The Future of Mobile Advertising
So I’m a co-organizer of Mobile Mondays (www.mobilemonday-ny.com) and as such I’ve been seeing a lot mobile stuff. Most of it is boring, some I don’t understand and others just aren’t business I could believe in. I get asked all the time about what I find good, bad and ugly. Lately, i’ve been seeing a lot of coupon businesses. Here is my take on coupons & incentive shopping - I hate the business with a passion. Do I know a lot of people in the space? Yes. Do they like it either? No.
I was offered to run FreeRide.com a year back. FreeRide was founded by the inventor of Marlboro points and raised some insane amount in the tens of millions during dot com 1 - then filed for a $2BN IPO - then went bankrupt. I was offered to purchase Milesource.com, another coupon high flyer (for the grand price of next to nothing) and a buddy is the former COO of mypoints. I still hate coupons. They lose people money. I don’t care if its on a cell phone or wherever.
If someone pitches me on a coupon idea, I ask “Do you have $1,000,000+ in revenue?” If the answer is no, I won’t give it a second thought. It is really really hard to make a coupon business work, period.
Now that I’ve went off topic let’s go back to mobile. Let’s look at the problem…people view mobile content but advertisers don’t really mobile advertising. Everyone talks about buying mobile and thinks its cool but very little money actually gets spent. Is the solution to this wining and dining media buyers? No. Could it maybe work if you wine and dine them really hard and even throw in one of Eliot Spitzer’s friends? NO.
Why not?
Because of our great country has not caught up to the world in mobile and mobile has not been fully taken advantage of. The holy grail of mobile is 2 things.
1) GPS targeting. Harness the GPS so that you can get relevant marketing messages when you are around certain places. Starbucks is always used as an example. THIS WILL WORK. yes it is coupon related but the key is GPS - location based context. If I’m walking down the street and get a coupon to save 50% on a double mocha pooper scooper from Sbux will I go in and buy it? No. But a lot of people would. (I’m spoiled with one of those super fancy coffee machines that makes 1 cup at a time - Sbux is crap in comparison). I don’t care of any other type of mobile coupon - location is the key to cell phones - convenience, not discounts. The reminder is more important that the discount. CONSUMERS WILL OPT-IN TO THIS with the right initial incentive so that they will want to be contacted by their fine local retailers.
2) Using the cellphone as a wallet. The cell phone offers a great payment mechanism through your phone bill. I would like to be able to use it as a credit card by pointing and clicking send and it will buy crap. The problem besides for the actual signal/processing (which works in Japan) is the fact that the phone co’s take 50% of revenue wh’den you bill to cell phones. That’s right, the last time you bought a little bit of Poison ringtone by Britney, Verizon took $.99 out of your $1.98. This is way ringtone companies are going to hell - now the phone co’s are selling their own. The phone co’s (Big MoMo) needs to rethink of themselves as payment processors and not money grubbing whores. If they do, and really open up phone billing, it will spark a revolution.
So to conclude, I don’t think mobile advertising will work until you can use someones GPS to send them a message and then let them buy shit instantly through their cell phone.
