Plenty of mobile options for advertisers

Multiple channels inherently available in a mobile environment add considerable complexity to the advertising mix, but mobile advertising can still become the lynchpin in a brand's much broader marketing campaign.

"Mobile is changing the paradigm. Not only is mobile a different medium it's actually multiple media all on the same device, so it's not like buying TV or buying Web," said Michael Becker, the Mobile Marketing Association's Managing Director for North America.

Advertising opportunities in the mobile environment can entail mobile websites, applications, messaging, video and TV as well as voice, all of which can be integrated into sustainable interactive campaigns. "Every one of those mobile paths is an opportunity for an advertisement," said Becker.

"Each one of these [mobile] media is an extension and will affect how a message is consumed and/or delivered," said Becker. "The same call to action will be responded to and accepted differently in SMS than, say, an application simply because the medium is different," he noted.

Savvy advertisers are beginning to engage in cross-platform buys within mobile, combining, for instance, mobile Web ad buys with in-app ads. "That's a major change because applications have just emerged on the scene over the past couple of years. Video has been around for awhile, but it's getting more important. SMS has been around even longer in a significant way but also getting more important in advertising," said Louis Gump, CNN's vice president of Mobile.

CNN, which has been focused on monetizing its mobile Web and apps inventories, "is looking at SMS closely" and is "putting the finishing touches" on its mobile video ad product, he said.

Because the mobile ad environment is so unique, simply shifting existing online ad efforts to mobile is inadequate. "One of the things we clearly advocate is thinking about the mobile experience first. Don't just take something that worked online and then kludge it and squeeze it into a small space. Instead think about the inventory you have and have a really direct message that's easy to read, because that just increases engagement with the audience," said Gump.

Gump also urges the industry to "not repeat the mistakes of online by doing things that are so intrusive that people really don't like them."

Noting that the boring, old banner ad is still quite effective on handsets, Gump said, "We have plenty of things that work on mobile already...We should not be seduced by the new and shiny all the time. We should be very cognitive of the fact that some of the core inventory works really well."

Publishers such as CNN are not the only companies striving to monetize their mobile wares by selling ad space. Mobile operators are also soliciting advertising from agencies and brands, but their efforts have faced some hurdles. That led Alcatel-Lucent to create Optism a hosted platform, for operators through which the vendor will act as a middleman, providing a central location for ad agencies to book and launch SMS and MMS campaigns across various mobile operators.

According to Alcatel-Lucent Director of Marketing, Global Advertising Solutions, Lisa Ciangiulli, "One of the reasons this is very attractive to the media agencies is that they have a lot of difficulty in accessing the inventories of the mobile operators because they currently have to go to every single mobile operator in a given market, territory, country, etc., which is a bit complex for them. On the reverse side of that, for the mobile operator, they very often don't have internally the expertise to represent their inventory to the media agencies."

Operators who wish to monetize their inventories should keep in mind that the cost of their data plans could curtail consumer acceptance of certain mobile ad products. "If operators change their pricing model for data consumption from all-you-can-eat data plans, that may become a potential barrier for continued growth in mobile advertising," said Patrick Hayes, vice president at The Cambridge Strategic Management Group.

In-app video is expected to grab a growing share, perhaps 20-25 percent, of revenue spent on mobile ads over the next five years, but that shift will not happen if data plans become too expensive for consumers, Hayes cautioned.

Favorable data pricing has so far helped make the full spectrum of mobile ads a key element in larger marketing campaigns that contain cross-platform buys beyond mobile.

"We're starting to see a lot of buys that include online and mobile. Some include on-air at CNN. That's one of the biggest differentiators for major publishers, and it's also one of the reasons why companies like The Weather Channel, ESPN, and CNN are investing in mobile," said Gump.