• by Bill McCloskey , May 8, 2001

I had a number of responses to last week's question: what is the difference between a Superstitial and an interstitial. The winner (i.e. the person to send me the correct answer first) was Jason Shulman, Vice President of Business Development at Freestyle Interactive. Here is the correct answer: An interstitial, which means in-between, is the generic term for any form of advertising or promotion that pops up between the loading of two Web pages. A Superstitial is a brand name for advertising technology developed by Unicast.

Of course this gives me two openings for this weeks article: I could talk about the incredible work that Freestyle Interactive is doing (and they are) or I could go into the amazing job Allie Shaw, Unicast's VP of Marketing, has done branding the Superstitial (which she has). But instead, I'm going to talk about something else entirely, namely wireless marketing.

I'm reading the Wall Street Journal this morning where I find an article about Amazon shutting down their "M-commerce" efforts. (For those of you not in the know, m-commerce stands for mobile commerce.) According to a company spokesperson, "Yes we did scale the team back as a slot of companies did when they realized that the bold predictions for penetration [of mobile commerce] in the market were not panning out." Which makes me ask, does anyone actually think for themselves anymore or are we just blindly following the questionable predictions of analysts to justify spending tons of money?

Personally, I've never been hot on the idea of wireless marketing. This stems from the old days when I was forced to wear a pager everywhere I went. My pager's buzzer was continually being set off by an endless stream of info: stock reports, baseball scores, weather reports, etc. And there was no way to stop it. I spent a good number of minutes everyday just deleting this accumulation of wireless detritus. And today's wireless offerings aren't much different than what has been available on pagers for years.

Have we reached the point in our consumer driven, immediate gratification, lifestyle where it is important to me to be able to order the latest Steven King novel from a taxi or bus? And if so, why don't I just get off the bus at the next Barnes & Noble and pick it up. As any New Yorker will tell you, it's not ordering tickets to The Producers on Broadway that is exciting. It's being there on opening night that has cache. And being able to order those tickets on my Palm Pilot is not going to get me in the seats any faster.

When people talk about the wireless revolution, they always point to Finland. Seventy percent of Finland's 5 million inhabitants are connected to mobile phones and many of those phones are used to run WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) applications. The United States is falling behind Finland, say the wireless hype-mongers. The problem is that it is dangerous to extrapolate what works in one culture and apply it to another (a case in point is British comedy.)

Finland is a small homogenous country that is buried under 10 feet of ice for most of the year and only broadcasts television programs for a few hours a day (educational TV at that). Of course they've taken to wireless marketing! They've got a mega case of cabin fever and are bored out of their minds. Here in the United States, things are different.

Like every period of economic downturn, people start looking around for ways of simplifying their lives. Interest in books about the "Simple Life" is huge during these times. Couple this with the hangover of workaholic mania we've seen over the last few years and I predicate people will start looking for ways to disentangle themselves from the Web for a while. Of course, the Internet is too entrenched in people's lives for this "back to nature" movement to have any effect on PC-based Web surfing, but it will have a substantial negative impact on people wanting to have impulse buying capability on their cell phones and PDAs.

Technology for technologies sake is a religion (and a drug) for some people (as anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley can attest) and advertising and marketing are always looked on as the lowest hanging fruit to pay for it all. But not every platform for human communication is a proper one for marketing. A plea to wireless technology vendors: before you start trying to figure out ways to sell me books on my taxi ride out to the airport, figure out a way that I can get my cell phone to work once I get there.

See you next week.

- Bill McCloskey is Founder and CEO of Emerging Interest, an organization dedicated to educating the Internet advertising and marketing industry about rich media and other emerging technologies. He may be reached at bill@emerginginterest.com.