The second day of the Digitrends Fall Media Buyers Summit opened with a discussion on wireless. The panel's goal was to separate hype from reality, which wasn't easy considering the moderator,
Digitrends CEO Rick Parkhill, kicked things off by stating that the wireless advertising market is predicted to reach $17 billion by 2005.
While none of the panelists expressly disagreed with
the prediction, they cited the all-too-familiar obstacles of wireless, such as lack of adoption by consumers, privacy concerns, creative limitations and the like. Nor could the panelists predict
where the $17 would come from - some said wireless will be a medium all its own, others said it will become only a slice of the total Internet advertising pie.
However, Lot 21 Interactive's
Mark Stephens said successful wireless advertising is possible. Without going into any details, he said Lot 21 ran a campaign on AvantGo, which turned out to be their most effective ROI campaign to
date.
But the words of wisdom came from AdForce's Rob Price, who said, "The worst thing we could do is oversell wireless. We want to enhance the user experience. If we said conversion rates
are going be 50 times higher than with other mediums, we'd be in trouble. I think some Internet companies did that, and now they're paying for it. So we're approaching it cautiously, and we want to
get actual numbers before we start making promises."
The panel did end on hype, however, as Rick Parkhill said that wireless will "open up so many doors for advertisers in the future,
enabling them to develop one-on-one relationships with the consumer that other media have not been able to deliver the promise of."
We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?