In meetings yesterday with two very different representatives of the mobile operators, it was hard to know what to think of where they stand in the movement to build mobile media and advertising as a revenue stream.
Mobile operators are supertankers
First up was Mike Short, the don of operators. Currently VP, research and development, at O2, he has chaired the Mobile Data Association for the past ten years and contributes to various government committees on mobile, telecommunications and the internet.
The overriding impression was that mobile operators are behemoths whose core revenue stream is – and will remain for a long time – voice and messaging-related data carriage. While they of course have an eye on where and how monetising mobile media might start to become interesting, its current contribution is so piddling as to be meaningless.
Mobile operators are supertankers, he said, so all there is to do is decide whether to steer a little bit left or a little bit right. One might as well ask the senior board of Shell whether they’ve considered selling advertising on their web site. ‘You’re alright thanks, I’m slightly more concerned about the rather complex business of finding and extracting oil at the moment.”
A standard of measurement
All very understandable, so, slightly disheartened (though of course incredibly appreciative of his time and insight), we head to our next. Henry Stevens is director of entertainment and media at the GSM Association – a global body whose members consist entirely of mobile operators, based in the UK and employing around 200 people. It does the Barcelona mobile shindig every year (and Mike Short was also its chair for a time).
One of the key issues we’d raised with Mike was about how the operators might help in measuring web site traffic from mobile devices. Given the above, there wasn’t a great deal to discuss. But, Henry, it turns out, is focusing on just that. Given the job of working out how operators might have a role in helping media and advertising develop, he’d come to the view that the best thing they could do is develop a standard of measurement for mobile web audiences (for site rankings by demographics, handset and time of day as it goes).
Really smart. The major issue keeping P&G and their ilk from committing significant spend to online is the lack of this kind of standard. What Henry’s up to could deal with the issue before mobile has got going. Online’s problem (& strength in many ways) is that it has evolved without it and it’s got so big that the process of imposing a standard is one of reverse engineering.
The difference between the two views
We agree we can able help him in the task by connecting him with what media owners, agencies and advertisers would want from such a standard and how it might work. So we leave the GSM’s (rather nice) offices in Holborn kind of confused. Do the operators care about the media industry or not?
What’s clear to us as convergence erodes their current business and handsets become merely our mobile connection with the internet is that they ought to. How soon they need to care is where the difference between the two views lies. What we might say is that, in the end, whether to steer a little bit left or a little bit right is pretty crucial and understanding the media industry would go a long way to making the right choice.
