Is mobile web surfing the new Tequila?
Surfing the mobile internet without a mobile data tariff is a bit like binge-drinking neat tequila on your eighteenth birthday.
If you go on a mobile website and download a two megabyte video for fifty pence without a mobile data tariff, it will cost you as much as £15.50 (Source: Mediacells D2C Case Study, Jan 08). Imagine you had naturally navigated yourself to a mobile website on your mobile phone and enjoyed consuming the mobile content of your choice and maybe you did it three more times before your next bill. Then, on a Saturday, (why is it always a Saturday?), you open your mobile phone bill and it's £62.00 more than your usual £25 bill. With this kind of a data hangover, you're likely to go the same way as the newbie Mescal quaffer and give the habit a miss for, ooh, maybe a lifetime.
Of course, it's not all doom and gloom - if you look at the Mediacells 2008 Speedometer, you can see an acceleration in the take-up of flat rate data tariffs, presently estimated to be be less than 8 million across UK networks (Source: Mediacells Mobile Advertising Briefing Feb 08), as well as the fundamental driver in Direct-to-Consumer growth: the ad funded content model.
If you think about it, it's only in the last year or so that the operators have finally admitted that they are no good at owning and generating content and that's it's a bit like a greengrocers waking up one morning and deciding that he's going to diversify into meat, you can't do the two, hygienically.
On top of that, the media owners only really started to crank up their D2C plays in 2007: Turner Broadcasting launch off portal mobile site for CNN (Source: Mediacells Content Tracker, March 07), BSKYB announce the groundbreaking zero-rated content play across all operators for the launch of its 24-7 Football off portal mobile website (Source: Mediacells Content Tracker, September 07), both of which are pulling in the pages and the unique users.
Vodafone’s CEO, Arun Sarin, calls the collusion with content companies 'adjacent partnerships' (source: Mediacells Operator Strategies, May 07) and includes Google, MySpace, YouTube and BSKYB into this management consultant terminology. In real terms, this buzzword translates as " Okay, we're a pipe, not necessarily a dumb one, who has a fleet of engineers and marketeers and no producers, so why don't we do what we do best; make money out of our network, and leave the heavy-lifting content production to the professionals."
This statement of intent, albeit a paraphrased one, suggests the mobile content market is now wide open for commercialisation and diversification. Certainly, the users are up for it. In a recent study of the operator device profiles, Mediacells discovered that on Voda, O2 and T-Mobile, more than 85% of devices in the installed bases of these operators were capable of receiving and resolving an animated banner advertisement. Additionally, the Mediacells forecasted unique users of the mobile internet in the
At the Mobile World Congress this year. the GSM Association announced an initiative in alliance with the big five
The reason for the operators ebullience to plunge into mobile advertising has been attributed to their collective fear of Google entering the mobile fray. If you look at the way T-Mobile has ousted Google as its Web n Walk homepage of choice and instated Yahoo! Instead, this provides a factual indication that the operators are acting like a King Canute trying to ward back the tidal wave of change which is the mobile internet - a free network. What a notion.