Data is Free

Tons of interesting new data points on mobile advertising. Lai Kok Fung, Ph.D., CEO of BuzzCity makes is co-founder and chief executive officer of BuzzCity, reveals the results of their 2,000 person survey. One of the biggest findings is that people are not accessing the Internet through their mobile phones while they are "mobile." They are accessing the Internet while they are at home or at work, they are just doing so through a mobile device.

A global survey of users across the more than 2,000 mobile web sites that comprise our mobile advertising network. Perhaps surprisingly, the survey found that most people who access the mobile Internet do not actually do so while “mobile.” Rather, they are surfing the mobile Internet while they are at work, home, etc.

Less than six percent actually use the mobile Internet while travelling, commuting or outdoors. In terms of usage, the survey found that most people use the mobile Internet and applications for communication with friends through chat, blogs and discussion groups—basically, social networking (60%). We found much smaller, but still significant, use of the mobile Internet for entertainment (16%) and for looking up specific information (10%).

The latter point is also an important one. The phone is a communication device. People use it for "social networking." (When I was a kid and we had a "party line" phone, "social networking" meant having the neighbor listening to your calls.) Knowing that most of the page views on a mobile device will come from social networking applications has profound implications for ad targeting and ad budgets. Two spring immediately to mind:

1) Ad impressions on social networking sites must be targeted to the interests of the user, otherwise the advertisers is just wasting their budget.
2) Social networking sites can be an incredibly valuable source of data for marketers for monitoring what their customers are saying about their products. Monitoring and responding to those comments in real time with clever ads is an unexplored but important area for marketers and market researchers to better understand.

Finally, Garrick Schmitt, group VP of experience planning at Razorfish and the agency's global, has very interesting thoughts about "app-vertising" on the mobile phone. I think everyone would agree that custom apps aren't right for every campaign, but we've seen that apps can be hugely effective for campaigns where the medium can be tied to the message. I'm particularly impressed with the Adidas Urban Art Guide which has a map of Berlin that you can access on your phone, and Audi A4 free driving game app. Both of these apps take advantage of a phone's unique properties (mobile and gaming device) that makes the advertisements effective.

The only word of caution is that having a cool app is not enough. Campaigns need to be multi-channel (search, display, mobile) and possess a combination of reach and targeted placements in order to be effective for the marketer.

talking on the phone, but times change.