This year will be an interesting year for mobile internet, but it won’t be as groundbreaking for the format as some commentators have predicted, according to panellists at today’s MediaTel Group ‘Future of Online’ seminar.
Richard Firminger, outgoing regional sales director, northern Europe, at Yahoo!, said that mobile adspend forecasts were going to be a lot less than expected, and that 2008 is not going to be the breakthrough year for mobile internet.
“It will be an interesting year, but it won’t be The Year,” he stressed.
Commercial director at Guardian News and Media, Adam Freeman, echoed his sentiments. “Consumers are not ready and I don’t think content owners like us know what to do with it yet,” he admitted. “We’ve got to play catch-up but I think that will slow down the advertising opportunity for brands.”
Sheryl Norman, Omnicom Media Group’s UK digital director, agreed, saying “we still have a lot to learn about the best way to use mobile as a communications platform.”
Louise Ainsworth, MD EMEA at Nielsen Online, added a similar point of view, but was less pessimistic. “I would agree it’s not the year when mobile adspend explodes but I do think it’s a very important year for mobile,” she assured.
“Although as yet not a lot of people are using the mobile phone for internet-like activity, there are people who are doing so. Now is the time to start getting those models that work from a content point of view so that [we’re ready] when he handset penetration does take off – and don’t forget people upgrade their handsets pretty frequently. Don’t dismiss it.”
Firminger pointed out that there is potential, citing ad spend of £15 million on mobile advertising in search and display last year. He believes this could lead to £60 – £90 million in 2008 and could rise to over £1 billion by 2010. However, he suggested this was “pretty small”.
Consumer experience has still got to improve, he believes, saying that accessing the web via mobile is still “poor to ok” and that “it needs to be excellent.”
He said that the “operators are playing like they’ve never played before”, and they are “turning from operators to also being media companies”, finding partnerships and investing in technology.
Freeman felt that while 2008 was an important year for GNM in terms of mobile, that the challenges came from a content perspective, and that the content offering was what the company was lacking at the moment.
Norman cautioned that companies had to tread carefully with mobile because it’s such a personal medium to consumers. “We do have to be very careful because there could be quite serious consumer backlash – if we’re bombarding consumers with content that they don’t want on such a personal medium,” she warned.
She also mentioned that companies like outdoor specialist Kinetic are launching mobile divisions. “We’ll see a lot of testing and trialling going on in that space also this year – there’s a massive amount of untapped potential there.”
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