The Interactive Advertising Bureau earlier this year estimated U.S. mobile ad spending at $1.6 billion in 2011. Looking beyond U.S. borders, the IAB issued a new report today estimating the global mobile advertising market at $5.3 billion, with a wide gap between developed and emerging regions. Asia-Pacific, for example, represented 35.9% of worldwide mobile ad spend, North America, 31.4%, and Europe, 25.9%. That compares to Latin America, with just 3.5%, and the Middle East and Africa, at 3.2%. The study, conducted by the IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence in the U.S., IAB Europe and research firm IHS Screen Digest, also broke out mobile advertising for each region by type: display, search and messaging. Across the board, search accounted for the largest share of mobile ad spending, typically at least double the amount of display for a given area. In North America, spending was more balanced, with search contributing $811 million, display hit $572 million and text message advertising, $295 million for a total of $1.68 billion. In Asia-Pacific, search was $1.38 billion, display, $491 million and messaging, just $41 million, totaling $1.9 billion. Similarly, the $900 million spent on search in Europe was almost three times more than display ($367 million), with messaging at $114 million. That adds up to $1.38 billion. As a proportion of mobile ad spending, text messaging was biggest in Latin America, accounting for $83 million out of a total of $188 million on the continent. Of the balance, $74 million went to search, and $31 million to display. For the Middle East and Africa, just $3 million was spent on text ads, $89 million on search and 32 million on display, totaling $124 million. The IAB explained one of the reasons behind the study was to underscore the global nature of mobile advertising. “This is not just a local, or even European affair. As many mobile campaigns are played out in a global ecosystem, the market we have to size spans across borders,” stated Alain Heureux, president and CEO of IAB Europe. Research presented by Kleiner Perkins partner and Internet guru Mary Meeker showed mobile usage still far outpaces mobile monetization. Mobile usage hit 10% of global Internet traffic in May, up from about 5% last year. While monetization is lagging that growth, Meeker predicts dollars will eventually catch up with eyeballs in mobile as they did on the desktop Web. In terms of methodology, the IAB explained that IHS authored the research based on identification of mobile ad spend reported by IABs, harmonizing the data and employing statistical and econometric models to infer a global market size, split across advertising formats.The findings also reflect information from interviews with “key players across the mobile advertising ecosystem.”
A new forecast suggests Microsoft’s Windows Phone will gain momentum in the coming years, edging out iOS to become the second-most-popular smartphone operating system behind Google’s Android by 2016. That would mark a dramatic reversal of fortune for the Microsoft platform, which currently has only a fraction of the smartphone market. Technology research firm IDC predicts Windows Phone will jump from a 5% share of global smartphone shipments in 2012 to 19.2% in four years fueled by 46% annual growth. By contrast, IDC projects Android’s runaway growth will slow to 9.5% annually, and iOS’ to 11%. Android will remain the top smartphone OS, but its share will decrease from a peak 61% this year to 53% in 2016, while iOS holds roughly steady, from 20.5% to 19%. The same is true for BlackBerry, whose share will remain at about 6% through 2016, supported by demand for affordable messaging devices in emerging markets. Symbian -- only a few years ago the leading smartphone platform -- will all but disappear by 2014 as a result of Nokia’s switch from that Symbian to Windows Phone as the primary OS for its phones. “What remains to be seen is how these different operating systems -- as well as others -- will define and shape the user experience beyond what we see today in order to attract new customers,” said Ramon Llamas, a senior mobile analyst at IDC. The firm projects overall mobile phone shipments this year will slip to 1.7 billion from 1.8 billion in 2010 as a result of sluggish global economic conditions and slowing feature phone sales. The 10% drop in regular phone shipments in 2012 will be offset by a 38.8% increase in smartphone shipments to 686 million units. Falling average selling prices and component costs, subsidized by carriers, and lower-cost data plans are putting smartphones within reach of more people worldwide. Feature phones, however, will still account for 61.6% of mobile phone shipments in 2012. And IDC forecasts 2.3 billion phones overall will be shipped by the end of 2016.
Google made a revealing acquisition this week that addresses some of the company’s weaknesses against competitors Microsoft and Facebook. Its purchase of longtime mobile productivity suite Quickoffice gives the search giant a highly evolved set of apps aimed at the enterprise and professionals. Quickoffice has been providing services for mobile users since before the arrival of smartphones, which provided tools that paralleled Microsoft Office. The deal comes in anticipation of Microsoft extending its legendary Office suite to a range of devices later this year. According to reports, a version of Office is in development for the iPad. Google has experimented with a range of cloud-based productivity solutions, especially Google Docs. The extension of these otherwise popular Web apps services has been uneven, however. In a statement at the Google Blog, the company welcomes the Quickoffice team and says “we’ll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite.” It is unclear whether Quickoffice will replace some of Google’s persistent attempts to compete with Microsoft on the productivity front. The functionality and mobile integration of Google Docs has been patchwork at best. Some aspects of the Web apps are designed for collaborative works and others focus on cloud-based document storage and downloading. Microsoft itself has been enhancing its cloud-based offerings for Office users with Windows Live and Office 365 cloud-based services. But this 800-pound gorilla in the business productivity space has itself been slow to move into cross-platform apps.
