• by Michael Weaver , December 16, 2008

When it comes to mobile marketing in today’s economy, do you hunker down or double down? The answer is both. As the stock market continues to hemorrhage and advertising budgets get either cut or redirected, there is a lot of debate as to what to do in terms of “new” advertising channels.

Should we abandon things like social media ads or mobile advertising and stick to proven, tactical avenues that are direct response-oriented such as search and couponing? Or, should we take advantage of this crisis to get ahead of our competition, secure our place in the market, and show the real value of emerging advertising channels? Right now the Sequoia PowerPoint or hunker-down people are winning the mainstream argument, but the real winners will be the companies that think strategically about how they can build their brand and engage consumers during this “down” time.

We might all take some advice from a recent Harvard Business Review, Marketing Your Way Through a Recession, which advises that “brands that increase advertising during a downturn can improve market share and return on investment.”

The challenge to marketers today is to not only find types of advertising that meet their requirement for measurable results, such as search, but discover channels that allow their message to shine and boost their brand image.  Mobile is a great example of a channel that allows advertisers to play it safe while participating in the next wave of technology to reach consumers in a relevant and measurable way. Mobile advertising is comparatively cheap, highly dynamic (with everything from video and display to text and search options), global, easy to produce, and, most of all, more measurable than any other channel. The challenge is simply turning advertisers into believers.

To date, in mobile, the struggle has been showing advertisers that there is reach. I have always found this funny, because at every meeting there are at least 10 phones on the table and the meeting is disrupted by at least one call. Clearly reach is there. According to Nielsen Mobile, as of Q2 2008, there were 258.9 million mobile phones in the U.S. and of these, 69% (178.6 million) have used at least one data service.   In fact, 76.8 million U.S. mobile subscribers already recall seeing some form of mobile advertising while using their mobile phone.

The second struggle has been the complexity of delivery. These hurdles have been crossed. There are a handful of companies that offer complete services for both advertisers and agencies for end-to-end campaigns from creation to reporting to distribution. These companies have all kinds of unique pricing models and are aggressive as they are looking to break into the market. Advertisers will see their options growing here.

Last, but not least is measurement. In mobile, measurement is what will ultimately define this channel as the most effective. In mobile, you can measure a whole host of things that advertisers cannot in any other channel and therefore target better advertising. This is brand advertising with a direct response mechanism built in.

On average mobile display campaigns get a higher click through rate than online, averaging 2-3% for mobile versus .25 – 1% online (Source: comScore). Mobile web traffic also extends the audience reach of online sites by an average of 13% (Nielsen Mobile) and significantly increases brand awareness, favorability, and purchase intent (Dynamic Logic.)  Mobile is the new frontier, with lots of opportunity and open space to stake a claim and get noticed, not to mention the intangible cache of being seen in mobile. Of all the mobile websites out there, less than two-thirds of the home pages serve advertising and roughly half of what exists are house ads (Nielsen Mobile.)

Right now, mobile advertising is cheaper to create, cheaper to buy, and cheaper to measure.  But the sad fact is, right now brands are backing away from anything “on the fringes” when the truth of the matter is, these circumstances are a potentially a great argument for getting involved in mobile right now. I am making the case to advertisers that they can show more real results for their dollar in mobile right now than in any other channel. The empirical evidence is there.  Time to double down.