Mobile app directory Appolicious is launching a keyword-bidded ad platform for running relevant ads that appear on the search results pages on its own online and mobile properties and those of partners Samsung and Best Buy. The idea is to tap the search activity within these app discovery hubs to offer marketers a way to reach consumers who are “in-market” for apps, rather than already using an app. The new Appolicious Advertising platform allows advertisers to target ads based on keywords like “music” or “sports,” and pay on a cost-per-click basis. The ads run on the search results pages of Appolicious.com and its Androidapps.com AppVee.com sites, as well as against search results in the Appolicious Android app. Beyond its own sites and apps, the ads will display against search results in the Apps app on the Samsung Note, the 7-inch Galaxy Tab Plus, and in the app discovery section of Best Buy’s apps for Android and iOS devices. Appolicious charges a set-up fee of $1 per ad and requires a minimum CPC bid of 10 cents. The app search ads themselves appear at the top of a page and take the form of an 85 x 85 pixel unit featuring app icon with text -- up to 40 characters for the title and 200 for the body of the ad. Appolicious founder and executive chairman Alan Warms said mobile ad networks like AdMob and Millennial Media use sophisticated targeting to reach qualified consumers to drive app downloads. “The problem is, most of this inventory is inside games -- where most people spend most of their time. So you’re still trying to reach folks when they’re doing something else,” he said. By contrast, he says ads served through Appolicious’ platform will reach them as they are in the process of selecting an app. Warms was general manager of Yahoo News, Tech and Education at Yahoo before starting Appolicious in 2009. Since then, the startup has partnered with sites including Yahoo and Citysearch and acquired rival app information providers like AppVee. Appolicious last fall struck a deal with Best Buy to power the electronics retailer’s App Discovery Center for searching iOS and Android apps. It reached a similar agreement with Samsung. Between its own properties and those it works with, Warms estimates that Appolicious content reaches an audience of between 5 and 10 million unique visitors. He said the company plans to add more third-party partners to continue expanding its ad network.
When Encylopaedia Britannica said it would cease publishing print editions, the company was quick to point out its digital bona fides. It introduced a CD-ROM version of the encyclopedia in 1989, an online extension in 1994 and a mobile edition on the Palm VII in 2000. More recently, Britannica has made a more concerted mobile push, launching a series of children’s-oriented iOS apps starting in 2010 and an iOS edition of the flagship publication last October. The Encyclopaedia Britannica app packages 140,000 articles with an array of photos, graphics and interactive features. John Russell, director of business development for Britannica, said mobile development is an increasingly important part of the company’s growth strategy. “It’s still a small part [of revenues], but it is growing, pretty fast,” said Russell. “We see it as something we need to do to stay competitive." Because the schools and libraries market makes up a large part of its business, Britannica is especially focused on staying up to date in that sector. That’s partly why the company began its foray into apps with the “Britannica Kids” series, focused on roughly a dozen different topics, including dinosaurs, ancient Egypt and U.S. presidents. The rollout of kids titles also allowed Britannica to hone its app-building skills before introducing the main encylopedia app last fall. “The flagship EB subscription product was one of particular interest and importance to us, so we really wanted to make sure that we got it right, and so put a bit of time into development and testing of it,” said Russell. The extra effort appears to be paying off. The app has earned a four-star rating in the App Store as well as an Appy Award in the reference category. Russell said downloads of the app, which sells for $1.99 a month, have been “well into the six figures." How do you condense a 32-volume encyclopedia into an app geared to a three-inch screen? “What we really wanted to do was just create a sleek, simplified version of our online experience that made interaction with the content a lot easier,” said Russell. In particular, he pointed to features such as LinkMap, a button that generates a web of icons linking to articles related to the one read. “The technology provides us with ways to interact and delve into all our content that we don’t really have online,” noted Russell. Compared to the desktop Web version of the encyclopedia, which costs $70 annually, the app is a relative bargain at $1.99 monthly. Still, any subscription fee can be a big barrier to downloads when most are offered free -- including the Wikipedia app. Britannica subsidiary Merriam-Webster, for instance, offers free and paid versions of its flagship dictionary app for iOS, Android and other mobile platforms. Russell indicated that Encyclopaedia Britannica may follow a similar path, rolling out an ad-supported alternative to reach a wider audience. “Since this is pretty new, we’re trying to test the viability of the $1.99 per month subscription. But that’s not to say we wouldn’t try different models in the future, or on different platforms,” he said. Android could provide that opportunity. Britannica plans to extend its app franchise to the Google platform starting next month with the Kids edition titles, to be followed by the encyclopedia app in mid- to late summer. The company eventually expects to expand also to Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS, which Russell sees emerging as a No. 3 player in the smartphone market behind Android and iOS.