That image you may have of a typical video gamer -- male, teenaged or twenty-something, sitting in a basement by himself -- is wrong. Very wrong. According to the Entertainment Software Association, nearly half (49%) of all American households own at least one console gaming system (and those that do own an average of two). The age of the average player is 30 (37% are 36 or older). Women over 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (30%) than boys 17 or younger (18%). And nearly two-thirds of all gamers (62%) play games with others, either in-person or online. One of the biggest areas for gaming growth has been in the mobile space. According to the survey, more than 30% of gamers said they play games on their smartphones, up 10% over last year. A quarter (25%) of gamers said they play games on other wireless devices, up from 13% in 2011. In all, consumers spent nearly $25 billion on video games last year (including content, hardware and accessories), and 42% of gamers said video games give them more value for their money compared with DVDs, movies or music. Of the gamers who said they were playing more often than last year, half said they were going to movies less, while 47% said they were watching less TV and/or DVDs at home. Additionally, 59% of those who said they were playing more video games than last year said they were playing fewer board games. That does not mean, however, that video-gaming has cut into family time. According to the study, 40% of parents say they play video games with their kids once a week, while 59% play at least once a month with their kids. The overwhelming majority (90%) cited the idea of “fun for the entire family” as a reason to play the games. More than half (52%) of parents said video games were a positive part of their children’s lives.
Content shared from Facebook and the amount of backlinks appear to influence organic search engine results most, but Google +1s have the strongest impact on rankings on Google sites in the U.S. and U.K., notes a Searchmetrics study being released Thursday. Keywords in the title or the header, word counts, title character length and an excessive amount of ads have negative effects. The study will show that similar factors have positive and negative influences on search engine optimization in both regions, although to different degrees. In fact, there are some strong differences between the U.K. and U.S., specifically in the order of importance. For instance, the number of words in the text has a large negative correlation in the U.S., yet less than half the correlation in the U.K. The report suggests that more highly ranked sites in the U.S. have less text compared with their counterparts in the U.K. The study analyzes Google results for 10,000 popular keywords and 300,000 Web sites in the U.S. and the U.K. between February and March to identify correlations between content and search ranking. The results should help marketers better understand the close correlation between search and social content, as well as how Google algorithms Penguin and Panda influence change. The data focuses on Google search engine page results because of the market share size, but Searchmetrics plans to add Bing and Yahoo in a later study. Matthias Bachor, director of marketing at Searchmetrics, said the ranking factors across engines are similar, as social continues to grow in importance. "We think that social factors will gain even more importance in the future," Bachor said. "It will probably never replace other factors, like backlinks, but social remains a strong indicator for good content and will have an even stronger impact in the way we search in the future." Bachor said it will lead to more personal results, depending on friends' networks, content that users like, and content being shared in their circles. Regardless of the rising influence of social media, backlinks remain one of the most critical factors in achieving good search rankings. The number of backlinks remains the factor most strongly tied to positive rankings in both the U.S. and U.K. The proportion of no follow links correlates more strongly with rankings than the proportion of links containing keywords in the U.S., but marketers will find nearly no difference between the two in the U.K. Even the proportion of links containing a stop word can have an effect. This strong correlation for factors that seem to suggest a more natural link structure illustrates a trend suspected by many SEOs -- that dull, perfectly keyword-optimized links are often uneffective. Ads are an obstacle. Too many or excessively clumsy advertisements have a negative effect on rankings. The negative correlation was slightly stronger in the U.K. at -0.05, compared with the U.S. at -0.04. "We have seen that the existence of ads on the page correlates to rankings," Bachor said. "This correlation value for AdSense integrations is much higher than for other ad integrations," Bachor said. "This means Google can easily identify the use of AdSense, but it also means the use of AdSense remains higher than other integrations." When asked whether influences on desktop are the same as mobile sites for all three engines, Bachor said they are similar in some ways such as regionally, but different in others.
