastiero (@appmobijoe) pointed out to me at #AdTechNY today that while HTML5 adds a lot of new functionality to browsers previously handled by plugins -- things like video and flash graphics and certain kinds of interactivity -- it doesn't account for the functionality mobile devices bring to the table: GPS, the "accelerometer," motion sensors, a contacts database with ability to connect to the contacts natively, certain kinds of touch screen swiping, and so on. True, there might be software workarounds or plugins for some of this (connect your address book through the browser, or open APIs that allows sharing of your email database). But the browser today doesn't generally allow those kinds of functionality that apps do. To add the functionality to the browsers would require that they become operating systems. (And, I'd add, that the machines that carry the operating systems become considerably more sophisticated.)

Then again, on the desktop, as this Technology Review story points out, HTML5 will allow for assembly and mashups of images, including video, with databases to create, as the story notes, a personalized image of someone running through a neighborhood when you put in an address. We can imagine all kinds of database mashups and functionality done on the fly to create new application-like experiences in an HTML5-compliant browser. We can assume the same kinds of functionality will come to mobile devices.

True, there is the nascent Chrome OS, and we could see the day when Safari has the functionality of Objective C. But for now, I'd say, Joe has a point for mobile devices. Not that HTML5 won't take hold, and not that a lot of functions will be handled by browsers on mobile devices, and not that you shouldn't have a good mobile site if a lot of your user base accesses your site via mobile platforms. But don't expect to be able to give them all the functionality through the browser that you can through an app. (And, as an exec at Ad Mob pointed out, you can sometimes access HTML5 browser functions through an app, anyway.)

From DigiDay Mobile: Focus on the Consumer Not the Device

From my friend and colleague Brian Reich, who attended DigiDay Mobile on Teeming Media's behalf:

It seems obvious to me -- a digital communications strategist and heavy user of all-things digital -- that mobile devices are a game-changer in the context of marketing. The simple fact that consumers can now access information wherever and whenever they choose, means that brands, media, and anyone else with something to sell have a whole new set of opportunities to explore. And yet, as I listened to the discussion at last week's DigiDay Mobile conference, I couldn't help but get the feeling that most marketers haven't figured out how to fully leverage what smart phones, tablets and other similar screens make possible.

The organizers of DigiDay Mobile framed their day-long discussion saying: "As more and more people consume content on their mobile phones, media companies and marketers need to quickly determine how to best reach and engage with these audiences." I couldn't agree more. However, as the conversation unfolded, across a series of panel discussions and case study presentations, the focus was clearly on what advertisers and agencies needed and wanted, not what audiences value or have come to expect when seeking information about products and services.

Some observations:

1) There was significant focus on the technology and not the different kinds of experiences that new and emerging mobile devices make possible. Presenters routinely cited apps, ads and the challenges of 'discovery' but spent little time exploring what is required in a mobile-enable society when the goal is to establish a relationship or support a consumers interests beyond a single, basic transaction. In my experience, it is far easier to determine the best ways to use technology to engage consumers if the behaviors of the audience dictate the options as opposed to letting the features or functionality that different platforms and channels make possible drive the decision-making.

2) While there seemed to be agreement that handheld screens, regardless of size, are what is driving the change in consumer behavior, and thus the need to adapt marketing strategy, the focus in terms of where to focus execution was mostly on smaller screens and more basic ways that mobile phones can be used. That makes sense if you are basing your marketing choices on data about mobile usage -- the statistics show that consumers do a lot of text messaging, for example. But, when you consider how tablets are influencing the way consumers think and act (whether they own an iPad or not) this focus is unnecessarily limited. To realize the full potential that mobile devices offer, it will be necessary for marketers to think beyond how to measure an initial transaction and instead strive for deeper, more meaningful interactions that extend across multiple screens.

