Mobile Fix: Mobile money and broadcasting battles
This week Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive!, takes a look at how companies are using mobile money and whether ratings driven broadcasters can really compete with subscriber funded channels…
Mobile Money
Facebook is testing a new service where it automatically fills in payment details on mobile – using the credit card details already stored with Facebook. Now it doesn’t have as many credit card details as Apple or Amazon – and most will have been added to make ingame purchases with Zynga ect – but this will make commerce easier on its platform.
Paypal also continues to roll out new products with a new service enabling users to log in to a website using their Paypal account. PayPal’s eventual goal is to let you make mobile purchases simply by entering your 4-digit PayPal PIN number on a website.
Or maybe it won’t even need that – around its UK offices in Richmond it has been testing another service that uses the Paypal app to pop up a picture of the user on the partner retailers’ till system – and the retailer charges them by clicking on the photo. Square uses a similar system in the US and this approach is ideal for retailers you visit regularly.
We were told a while back that mobile payments aren’t really banking – moving money around is just logistics and that’s why so many other people feel they can get involved. But for most people all they want from a bank is efficient movement of money – logistics – and therefore the role for banks could be limited if they don’t innovate. This is a good look from Wired at how banks could be disintermediated by Google, Facebook and others.
newTV
At the Edinburgh TV Festival Kevin Spacey talked about TV entering a new golden age – but argued that if this is to continue, TV execs have to adapt;
“For kids growing up, there’s no difference between watching Avatar on an iPad or watching YouTube on a TV and watching Game of Thrones on their computer. It’s all content. It’s all story.”
Steve Hewlett makes the point that most of the examples Spacey quotes come from subscriber funded channels where ratings aren’t crucial. And much of the best of UK TV comes from the BBC and C4 – where public funding reduces the need for a pure ratings obsession. Can ratings driven broadcasters compete?
One company staring at the headlights is ESPN – which relies on $6 billion in cable fees. As those of us desperate to watch Leeds play Ipswich on Saturday found, there are lots of dodgy sites showing a pirated feed of many games. Can this genie be put back in the bottle?
For a longer read on how Netflix is changing TV, this is a good article – with a lovely quote from the head of the academy who hands out Emmys;
“Television no longer refers to the box sitting in your living room – television refers to storytelling,” academy Chairman Bruce Rosenblum says. “The method by which our viewers experience those stories is truly irrelevant.”
Which is great – but if consumers are paying for the content there is less need for ads. And if you are allowing binging there is less room for ads. So its interesting that this week WPP published a piece on the End of Advertising as we know it.
Mobile Advertising
A new report shows that whilst Facebook is doing really well at mobile advertising, it is still dwarfed by Google. Of course search has been the fastest type of advertising to go mobile but as brand advertising eventually follows will these figures balance out?
It would seem easier for Google to develop formats that work for branding than it is for Facebook to get traction in search, but we are yet to see much progress.
The Weather Channel has down well with their mobile transistion and this piece talks about its success with brand advertising.
As with most success stories around mobile ads, this approach is bespoke, creating specific messaging to suit the audience and the context – so it’s people heavy. Picking up on our look at the consolidation in adtech this article points up one of the problems – most of the ad tech still needs lots of people to make it happen.
Mobile & Magazines
Tablets seemed to promise a great future for magazines, but few have made a big success of their digital extension. This adage article sums up the generally poor US performance and we suspect it is similar in Europe. Because digital sales do count towards the circulation figures that used to price advertising there is potentially a big prize here.
But despite all those great concept videos from a few years back, most digital magazines are virtually the same as the print ones apart from some simple interactivity in navigation. The UK rules allow up to 25% extra content in the digital editions but few get close – when will a smart publisher work out how to use this opportunity to make the digital edition a far superior edition to the print one?
Maybe it will be Amazon that helps publishers crack this, rather than Apple. The Newstand app doesn’t really help a magazine publisher find their audience and we suspect the Conde Nast deal with Amazon to manage all its subscriptions will be the first of many.