Patrick Moorhead, who served as mobile lead at Draftfcb, has left the Chicago-based agency to take the newly created position of vice president, mobile sales at in-store and digital shopping marketer Catalina Marketing. In his new role, Moorhead will lead sales of Catalina Mobile’s new range of smartphone-related solutions with a focus on CPG manufacturers. Catalina claims an in-store network that reaches 50,000 food, drug and mass merchants worldwide and 26,000 in the U.S. It also says it has purchase histories of 75% of U.S. shoppers and 130 million health consumers to help clients develop customized, measurable marketing campaigns. Known for providing coupons at store checkouts, Catalina extended that business to the Web with the launch of CouponNetwork.com in April. Catalina also pushed into mobile last month through its acquisition of m-commerce firm Modiv Media. The company offers a white-label solution for retailers to create their own m-commerce apps. They can include product scanning, targeted savings offers and couponing, as well as self-checkout. “In general, the strategy at Catalina is moving from a paper coupon company to a sophisticated loyalty and consumer-centric shopping data company,” said Moorhead, who began this week. The idea is to provide seamless cross-channel offerings from the in-store network, CouponNetwork.com, back-end integrations with retail sites, as well as mobile tools. Moorhead said the Modiv Media acquisition would help Catalina introduce new m-commerce options for retailers, like scanning products on the shelf for purchase and more robust shopping apps that tie in brand offers and discounts. “My role is to work directly with the manufacturers — the P&G’s and Nestles of the world — to help them construct consumer promotions and loyalty programs for their brands that will live successfully within this new digital and mobile ecosystem that Catalina is deploying to retail partners,” he said. Working with Moorhead will be Courtney Jane Acuff, who previously ran the Chicago office for Publicis Groupe consultancy Denuo before joining Catalina a month ago as vice president, mobile consumer activation and product research. Before joining Catalina, Moorhead had been senior vice president and managing director of mobile platforms since 2009. He previously served as director of emerging media at Razorfish.
Mobile ad exchange Nexage has raised $10 million in a second round of venture financing led by SingTel Innov8, the corporate venture capital arm of the SingTel Group. Prior investors Relay Ventures and GrandBanks Capital also participated in this financing, which brings the total raised by Nexage so far to $14.5 million. The Boston-based company said it plans to use the new capital to build out its products and technology, add sales staff and potentially expand its ecosystem of buyers and sellers. More than 300 publishers and developers and 150 buy-side entities today use Nexage real-time bidding (RTB) exchange to trade mobile display inventory. “This is a classic Series B round, meaning we’ve shown customer acceptance, we’ve shown success in the market, and we want to grow fast, and stay ahead of the market, and that’s what we’ll be using the funding for,” said Nexage CEO Ernie Cormier. The company saw bid volume increase 70% a month in 2011, and earlier this year it said ad requests had surpassed 100 billion. Nexage CMO Victor Milligan said the company has benefited from more publishers optimizing their digital presence for mobile as well as advertisers becoming more active in making mobile buys using RTB platforms. “So the funding raise allows us to ensure we stay apace and get further out in front of this market,” he said. Cormier makes the case that RTB marketplaces such as Nexage are especially relevant to mobile because the medium lacks the third-party data derived from cookies on the desktop Web. So advertisers look to publishers and exchanges for ad-targeting information such as location and user demographics and behavior. “Because all the data for targeting is on the supply-side, not on the buy side, you really end up having to have an exchange -- there’s no other means of doing it at scale for buyers to sift through the billions of impressions available,” said Cormier. In addition to giving Nexage a bigger war chest, the funding also highlights SingTel’s recent expansion into mobile advertising. In March, the Singapore-based mobile phone and services provider acquired U.S. mobile ad and marketing firm Amobee for $321 million. “Mobile advertising has quickly shifted from an experimental market to being an integral part of the advertisers’ ability to reach and compel consumers,” said Punit Chiniwalla, director of investment for SingTel Innov8, in a statement. “Nexage is well-positioned to be one of the winners in this rapidly growing market.” U.S. mobile advertising grew more than threefold in 2011 in to $1.6 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The IAB released new data Wednesday estimating the global mobile ad market at $5.3 billion.
