Measurement as a critical part of mobile development
Sometimes, you don’t need figures. A look around you will show how far and how fast mobile telecommunications has evolved from its humble beginnings. Instead of simply making phone calls, people are sending text messages, retrieving their email, checking things out on the internet, playing video games, watching streaming video, and so on. In short, they are doing a thousand and one things that could barely even be imagined when the first patent for radio telephony was issued in 1908. In fact, even when Japan’s NTT launched the original first-generation cellular network in 1979, no one could predict the rate of evolution of mobile and mobile media, let alone the extent that their utility would change and grow.
Figures help make these things easier to understand, and easier to grasp. Even mentioning dates in the last paragraph helped you imagine a particular span of time, and maybe even place yourself within the context of that history – hmm, where was I in 1979, you might have wondered or else you might have tried to recall what year it was when you got your first mobile phone. The trends surrounding mobile phone use are very telling, pointing very clearly to the changes that we can expect to see very soon.
Smartphone use is on the rise, for example, and is predicted to outgrow feature phones by as early as the third quarter of 2011, by some estimates. Data plan uptake in the United States is massive, and a similar growth is expected in Asia as service providers here make data plans more easily affordable and available across the region. There is a clear uptick in mobile internet, mobile apps and mobile video, despite some current market confusion surrounding standards and replay formats.
With 65 million mobile internet users in the United States alone, mobile advertising is a growing market, with advertisers poised to move up to fill the gap. While public perception might have the iPhone as the main driver, the fact is that Android users display similar behavior, and even feature phone users are subscribing to cheap data plans in order to get their internet fix. Consolidated figures for Asia aren’t readily available, but looking at China, we can see that mobile internet use is growing faster than fixed internet, as mobile phones have a higher penetration rate and lower acquisition cost than desktop or laptop computers. Chinese mobile internet users spend on average 97 minutes per day on the internet – which only reinforces the fact that once users start using mobile internet, they use it a great deal.
With consumers accessing information and entertainment across three screens (television, computer and mobile phone), the balance is moving towards the mobile phone as the exceptional third screen. Smartphone penetration and uptake of data plans is driving the development of mobile internet, mobile video and messaging use, and of course, this is driving ad dollars to mobile marketing. Advertisers are trying to get to consumers through the screen with which they spend the most time, and increasingly that is the mobile phone.
That’s when the gap becomes apparent. Advertisers and marketers need the targeting ability to accurately select audiences for their advertisements, combined with standardized measurement to be able to report. At the moment, these measurements don’t exist. Part of the problem is that mobile doesn’t behave like other media, which means that more traditional measurements are less effective.
Effective targeting of consumers using mobile marketing requires new means of measurement, as well as new ways of thinking about customers, besides the traditional demographic axes used today. Perhaps over time we will develop other axes of measurement, for attributes like sociability or degree of digitization. There is no doubt, however, that the role of measurement is important, and only now are we beginning to feel the effects of its absence.
The first stage of mobile development is past, and we now have mature technology that is falling in price to a point where it can be made available to more and more people. The next step is to create standardized measurement and metrics. Once we develop a standard way to measure the mobile audience, then we will also have information, consistency and confidence, all critical to the growth of the medium. These measurements will enable close targeting for advertising, measure the reach of individual campaigns, measure the ROI of campaigns, between and across media and formats, and will help advertisers optimize the marketing mix.
Solution to this problem already exists, as does the necessary data – what’s needed is agreement, and access. Once all parties in the ecosystem agree to adopt a common standard, and the necessary arrangements can be made to get the data from the mobile subscriber, the mobile device manufacturer and the operator/service provider, we will be well on the way to getting the system of measurement that we need.
By Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director, Mobile Marketing Association Asia Pacific Limited
