What are the possibilities of advertising and more - in the 7th Mass Media Channel?

Yes, advertising has appeared on all mass media in some way or another. The first mobile ads appeared in Finland in 2000 to support free daily news via SMS. The first modern mobile advertising company was formed in Japan in 2001 when the biggest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo and Japan's biggest ad agency Dentsu joined to launch D2. In 2007 mobile advertising was worth 2.2 B dollars (Informa, 2007) and is growing at dramatic rates.

The primarly advertising types making most money today are spam SMS text messages and banner ads on WAP pages. These are both copies of earlier media. Spam SMS is adapted from spam email, itself a digital copy of snailmail based junk mail or "personalized mail". Meanwhile banner ads are copies of web banner ads, which are digital adaptations of magazine and newspaper ads. This is not the way! We should not be satisfied only to copy the existing formats, we need to learn to use the full abilities of the 7th Mass Media.

What Google did with Adwords - they invented a new advertising format for the internet - search advertising. And in so doing, they revolutionized web advertising, and today search ads are the biggest part of online ads. We need to do the same for mobile ads. And I don't mean copying adwords.

Just like Google innovated creating a new advertising format for the internet, now we need to invent new advertising formats for mobile. Oh, and the adwords auctioned ad concept of Google? Flirtomatic has already adapted that for their "First Face" concept. If you want to be featured as the first face to welcome Flirtomatic members, the current auctioned price is about 8 UK pounds (16 dollars) for six hours. If you have a good smile, that should get you a couple of hundred new friends in a hurry...

But back to mobile ads (actually Flirtomatic First Face is of course mobile ads,) Another part is mobile coupons. We can do much more with digital coupons on mobile than with coupons on any other media, as we can embed info on who received the coupon and who forwarded it, and in which store it was redeemed etc. We can send barcode info on MMS picture messaging.

We can use the 2D Barcode readers to transmit info to the phone and owner. We can even credit direct cash or virtual money to the phone owners, as they already do in advanced markets such as Japan, with given campaigns. If done properly, the response rates can be astronomical - Aircross in South Korea had a campaign for Gillette razors, well targeted and with a great proposition, which produced a 98% response rate. Come on? We can do so much better than spam or banner ads.

Part of it is mobile marketing, defined more broadly than just advertising. We can include all kinds of customer relationship benefits including aftercare, such as alerts and information via SMS when your car is fixed and ready to be picked up at the garage, or the library informing you when your book has arrived, or your book needs to be returned - or can even be renewed via SMS without walking the book physically back to the library for renewal, etc.

There are thousands of solutions in this space, from the hairdressers who send reminders for booked appointments, to dentists who re-schedule cancelled appointments to those with urgent dental care needs. There are medical bottles with alerts which have in-built clocks that prevent overdose, but include a sensor to detect if the pill has not been taken - to send the alert to the nurse or loved one (grandfather forgot to take his 8 o'clock pill again). St Louis, think of the possibilities alone with an aging population and 'Independent Living'!

There is even an intelligent sunscreen bottle and service which tracks how long you've been in the sun - adjusting for cloud cover - and informs you when to get into the shade or apply a stronger sunblock. This is mobile marketing, not just mobile advertising.

Of course the ultimate is engagement marketing - whhich is a total change from 'interuptive advertising'. The core competence of Alan Moore's company SMLXL, so I won't spend much on this. But the best tool to engage with customers is mobile (you can do engagement on other media too) and the trailblazer for this area is obviously Blyk, with their user-generated ads and so forth. But if you are in advertising today, you need to understand mobile as the 7th Mass Media channel, not just as the dumb little brother of digital or interactive media.

We are going on for a few more related articles to fully capture the possibilities of mobi.

For your success,

Keith Thorn
www.KTLLC.mobi