May the best experience win. As retailers evolve their strategies for handling the super-informed, smartphone-wielding consumer, the best defense is a good offense. Trying to thwart the new consumer look-up habit with store-only inventory or universal pricing seems to me a defensive response that drips desperation and in some measure, scapegoating. Much like the music industry, which blamed the digital revolution and piracy for declining sales (when it always has been about bad music), some retailers want to pin their declining fortunes on “showrooming” and customer poaching. The showrooming phenomenon -- while not new -- is surely accelerated by mobility, but it deflects attention from the fact that the retail experience at many stores just sucks. And many third parties simply beat retailers to consumers with superior shopping apps. The next logical stage of this ongoing shopper revolution will be retailers that step up and provide mobile experiences that are so much more helpful to consumers than the third parties, there is little reason for the consumer to go elsewhere. Key to this approach will be retailers actively encouraging and supporting in-store app use and then providing an infrastructure that makes it all seamless for the customer. Last month, home products retailer Lowe’s issued the 2.0 release of its iPhone app, adding to the older shopping app much more granular control over a user’s account, their MyLowe’s loyalty card, saving of details about the consumer’s home and a handy purchase history. But the upgrade was only a consumer-facing piece of a much broader and deeper project to make the mobility a central part of the Lowe’s operation. “It’s not just about customer support and associate support,” says Sean Bartlett, director of mobile platforms and strategy. “If [mobile] is truly part of the business structure, then it is part of everything we do.” Which means that mobile connectivity has to be considered at every point in the organization. Basic functionality needs to be assured, so Lowe’s rolled out WiFi in all of its stores. When someone uses their smartphone in-store they get on the same guest wireless network as the associates. Earlier this year, Lowe’s provided 42,000 iPhones to its in-store staff. They all now have apps that complement the ones the consumer brings into the store and work with the consumer-facing mobile experience. But once the devices and network are in place, you need a platform whereby the consumers and their data are fluidly made a part of the in-store mobile layer. Now that the purchase history of the customer is embedded on the phone and part of their loyalty card, the associate can scan the customer’s key fob for them to rediscover what they had purchased before. The customer gets an image of their myLowe’s key fob in the app that can be scanned at any POS terminal. The associates’ app drills a little deeper into inventory for their own store and nearby stores. The app-bearing customer finds that the data embedded or put into the app is of real value here. Bartlett says that the brand does not want to pit retail against the empowered consumer or pretend that a host of third party apps are not already being used by consumers when they come in the door. “We embrace transparency. We offer free WiFi. We offer apps. But if you come into the store, hopefully you will use the Lowe’s product. We’re not going to hide from the fact that people use information in our businesses. When it comes to the home, we feel we are in the best position to deliver that experience." Bartlett says the Lowe’s app users self-identify as core customers. While the mobile Web site for Lowe’s gets considerable traffic via organic and paid search and direct look-ups, there is a lot of store locator activity there and basic look-ups. “If someone is making the jump from mobile Web to your, they clearly have an affinity for the brand.” If they opt-in to a MyLowe’s program, then they have a hyper-affinity. Bartlett says that early response to the MyLowe’s feature has been “fantastic.” Users are also especially keen on getting inspirational content, such as videos and how-tos. Bartlett says that calculating the ROI on the company’s massive investment in mobile must be framed in the larger mission for the brand. And again, it needs to be seen as a game of experiences. “For the organization it is about enhancing the overall customer experience. It rings true for the space we play in. Home or home improvement is a very personal thing and sometimes involves very long decision cycles with high consideration. So the best fit is to enhance the overall experience, whether it is from inspiration or how-to videos on how to fix a broken sink we need to be there for you. It is not just self-service on the app, but also having the sales associate help you as well, whether to look up inventory or to show you a how-to. It is really about providing really compelling experiences regardless of location.”
Dentists, dry cleaners and other local business owners want the same search and ad targeting platforms as national brands and retailers, but can't reach that goal due to complicated systems and lack of technology. Not yet, anyway. eXelate has begun to research long-tail services that would provide local businesses with an automated self-serve audience targeting and modeling systems. The platform, and others like it, would allow local retail and service companies to input information to build custom audience segments. "I'm a dentist that works at this location who specializes in braces; build an audience block for me," said Mark Zagorski, CEO at eXelate. "We want to achieve that goal." Zagorski said companies like TruSignal, which develops custom offline models, will allow eXelate to offer full funnel targeting. The partnership between eXelate and TruSignal, announced Wednesday,provides online advertisers and their interactive agencies a more precise way to target consumers. The audience segments include insurance and financial services, education and political affiliation and donors. The methods used for larger brands are similar to those needed for local companies, but technologists need to redesign and develop the interface and the technologies for smaller businesses. The algorithms still need to process the data and the attributes, but the challenge becomes simultaneously scaling hundreds of thousands of long-tail audience segment models. Today the company builds tens of hundreds of models. But it not only requires model-building skills, it takes processing power. Education will also become a priority. Zagorski said small companies and individual professionals will need to become educated on ad targeting and online and offline cross-channel advertising and marketing. The first stage becomes developing easy to use online display ad tools, allowing small businesses to access inventory and build creative pieces. AdReady and others already support these tools, Zagorski said. Then companies like eXelate will need to create to size targeting and modeling tools. Big brands have begun to get it. Smaller companies will come next. It all trickles down. An increase in mobile use by consumers to find local services will also fuel the transformation. Research, however, reveals the trickle as a slight drip. More than half of America’s retailers miss opportunities to connect online with offline shopping and service experiences, according to a study released Tuesday by ExactTarget. Forget about sophisticated ad targeting techniques; research found only 44% of brick-and-mortar stores connect with shoppers post-purchase via email and of those only 5% personalize emails based on in-store purchase.