3) I would suggest brands and agencies focus their attention on creating new and compelling ways to market their products and services and not on hating Apple. Despite evidence to suggest that apps are popular with consumers, many of the presenters dismissed apps as a viable marketing tool in favor of mobile-web based options claiming that consumers were more interested in searching for information than establishing a direct connection with something that interests them. In reality, marketers hate apps because its hard work to create and support an app that a consumer will find valuable, and use every day, but far easier to dismiss the whole concept in favor of something that provides more options (even if they aren't as compelling to consumers). For similar reasons, there was a lot of anger directed at Apple and the iAd platform they have developed. I suspect that the control that Apple has over the market causes frustration because it means marketers no longer have as much control over how their products and services can be presented -- and that makes them uncomfortable.

Marketers and media companies absolutely need to determine how to best reach and engage mobile-enabled audiences... and fast. My suggestion, with the discussion from DigiDay Mobile still very fresh in my mind: focus more on the consumer interest and behavior than on the platform that delivers your message. Most adults in the U.S. now have cellphones and one in four are using smartphones. With their rich features and capabilities, these devices are driving more than just a mobile app economy, mobile web revolution, or marketing explosion. They are changing behavior.

It will always be challenging for consumers to navigate through the mass of marketing messages and options that are being pushed by brands and media companies. New platforms and formats will emerge and different standards and best practices will be uncovered. But what has always been true, and what mobile devices of all sizes and kinds will enable in ways that we haven't been able to imagine until recently, is that people will seek out what they find valuable, and expect to get access to what they want, when they want it, and on terms that they dictate. If brands and agencies focus on that as a starting point for their mobile marketing decision-making, many of the other challenges will seem far easier to address.

Cell Phone Networks Take Another Hit

In this age of open, digital and shared media, those who opt for control -- especially if that control gives them what’s deemed an unfair share -- will be attacked from many sides. Witness the music industry’s overpriced CDs of albums they’d already sold in vinyl. (And compare it to the success of iTunes, which has been attacked for being controlled, but has also relented and removed DRM and also is now playing with pricing.)

Today, many companies are developing -- and consumers are loving -- options to go “off-deck” and circumvent cellphone carriers, either by installing applications on their phones or by accessing the mobile Web. The cellphone carrier networks, the Sprints, AT&Ts and Verizons of the world, are demanding what one wag here at the AlwaysOn conference called a “rapacious” share of anything that runs through their system. Not only do subscribers, locked into costly contracts, have to pay for every new piece of service, and difficult-to-understand fees, but the carriers also demand that anyone who wants to provide a service to their subscribers -- anything from weather to movie listings to paid video -- give the cellphone carriers a share that can be as much as 70 percent. Plus the fees are often dictated by the carriers. These moneys were easily demanded in a day when the only way to reach cellphone subscribers was through the network, and the interface on the phones that the carriers controlled. The carriers also controlled the information about the use of the networks; some would say that they are protecting their users’ privacy. Fair enough.

But with the mobile Web, and applications for smartphones like the iPhone and Google’s Android system, it’s becoming easier and easier for content companies and their consumers to circumvent the network. Medialets chairman and CEO Eric Litman told me today about how his company is embedding code in Apple’s iPhone apps that allow his firm to measure all kinds of data on the phones’ usage, a lot of typical Web measurements, for example, like pageviews, unique visits, time on site and so on. The trick, he said, was that the Apple folks had not demanded anything from the code, and had struck a deal with AT&T that required the carrier to let apps through unblocked. The book “Planet Google” by New York Times columnist Randall Stross points out how Verizon kind of sort of bent to Google, which was bidding on new cellphone spectrum, demanding that cellphones be allowed to work on any network instead of being locked. (It’s not clear Verizon fully kept its promise to do so, Sross says, but that’s another story). At a panel I appeared on with partners Scribe Media last fall at Streaming Media West, the argument was over whether subscription video on cellphones could survive when people could go get what they wanted for free.

