• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, April 9, 2006

Vegas doesn't have much for me. I don't drink, don't smoke, don't gamble, and the middle-aged libido is so depressed that, until they develop a Viagra IV drip, I am not likely to be womanizing, either. My only option at the CTIA Wireless Show in Las Vegas last week was to scratch beneath the surface of the panel sessions on mobile marketing and catch a few rumors and innuendo. And so, in true teen girl rumor-mongering fashion, here are my SMS bursts on the show.

Ad networks are coming to decks. We already knew that several carriers were testing dynamic advertising on their own decks, but apparently they are in serious trials and discussions with several vendors--Third Screen and enPocket, to name just two.

In fact, there were many signs that the carriers are warming up to being in the ad loop. In talking publicly and privately about their new music download services, both Sprint and Verizon executives kept emphasizing that music on phones was "more than digital downloading." Almost reading from the same page, these guys kept talking about the larger package of music news, ringtones, wallpapers, ringbacks, and songs that phones embrace.

I read two things into this. First, they are very excited by the growing fever among music conglomerates for the higher margins mobile song distribution represents. Over-the-air downloads are performing ahead of expectations for both Sprint and Verizon, even at $2.50 and $1.99 price points respectively. But the carriers also seem to see themselves as part of a larger music marketing ecosystem, I think, so they are emphasizing their ability to package performers with multiple revenue and marketing opportunities for the labels. Which means that the carriers are starting to think like media companies, or saying that they are.

Major and minor brands should secure their .mobi URLs in early June. I saw considerable support coalescing around this scheme for standardizing basics of WAP page design and create easily-remembered URLs for mobile browsing. The addresses will not require the tedious "WWW," and designers really only need to follow three commonsensical design tenets. For brand marketers, this means that you have a mobile equivalent of ".com" for accessing a "Nike.mobi" etc. on phone browsers. The mobile domain name registry, mTLD, will open registration first to members of several allied mobile associations, including the Mobile Marketing Association, and then there will be a grace period for registering trademarked brands as .mobi.

Speaking of the MMA, we saw love across all of the links in the mobile value chain for the fine work the MMA is doing. Unlike many trade associations, including some others in the wireless and digital space, the MMA is a genuine consortium of interests. Carriers, marketers, infrastructure providers and content providers I spoke with all praised the MMA for getting standards, ethics, and best practices out there very proactively. Rather than scrambling to excuse or deflect accusations of mobile marketing abuse, the MMA is actually out in front of any controversy with some very stringent consumer protection guidelines.

Who is going to sell this stuff? That's the big question emerging as carriers, mobile marketers and publishers now agree that ad support is necessary and inevitable on mobile. I am already seeing how potential conflicts of interest and market confusions could emerge from this. One mobile marketing firm has already been told by a tier-one carrier that the operator is getting into the ad sales business and plans to hire up to 150 staff to sell deck-based ads. How many businesses can the operators be in at once? They want to be credit card companies, telcos, ISPs, and now media companies. I am not sure they have proven themselves adept at more than one of these pursuits.

The bigger question may involve clutter and revenue sharing. The carriers want to monetize their decks with advertising, but so do the content providers who will be linking off of that deck. Most of the deals I have heard whispered about between major media brands and the carriers involve some sort of revenue share on ads that run on pages a user links to from the deck. So the user will get a banner on the carrier interface, then again on content pages from third-party providers.

Who is selling what piece of this to whom is also going to get a bit confusing, because of the complexity of the mobile content chain: carriers, aggregators, content providers, mobile TV companies, ad networks. Will all of them be selling ads into mobile content? Will there be any coordination among them so that the mobile experience doesn't devolve quickly and make the deck look like a NASCAR racer? And since some content and services and data usage will continue to involve fees, at what point will the consumer start asking what they are getting in return for subjecting themselves to ads on the medium? I think I can see how an ad on my free Weather Channel pages is buying me something, but will the carrier be able to make clear that those ads on the $15month data portal are helping to keep my cell phone bill reasonable?

Agency lag? From what the mobile marketing firms tell me, big brands are bypassing the agencies altogether to explore mobile promotions. The agencies just aren't seeing the financial advantage of bringing mobile to their clients, and too few agency executives understand the technology well enough to answer client questions. Well, that is the mobile marketing line, at least.

On the other hand, I heard from some agency-side folks that when they do invite mobile marketing firms into the consultative mix, the mobilistas often try to dominate creative decisions and step on agency functions. This all sounds very 1998 to me, with the obvious end game being agencies starting to buy up the mobile marketing start-ups.

Look for mobile marketers to move beyond the simple one-shot SMS interaction this year as companies lay out more CRM-oriented plans. One marketer told me his company is seeing 5 percent to 20 percent of users opting into further communications with a company via mobile.

In the coming weeks, we will drill further into many of these issues. Mobile Marketing was indeed the only new and interesting theme of this year's CTIA. More questions were raised than answered about how it will all play out, and what our ad-subsidized phone decks will look like in 2007.