Lots of content creators found their way to Manhattan this week -- but landed on different floors of the same convention center. BookExpo America (BEA), which bills itself as the largest book industry event in North America and one of the largest gatherings of publishers in the world, was hosted upstairs at the Jacob Javits Center. The show aggregates an array of publishers, book industry services and related retail. Running concurrently downstairs at Javits was the BlogWorld and New Media Expo, which promotes itself as the largest conference in the world geared to bloggers, podcasters, Web TV content creators, social media enthusiasts and new media content creators. Both events draw thousands of attendees, with BlogWorld’s projected to be around 3,000 and BEA more than three times that number. The upstairs book-oriented confab was literally overflowing with many thousands of physical printed books, while downstairs was focused on all things digital. BEA featured all the major book publishers such as McGraw-Hill, Random House and Penguin Group, along with many hundreds of small publishers. Downstairs at BlogWorld, many exhibitors focused on digital delivery -- such as WordPress, which powers some 75 million blogging sites and whose mobile app has been downloaded about five million times. And there was Stitcher, the smart radio app that aggregates 7,000 content providers and 1,000 live radio stations, according to Rachel Eaton, director of content partnerships at the California-based company -- whose app also has been downloaded five million times. As I made the rounds of publishers upstairs I asked various book publishers what they were doing with mobile. I got answers such as “not enough, really -- we have a few mobile sites we plan to launch” and “nothing, really.” Many of the publishers also said their mobile efforts were being managed by their distributors -- most notably Ingram, the largest book wholesale distributor in the world, with millions of titles and more than 71,000 retail and library customers. The obvious question in the room filled with physical books and the publishers whose mission is to derive revenue from publishing them is the role of mobile in their future. “Our job is to get the published content to where the consumer wants to buy it,” said Marcus Woodburn, vice president, Digital Products at Ingram. With the global nature of mobile, getting that content to consumers looks to be a different animal based on the particular market. “In South Africa only one percent are connected to the Net,” said Woodburn, noting that a market such as that would be better suited to delivering books to be read on phones, with similar situations in other parts of the world, such as certain areas of Latin America and China. “The phone is the most widely used device, so the content delivery is somewhat device-driven,” Woodburn said. “People do read books on phones.” The mobile book market could develop so that different markets behave differently and publishers adapt accordingly. For example, the U.S. market may use mobile to order a book to be delivered or downloaded on an e-reader. Another market may use a phone to read a book, and a third scenario is that a first chapter may be free on the phone as a promotion to order the book either physically or digitally, according to Ingram. With these options, Woodburn sees the book market potential to be larger outside the United States because publishers can reach customers they never could have reached before. We heard similar sentiments in a recent meeting in Latin America, where bankers were looking to reach customers who have never had a bank account, since they don’t have access to a bank or the Internet, but they have mobile phones. Print on demand (POD) technology developed over the years also allows the model of previewing and then ordering a book to be more efficient. This does not mean printing a book to be picked up your local Sir Speedy, but rather POD deployed around the world in large, centralized facilities by companies like Ingram. With facilities in various countries ranging from Europe to Australia, Ingram says it now prints more than 25 million POD books a year. In the U.S., for example, a current routine is that a book is ordered from Amazon, and Ingram prints it, ships it to Amazon and it goes to the consumer in the typical Amazon box, just days after being ordered. So despite all the physical, printed materials in the upstairs Javits, there are some people highly focused on the proper fit of mobile in the world of books. Meanwhile, downstairs at the same center, there were thousands of individual bloggers (AKA publishers) looking for ways to expand their digital reach. All their POD is digital. The race is on to see which of the publishing entities best utilizes mobile, with the content consumer being the most likely beneficiary.