In another panel, on what business can learn from Obama’s use of social media, Larry Weber of Racepoint Group, Digital Influence Group, said media companies were structured so much like mafiosi that their hold was “hard to break.” But, he said, the era of unpaid media was coming. Don’t know if I agree with the characterization. But it is hard to see how business models based on control -- rather than enticement and service -- will win.

Ways Around Text Messaging Fees

A significant portion of the recent Naked Media show was on fees for mobile (cellphone) use, and how people are going directly to the Web to get video and other material rather than subscribing and paying a new fee for a subscription, on top of their data plans.

Occurred to me today that the mobile Twitter app (interestingly, link is a Blogspot blog) is a way to avoid text messaging fees. You can post to the mobile Twitter site, and hit people directly (if they follow you), and also blast the wider group. Less of a sure thing than text messages -- which you can be pretty sure are consumed by those you're sending to -- but it's a way for people to go "off-deck" for text messages, too, from their handhelds, and end-run another money maker for mobile carriers.

Naked Media Goes Mobile

In a wide-ranging yet very specific discussion with Jerry Rocha of Nielsen and Bob Walczak of mobile ad company RingLeader Digital we explored everything from the fate of mobile advertising (there may be one), to how minorities are using mobile devices in the U.S. more than the mainstream, to ways in which the iPhone (gasp!) doesn't quite work.

See Episode 5 on the Naked Media site. And check out the blog for some "man on the street" interviews where we show that all the whizbang we discuss in the studio (and at trade shows, industry magazines and the like) is far ahead of the crowd.

Naked Media: All Mobile

Next Naked Media: All About Mobile. Noon ET, Thursday, Send questions, in comments.

Mobile On Mobile - Let the Games Begin!

Outside the Mobile Marketing Forum, couldn't help but notice this ad, trying to get people to text in (didn't see anyone in front of the billboard playing the game, in Times Square) but there were winners listed later. Perhaps the ad was shown in multiple locales.

Also, the bottom area, where CNN was listed, also tried to get folks to log onto CNN's mobile app.

We're going to see a lot more of this -- again, like the early days of the Web, trying to get people to interact with mobile content, apps, games, and such, and in exchange give up some info (they're defacto giving up their mobile number ...)

A Mobile Carrier Responds

It’s tough without jumping through various PR hoops to get a mobile phone carrier to talk on the record, but I did get one carrier exec to counter the assertions of folks at the Mobile Marketing Forum, run by the Mobile Marketing Association, who say the carriers don’t play fair, do all kinds of nefarious things that hurt the market and the industry. The assertion, and the unattributed rebuttal, below:

- Carriers ask too much of a revenue share on ad and marketing campaigns:

* If it’s too costly, don’t do it. It’s business. I’m not in business to keep you in business.
* Our customer acquisition and retention costs are really high. Customer only has 1 carrier (and take a lot of time and energy deciding). They can get content from a dozen, two dozen places.

- Carriers unfairly block applications and things people want to download onto their phones:

* If the application doesn’t work well, customer doesn’t call the one who made the app, call 611. We have to deal with it.
* Customer experience is paramount.

You’re not sharing data on customers, age, location, etc, which hinders our ability to target them with services, etc:

*Has to be worth it. Generally, he who controls the data, controls the game. Very valuable. Have to give us a reason to share it.

The Coming Collision With Mobile Carriers

UPDATE: A carrier exec gives a rebuttal.

= = = = =

Spend almost any time with people in the mobile (meaning mobile phone) content, advertising or applications industry, and you’ll surely hear something about how the cell phone carriers are making life more difficult for them. At the Mobile Marketing Forum in New York today:

Rene Rodriguez of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.: “We still often don’t even know who our users are ... Targeting our users in arena, our fans, and I have no access to that information” because the carriers refuse to share it.