The movement in the TV business to allow voice recognition to select shows and make other commands has a significant audience. A large percentage of Apple iPhone 4S users appreciate the Siri voice-recognition functionality and a notable chunk would like the opportunity to issue similar directives for their TVs, according to Parks Associates. More than 70% of U.S. 4S users are “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with Siri, while 37% of them “want to have a similar voice-command interface for their TV set.” There are suggestions that Siri may be part of a new Apple TV. John Barrett, a director in customer analytics at Parks, said the nearly 40% who expressed interest in Siri-type capability for TV sets was surprisingly low. “I would have expected more owners to want Siri for their TV set,” he said. “These are the folks that rushed out to get the new iPhone 4S." Smart TVs from Samsung (which also has gesture and face recognition) have voice control, while it is expected that most smart TVs on the market from various manufacturers will offer it soon. Barrett did say that some Siri users may have concerns how it would work in a living room buzzing with family members and others. "Some said Siri didn't work well against background noise,” he said. “Others said it had trouble understanding commands. These problems could be amplified in a noisy living room, where the main TV would be located."
Publishers are in the very early stages of establishing mobile ad infrastructure, and they continue to try out a range of solutions in an already fragmented market. According to a survey of 95 online and mobile publishers fielded by InsightExpress on behalf of Mocean Mobile, almost half of respondents had at least tried DART for Mobile over the past two years, but 41% had also tested AdMarvel, 34% Mocean and 19% Nexage. And when it comes to the currently used solution for many publishers, DART (17%), AdMarvel (14%) and Mocean (13%) have to contend with 15% of the market that still relies on in-house or custom ad-serving technologies. “There is a heck of a lot of experimentation going on,” says InsightExpress’s Joy Liuzzo. “When you see this much experimentation, it is indicative that folks are interested in learning.” “And they probably are not finding all of their needs solved in one place,” Liuzzo adds. The research shows that publishers often are favoring different vendors for apps, mobile Web, video and rich media. In fact, the prominence of custom solutions in the mobile ad-serving mix suggests that many publishers still feel the need to knit things together. And the mobile media also find their own inventory fragmented across models. About 45% of respondents say they are responsible for selling less than half of their own mobile ad inventory. Only 55% are selling 50% or more of their inventory. And in most cases, it is the ad sales group that is driving the decisions about which ad servers to use, not ad operations. And while the mobile marketing air is filled with promises of advanced targeting available on this platform, it is most interesting that publishers themselves are mainly looking for ad technologies that help them report metrics, control campaigns and unify platforms. When asked to rank the functionalities most important in choosing a server, 75% put reporting and analytics in one of the top 5 ranks, far ahead of campaign management tools (59%) and even farther ahead of multi-mobile platform serving (51%). Targeting against demographics or behaviors were much lower priorities, ranked in the top 5 by 25% and 19%, respectively. When it comes to developing content in the near future, iOS continues to outpace all comers. Fully 72% of publishers said they planned to focus “very aggressively” on iPhone and 56% said the same about iPad. In contrast, and despite phenomenal growth in worldwide penetration this year, only 53% were strongly aimed at Android. But even more curious is the lingering ambivalence toward mobile Web. Even as many ad agencies and mobile marketers recommend that clients optimize sites for mobile browsers and get them into the mobile search ecosystem, only 39% said they were aggressively focused on this platform. InsightExpress fielded its survey of publishers between mid August and December 2011. Almost half of the respondents were serving between 200 million and 500 million impressions a month.