They may be global, but marketers can’t quite catch up with consumers’ passion for local In many quarters, 2012 has been dubbed the year of mobile. According to a 2012 Nielsen report1, smartphone penetration in the U.S. has exceeded 50 percent and is poised to rise even further as the technology improves. Just like every new technological platform that attracts a critical mass of consumers, mobile has experienced its fair share of the inevitable growing pains in monetization with advertisers that every nascent medium goes through. However, I think brands and agencies know there is great, and largely untapped, value in mobile advertising, and an engaged audience — expecting media and technology to tangibly improve their lives — is waiting to connect. The Case for Location-Based MobileLocation-based mobile advertising represents the ultimate actualization of this opportunity. With the growing level of sophistication and wizardry behind the modeling and the technology, publishers are now capable of offering premium, brand-safe content that is sticky with consumers. And with publishers increasingly ramping up their capabilities in offering video and tablet inventory, advertisers are beginning to see the power of the platform in engaging their target audiences in a deeper, more resonant manner. The number of people who are consuming video content on mobile devices is increasing rapidly. Tablet ownership is up 282 percent, and ereader ownership is up 129 percent compared to this time last year, according to recent 2012 comScore data2. Logically, consumers are more apt to tap on mobile ads that provide value than those that don’t. It stands to reason that location-awareness is a proven driver in higher click-through rates as compared to campaigns that aren’t location-aware. Our surveys at Verve have convincingly confirmed this notion. The ability to hyper-target consumers locally is especially vital in the marketing plans of brands in the retail, automotive and QSR verticals. For example, over 80 percent of people on the Verve Network said they would be open to receiving mobile ads promoting their local dealerships if they were offered an incentive for test-drives of new vehicles as a part of the messaging. Dynamic, geo-fenced campaigns are starting to catch on with marketers, too. An advertiser may want to drive traffic to a store location for a weekend sale, so ads are only served to people within a predetermined radius of that store location, and nobody outside of that parameter will receive those ads. Or if you’re looking to cast a wider net, a brand can execute what in industry lingo is referred to as a geo-aware campaign. A brand could set location parameters to better target consumers of a general area. The technology exists where mobile ad creative can be effectively adjusted based on regional weather forecasts or other criteria. Home Depot ads in the Pacific Northwest during rainstorms may remind consumers about their line of roofing and rain-gutter products, while simultaneously showing Miami consumers specials on patio furniture. How Do We Sell Location-Based Mobile to Advertisers? So the value proposition for location-based mobile would appear to be a simple, elegant and powerful argument. What will it take to spark a level of commitment from advertisers commensurate to the opportunity? Consumers currently spend 29 percent of their time in the mobile medium, yet the ad spend is only 1 percent vis-à-vis other media. This imbalance is due to a lot of things, and will close over time, but generally speaking it’s about a lack of cohesive understanding of how mobile fits into the broader strategy. It’s also reasonable to figure that many brands are standing on the sidelines out of pure inertia and an aversion to risk and experimentation. We all know about the relatively short lifespan of CMOs at Fortune 500 companies, as well as the increasing encroachment of cost-cutting procurement people into the advertising allocation process within marketing organizations. Against this tough backdrop, the margin for error is razor-thin. So how do publishers and mobile ad networks sell the proposition to brands and their agencies? Local media companies need to realize they are sitting at the epicenter of the entire “LoMo” phenomenon; 95 percent of smartphone users have searched for local information according to Google Mobile Playbook, April 2012. And beyond relentlessly preaching the gospel of “test and learn” as a marketing imperative, we need to do what we can to give CMOs and their marketing people cover for these initiatives. The most surefire way to do that is by offering them case studies of how advertisers have successfully leveraged the location-based mobile platform and delivered upon predetermined KPIs. Tom MacIsaac is CEO of Verve Wireless
Critics have been attacking new platforms since Plato. But is mobile more harmful than any other media? As surely as technology evolves, technological change has always provoked complaints about its effects on human beings — and mobile devices are no exception. In a New York Times column titled “The Twitter Trap,” published in May 2011, Bill Keller noted the latest mobile developments before confessing that “my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community …”More recently, in another essay in the same newspaper, titled “The Flight from Conversation,” M.I.T. psychology professor Sherry Turkle similarly asserted that the new technology brings with it some kind of loss, a metaphysical price to be paid: “We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.”But these concerns about media technology — that it will make us incoherent and superficial — are nothing new. Take the examples cited by Turkle at the beginning of her column: “At home, families sit together, texting and reading email. At work, executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: It involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.” This damning paragraph can easily be rewritten, to similar effect, with the substitution of “analog” technologies or no technology at all: “At home, families sit together, [watching TV]. At work, executives [doodle] during board meetings. We [pass notes] during classes and [check stock prices on CNBC] when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: It involves [appearing to listen to someone while you read the newspaper]; it’s hard, but it can be done.”Indeed, the handwringing over mobile’s impact