Gartner: The Future of Media

[Ewan McIntosh]

At this morning's Wireless Innovation Mobile Content Morning speakers from the worlds of research, media and marketing talk about how to create great mobile ideas that make money. The following blog post comes with all my errors of comprehension, bias and typing.

MySpace mobile receives 3 billion pages views per month from more than 10 million monthly unique users. Mobile connections between people are ever more important, meaning that overall mobile display advertising is increasing, especially on the iPhone. There is ripe scope to earn a fortune while also earning your knighthood.

The key viewpoints

Adam Daum from Gartner Research has mostly noticed the emergence and development of premium content providers who sell content to consumers and aggregate audiences for advertisers. Both these models are threatened by piracy, audience fragmentation thanks to (or because of) the long tail, and behavioral targeting, where the ad is stuck to the user not to the content. Something needs to give.

The response from Gartner might be on focusing on good quality content and customer experience; maximising reach through syndication and good SEO; maximise ad revenue through the use of social media apps; and reduce the costs of production, this last point echoing Clay Shirky's point from Tuesday that, if someone wants to spend £1m on digital media then send them out for a long walk.

Where does the money come from?

The consumer pays through Buy-to-own (pay per view, subscription); Variations (time limits, geo-limits, freemium); Transactional services around the content (e.g. Sony BMG's ticketing of events around content, The Guardian's income from dating services); or the advertiser pays or someone else pays.

Challenges and problems with Mobile Media

Handset fragmentation, even in the smartphone sector, makes it hard to guarantee the quality of the experience. Ergonomics of small devices compound this. Battery Life of less than a day is too restrictive for long periods of sticky activity. Bill shock is alive and well, especially as we use more data tariffs. The services are poor: who needs or wants mobile TV?

Television itself, he believes, is going to become more like the social web, with the EPG no longer being some kind dumb print out of what you know you're watching, but a system whereby you can be recommended things you would like based on your choice, and the choice of your friends.

Content Experience is King

iTunes is not competing with other sites, it's competing with piracy. Digital music, a binary series of 1s and 0s, is not in and of itself something you can sell. Steve Jobs therefore opened iTunes by claiming they had made something better than free.

Your content is not stuff to be stolen, either. It's stuff to be made better by harnessing what your users can bring to it. If you've got showbiz news, then provide a means for people to display it in their own living room (e.g. Facebook). Sharing is essential.

Money can be made from simply branding an experience and taking the advertising for having provided something intriguing or useful, like a map of the cities you have visited. Taking things further, by offering a fun game related to your business for people to play you can attract double the traffic you had before. Encouraging people to publish work, rather than have it held within the walled garden of a social network, means that you can monetise their content in other spaces.

Issues in advertising

There are three big changes in what we expect from advertising:
Addressability (to specific people); Interactivity (you can do something with the ad); Dynamic delivery (the ad changes according to how we interact with it). This disrupts traditional mechanisms by exploding ad inventory, increasing the demand for accountability and the need for automation in the process, rather than creative bespokeness from a marcoms person.

Pic Credit

[Lesley Keen]

And the data charge...within bundle?

[Stuart Cosgrove]

The services are poor: who needs or wants mobile TV?

Me. Just had a 7 hours flight to Detroit I'd downloaded C4's 'Devil's Whore' to my i-phone and watched it transatlantic. Brilliant quality. Much better than the stuff that was on the in-flight system, both technologically and creative quality too. Mind you it did take me 5 hours to download tho, so in that pre-planning sense the user-experience was not great.