Jordan Rohan,
founder and managing partner of Clearmeadow Partners, painted a sobering picture of the outlook for mobile marketing at the OMMA Global conference earlier today.
He suggested cracking the code
on mobile will be even more challenging for agencies and advertisers than figuring out social media because of the small screen size of devices and the greater complexity of the wireless ecosystem
compare to online. And just because a business like search has been huge on the Web, doesn't mean it will also be on mobile.
The biggest winners will be those that can drive consumers into
stores by via mobile coupons or similar direct marketing efforts. "If you can't do that, it's much harder to see how mobile is going to be a marketing platform for the majority of companies," said
Rohan. Adding social networking to mobile will only multiply the difficulty of shaping a mobile strategy.
He indicated the best bet was to stick with a big social media player like Facebook as
it extends its online dominance to mobile devices and accrues a wealth of user data that will benefit advertisers. Despite the hurdles, Rohan acknowledged that if enough people over the next five
years get smartphones or netbooks, advertisers will have to figure out how best to reach people on the go.
Not everyone was as pessimistic about mobile advertising. David Wells of Web
development shop Alter Imaging posted a comment on the MediaPost blog today agreeing with Rohan's view that transitioning to mobile marketing will be tough for most businesses. But he believes mobile
applications hold promise beyond just coupon offers.
"The real groundbreaking mobile marketing applications transcend this coupon push and serve some sort of utilitarian purpose. (Like an app
made by an alcohol company that calls you a cab and locates you on your mobiles GPS, or an augmented reality map app that takes you on a tour of a city....just some examples," he wrote.
Certainly mobile applications are likely to be an active area of development by brands and other services for some time, if for no other reason than they're often easier to use than the nascent mobile
Web. Whether they'll prove strong ad vehicles in the long term isn't as clear.