on the human psyche is merely the latest bout of our recurring, collective anxiety about our reliance on communications technology — a sense of unease that the way we communicate has some pernicious, hidden impact on our minds and souls. Essentially we fear that emphasizing one form of communication (textual, visual, auditory) causes our other faculties to atrophy, warping and diminishing our ability to think. But this supposed relationship between communication and cognition — which can be traced all the way back to ancient times, and reemerges with every new technology — is probably overstated.In retrospect, the first device that fit our modern conception of mobile technology was probably the Sony Walkman, introduced in 1979, and the various knockoffs it inspired in following years. Critics immediately became fixated on the idea that people listening to the device were “cut off” from the world around them and isolating themselves in an antisocial way. Others said the Walkman would shorten attention spans by allowing young people to switch back and forth between external stimuli and music; educators recommended that parents not allow children to listen to a Walkman while doing their homework, and the device was banned (mostly unsuccessfully) by many public schools. As with other new communication technologies, of course, the Walkman was also said to be contributing to the decline of culture and society. In his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, conservative cultural critic Allan Bloom complained that the archetype of the modern era was “a 13-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching TV.” Indeed, devices like the Walkman were atomizing American public life and undermining the influence of high culture: “As long as he has the Walkman on, he cannot hear what the Great Tradition has to say. And after its prolonged use, after he takes it off, he finds he is deaf.” At the extreme, the device became a symbol of nihilism: Jean Baudrillard wrote that “nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his Walkman …”Before the Walkman, the main object of criticism was television, which was blamed, among other things, for shortening attention spans, hobbling our linguistic abilities, and, in essence, making us stupid. In this view, rational, language-based thought was being undermined by the simple, seductive pull of visual perception. Neil Postman, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, wrote that “excessive immersion in nonlinguistic, analogic symbols will have the effect of amplifying the functions of the right hemisphere while inhibiting the functions of the left … such people would be strong on intuition and feeling, but weak on reflection and analysis … in other words, people whose state of mind is somewhat analogous to that of a modern-day baboon.”Postman further warned that TV, as a primarily visual medium, “stresses the fragmented and discrete nature of events, and, indeed, is structurally unable to organize them into coherent themes and principles.” At a more basic level, the regular interruption of TV by advertising was said to be “shortening attention spans,” supposedly resulting in children being unable to learn or even carry out simple tasks. Complaints about the alleged coarsening effect of violent and sensational TV content are so well known they don’t need to be repeated here.TV’s heavily visual aspect was condemned as incompatible with rational, analytical thought — but many of the same basic critiques were previously levied against a non-visual medium: radio. In 1927, H.G. Wells wrote that radio was fit only for “very sedentary persons living in badly lighted houses or otherwise unable to read … and who have no capacity for thought or conversation.” Radio was widely condemned as a “dangerous rival” to reading, which would encourage illiteracy and cause attention spans to shrink, thanks to the prevalence of 15-minute-long radio dramas and even shorter pieces of music. By encouraging people to spend time alone or silently with others, the British critic F.R. Leavis also said radio was causing people to lose touch with the art of conversation (this was in addition to the usual battery of complaints that radio, like movies before and TV after, was undermining society with violent, vulgar content). Before radio, of course, came movies — first silent, then “talkies,” but always a visual medium. Here, again, cultural critics remarked on the power of sight, sound and motion relative to other media. In Our Movie Made Children, a much-cited study published in 1935, Henry James Forman wrote: “Pictures, as the investigators point out, have two means of reaching the human consciousness, both the visual and the auditory. How indirect, by comparison, is the medium of books!”As the title of Forman’s book indicates, critics were particularly concerned with the impact of movies on children, which supposedly extended to physiological phenomena including disturbed sleep patterns and insomnia, resulting, in turn, in “emotional instability … similar to the effects produced by alcohol, cocaine, heroin, hashish and other narcotics …” Furthermore, “sleep impairment following the movies” was held to be “detrimental to health and growth.” Again, these cognitive and psychological effects were attributed to movies without reference to their content, which was separately (and vociferously) criticized for undermining the fundamental values of civilization.Based on these complaints about modern media, we might assume (as many of critics still do) that textual communication is the gold standard — the original medium, perfectly attuned to the human mind. But in the 19th century. the same kind of accusations were levied against the medium which is venerated today as the most sober and substantial of them all: newspapers. In 1865, E.L. Godkin, the famed editor of The Nation and the New York Evening Post, condemned popular newspapers for their impact on ordinary Americans: “They like ‘light stories,’ ‘pleasing anecdotes,’ and would like to have all the great questions of the time disposed of in at most half a column … [This] … gives one a tolerably fair idea of the influence of the daily press upon them.” In 1890, Godkin was still fulminating against popular newspapers for their supposed effects on the American attention span: “Now, nothing can be more damaging to the habit of continuous attention than newspaper-reading … it never requires the