Gene Keenan, VP, Mobile Strategies, Isobar (ad agency holding company): “In some instances we can’t target as well on the mobile phone as online [because demographic information such as age] is held pretty closely” by the carriers. And, he says, he isn’t allowed to give content away, even though many brands want to, as part of a marketing or branding campaign.

Tom Daly, Group Manager, Strategy & Planning, Global Interactive Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company: Carriers are making it tough to bring content to consumers for free (because they see it as competition to premium content. “We created 20,000 songs, 15,000 artists in Europe ... We created a great platform for everybody ... You share it with us, we’ll share with the world. The artist wins, the consumer wins. We hope some of that love wears off on Coca Cola.” But it’s not easily done.

And on and on, like at a recent iBreakfast where Randy Haldeman of Apptera says that mobile so far is about 99% spam free, because the carriers block it, but they’re responsible for whatever spam there is.

The arguments I’ve heard in favor of the carriers are:

*They can’t just enable everything on their networks, make it an Internet-like free-for-all, because they need to protect the golden goose: voice communication. They can’t let a bazillion people sending rich ads and video and pictures clog or freeze the network and endanger their biggest most important task. They’ve invested a lot to build their networks, which are not government-initiated with multiple agnostic redundancies, as is/was the Internet, and also have to recoup that investment.
* When I said content creators are complaining about the amount carriers charge for their content, one carrier exec said to me that there is no real reason content makers should be able to charge for the same content multiple times on different platforms. Not sure I understand the argument, but it is what he said.

Regardless of the arguments, though, the tide is, I think, turning away from the restrictive nature of carriers, their locked phones and their plans. Not only is Google Android coming, which will create open standards for cellphones on new network bandwidth (if I understand correctly), but the Supreme Court has allowed a case to go through that will challenge restrictions on unlocking phones. Add all the voices of the Mobile Marketing Association and friends, and you’ve got quite a clamor for more openness and fewer restrictions. Government policy here in the U.S. allowed cellphone networks to develop as competitive fiefdoms, rather than a blanket network with a single standard, and we’re paying the price for that today, with all the restrictiveness, confusion (quick, tell me the rules of your mobile plan, in detail), plethora of mismatched services and devices, and the U.S. lag in many ways behind other countries.

Mobile Me: Mac Does it Again

I'd been struggling with my Windows Mobile 6 device, and actually went back to my years-old Blackberry 6710 in frustration. (A tad embarrassing today when I was moderating at a Magazine Publishers of America event on new mobile technologies to pull out my old clunker.) Part of the reason I'd been waiting rather than switch to the iPhone today is because a) I have a contract until October with T-Mobile and I've heard a few horror stories about cracked iPhones and b) the new iPhone was coming out today.

Well, with the new features, and the new MobileMe (I already have .mac, so apparently I'll be upgraded automatically), I'll now be able to get the features AND the synching I want with the iPhone -- good email, contacts and calendar available, and updatable all over... I'll be a happy camper, it seems.

I don't always love the Mac, but I love the way they keep trying. I can't see how this doesn't mean great things for Apple and the decline, if incremental, of some of its competitors.

In Mobile: Sex Sells (And SEO Will)

Adult content is a big application for mobile search, says Farhan Memon, senior product manager of AOL Mobile Search. Speaking at a iBreakfast meeting in New York, Memon noted that AOL blocks terms that would look for illegal content (think "teen" or "underage"), but is looking for ways to appropriately allow other searches, and monetization of the search, for adult content. Mobile is "about things that are not meant to be consumed in public," he said. Pressed privately, later, he wouldn't say how much of search adult counts for.