One of the biggest problems for mobile Web shopping is that the steps to purchasing simply take too long -- far longer than on the familiar Web. And that's because of the way that mobile devices work. Just clicking a button to “add,” “delete,” or “change quantity” on the mobile Web requires sending transaction data from the shopper’s mobile device to the vendor’s server (average 3-5 seconds) via cell towers, not high-speed cables. These interim steps -- which take place long before checking out --are the challenges. It's all about time. A study commissioned by Adobe in October 2010, titled “In-the-Know about On-the-Go: Adobe Captures What Mobile Users Want,” indicated that 67 percent of shoppers “strongly prefer using mobile websites over mobile apps for all shopping-related activities.” Was that just an isolated data point or the beginning of a trend? A more recent survey -- released in January 2012 by ZMags, titled "Meet the Connected Consumer" -- goes even further by showing that 87% of connected consumers now prefer to use Web sites and browser-based mobile sites for browsing and shopping, whereas only 4% prefer smartphone and tablet apps. ZMags even concludes that “retailers need to think about the purpose of these apps and determine the role of the app in the customer lifecycle.” The reality is that consumers have a hard time keeping track of multiple apps, and would much rather keep more space for music and photos on their smartphones. Other studies released soon after last year’s shopping season indicate that over 40% of mobile buyers reported being unhappy with their shopping experience, and consumers still routinely abandon their online shopping carts up to 70% of the time. What can the industry do to demonstrate that it is actually listening to its users? The first wave of mobile commerce development has favored massive investment in apps for different platforms and different purposes such as special promotions, comparison shopping, and loyalty programs. As in any new product introduction, now is the time to evaluate customer feedback via real-life behavior, make changes accordingly and look at the bottom line. The “connected consumer” study shows that it makes sense to separate the wheat from the chaff and streamline the number of apps, so that a portion of development resources can be reassigned to improving site design for the mobile Web in favor of the customer’s experience. A number of organizations perform regular tests on retailers’ site performance, so we know what the main candidates for improvement are. Here are a few key questions that Internet retailers, large and small, should ask themselves: How good is your site’s response time? This is most critical when the consumer comes in on a smartphone. (One key issue is how many images you have per page and whether their definition is compatible with the 2G or even 3G speed most phones still provide.) How complex is your navigation? How many clicks does it take to get to the desired product? Have you looked at how long it takes, on average, for transaction data to be sent/confirmed between a mobile device and your server? How many page changes or re-loads are required for a customer to “add to cart”? Must they be forced to see a “view cart” page every time? How is the “shopping flow” on your site? Psychology researchers have demonstrated that not interrupting the actions of a particular consumer may provide a much higher percentage of completed transactions. Have you investigated alternative solutions to reducing the time it takes to use your cart? Research shows that despite the availability of time-saving options, such as AJAX, less than 5% of the top 500 retailers actually use it. What if you could just place a checkmark next to the item you wish to purchase with no page reload required and not one change to the page you are looking at except a message that pops up: “item added." What if you could navigate around your site with no interruption at all, focused only on your intentions, undistracted? Will HTML5 solve all problems? Not quite. The most likely advantage from HTML5 will come in the form of quicker display of information of interest. But the design of a commercial site that favors the user experience will still be an issue for the reasons mentioned above. In conclusion, retailers need to look closely at how they allocate their 2012 budgets, reduce the amount spent on apps and increase development resources dedicated to improving their mobile sites.