mind to be fixed on any topic for more than three or four minutes, and … every topic furnishes a complete change of scene. The result for the habitual newspaper-reader is a mental desultoriness, which ends by making a book on any one subject more or less repulsive.”The perfect form of communication, to Godkin, was books — thoughtful, weighty, requiring long periods of concentration. And yet books themselves have been criticized for their supposedly negative effect on the human mind. No less an authority than Plato, the original social conservative, complained (through his protagonist Socrates) that reading caused the faculty of memory to atrophy, and gave readers the false impression they are learning when in fact true knowledge existed only in the soul. In Plato’s dialogue titled Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of the ancient Egyptian inventor of writing, whose invention was criticized by the pharaoh: “… it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: They will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing … you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality.”So how real is the supposed impact of communications technology on human beings? It seems strange to have to defend literacy again Plato (who was, of course, fully aware of the irony involved in writing a critique of writing). While reading and writing may indeed lead us to neglect our memory, only a small group of people were ever able to cultivate massive memories in the first place (e.g., medieval monks who built “memory palaces” full of thousands of texts). By contrast, reading and writing allow vastly more people to participate in the life of the mind and the world around them. This broadening of the information franchise has spurred endless technological, social and economic development, while humanity has accumulated a vast store of collective knowledge in libraries and now the Internet.Beginning in the 18th century, popular newspapers — highbrow and lowbrow alike — helped disseminate important, relevant information (alongside sensational trash) to large numbers of people. They were key in the development of democratic institutions from the Revolutionary period onward, and have also left behind a massive archive of text and images that continues to be useful. While Godkin condemned popular newspapers after the U.S. Civil War for their inaccurate sensationalism, the most popular newspaper during the conflict, Harper’s Weekly, was widely valued at the time for its evenhandedness, and today is an invaluable resource for historians and other scholars. Sensational newspapers can still contribute to the national conversation, as the National Enquirer demonstrated with its reporting on the John Edwards affair.Whatever concerns parents, educators and doctors may have had about movies from the 1930s onward, they have been viewed by most of the U.S. population, including children, ever since without producing any readily apparent ill effects. It’s true children have nightmares following some kinds of movies, and parents have to be vigilant about the content their children see, but a roundup of recent research on the relationship between media exposure and childhood sleep disorders (a prime concern about movies in the 1930s) by the Kaiser Family Foundation concluded: “One of the striking insights to emerge … is that there is nothing inherent in most media use that would make it damaging for sleep.” Of course, the fears about radio promoting illiteracy among children and young adults turned out to be wholly unfounded: From 1910 to 1950 — radio’s golden age — the U.S. literacy rate actually increased from 92 percent to 97 percent, with children leading the way. Interestingly radio is now seen as a valuable tool for spreading literacy in developing countries with little or no public education: In Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has been distributing hand-crank radios with literacy workbooks to villagers so they can learn to read at home (part of a broader strategy to undermine the Taliban’s control of news and opinion).Television, the bogeyman of cultural critics during the second half of the 20th century, is a somewhat easier target, as increased TV viewing has, in fact, been correlated with shorter attention spans in some children. (The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV for children under age 2, and no more than two hours of quality programming for older kids.) But as with other media, this negative impact probably has more to do with the type of content viewed than anything intrinsic to the medium itself. Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital who led several much-cited studies, commented in 2011: “Most parents worry too much about how much TV their children watch and not enough about what they watch. It’s not about turning the TV off. It’s about changing the channel.” As for TV’s broad impact, there are few reliable longitudinal studies over time, but what little evidence there is suggests average attention spans today are roughly the same — about 10 minutes for 4-year-olds, 20 minutes for adults — as they were in the first half of the 20th century. Returning to the present, it’s true the latest wave of mobile media technology differs from previous waves in its interactivity: We aren’t just reading text or watching video or listening to music, but sending text messages, playing mobile games, sharing video with friends, and the like. But it’s not clear why active, “lean-forward” behavior would be any more damaging to our cognitive abilities or attention spans than earlier media: Indeed, traditional media like movies, radio, and TV were often criticized for encouraging passive consumption, which may be less when prevalent when there are interactive options offered by the same device. No doubt, certain activities — texting while driving, “sexting,” compulsive socializing, addictive consumption of any kind of media — can be dangerous and bad for your health. It was never a good idea to let kids watch TV all day long before, and it’s not a good idea to let them, say, watch mobile video or play mobile games or goof off on Facebook all day long now. Other (adult) behaviors are just rude: People should consider turning off their mobile devices so they don’t get sucked into reading the news or texting at dinner. But as in previous eras, it would be foolish and irresponsible to blame technology for the uses we make of it.