Other things discussed:

• PPC -- Pay Per CALL (not click) ... in other words, someone clicking on an ad on their phone to call a number. Something only phones can do.
• Localization on phones. Geographically targeted ads can be served because a lot of queries on phones are geographically specific -- what times the movie here, or where's a restaurant. Phone numbers can be correlated, too, though they're less reliable for obvious reasons (people move around and take their numbers with them). Can't yet triangulate location based on cell towers because the carriers aren't allowing it. One targeted ad from a company called Apptera let a singer, Rianna, tell folks who'd asked for a message from her tell them that she'd be in concert in their city (New York).
• No single form of advertising is enough to cover the cost of content. That's why AOL is putting as many as four different kinds of ads on mobile search pages (SERPs), according to Memon.
• There's a burgeoning market of women over the age of 35 using text messages to communicate with their children, according to Randy Haldeman of Apptera.
• Mobile is 99% spam free, he says. (Carriers are the main culprits, he says, while blocking spam in general.)
• Mobile search takes off at the time when computer-based search lessens. IE, as people leave their desks at the end of the day and on weekends, they're using their devices, instead.

On the last point: I wouldn't be surprised if mobile content takes money away from computer based search over time -- if people doing localized ads in Google and Yahoo start to put them into mobile in a couple years. In fact, I think it's fairly likely that it will. Which is probably one of the reasons Google is coming on strong in mobile. (And it's not talked about a lot, but Yahoo already has a big presence.) Today, mobile search has not developed to where folks are finding mobile sites serendipitously -- so a lot of marketing is being done to get folks to use the mobile sites that are created. That will change, over time, and I bet we'll start to see SEO and SEM for mobile sites.

Telephony?

Jeff Pray of Starcom in front of a water tower on the VoodooVox roof, just outside their offices (which belonged to Amp'd Mobile, before they went bankrupt and left in a hurry.)

These days folks excited about mobile technologies and media are usually thinking of visuals and cool apps -- video, photos, Twitter, ads, widgets, text links and so on. All of us caught up in 3G, iPhone, click-to-pay, bar-code-ism sometimes forget that cellphones and Blackberries and smartphones are, well, phones. They’re used to talk, have, y’know , the linear human form of communication known as a conversation. That’s often their primary function.

Some startups have not forgotten, though, and there appears to be a small if vibrant community of them trying to tap in to the new/old telephony. VoodooVox, which I wrote about this week, convened an “in-call media summit” yesterday that for some of the day filled a room of about 200 people in a Manhattan penthouse. The presenters included companies like SayNow (which I gather is a phone-to-music recording service), Starcom (which buys “in-call” media, ads that play while you’re on the phone , say, calling into a favorite radio station), and FreeConferenceCall.com, which claims to have five percent of the conference call market, if I understood correctly.

Investors, including Alan Patricof (who invested through a company he was with before Greycroft) and David Min of Steamboat Ventures and Eric Hippeau of Softbank were there, showing that the space is attracting money from the same kinds of folk who fund sexy Web 2.0 ventures. And we learned about revenue models as easy-to-understand as in-call advertising and as complex as FreeConferenceCall’s typical telecom technique of taking a cut of the money you spend to call into their service via a telecom revenue trade mechanism that’s been in place for decades. (When they, say, route a call through Nebraska, that Nebraska phone switching system gets money for the call from your provider, and the Nebraska company shares that with FreeConfCall.)

Perhaps the biggest eye-opener, though -- in addition to a roomful of folks in a swank Manhattan building excited about telephone calls, and the amazing VoodooVox offices -- was some AT&T ads (YouTube montage here) about the “future” that the company made in 1993. They said that some day “you will” do things like: borrow a book from thousands of miles away, send a fax from the beach, drive across country without asking directions (pictures of a GPS-like device on the dash), pay a toll without stopping, buy concert tickets from an ATM, call into a business call with your shoes off, carry your medical history "in your wallet", watched movies on-demand, distance-learned on a screen. I don’t remember whether the ads seemed futuristic then.

What would be the ads for “some day” from now that will actually come true 15 years from now? Bio-chip implants to help us connect without devices? Computers the size and thickness and flexibility of a placemat, or the size of pens we can stick in our pocket and project onto a table? Ads that know us so well we never get something we’re not interested in? Add your guesses to the comments.