The essence of mobile advertising

St Clair was speaking at the Thinking Mobile Conference held late last week at the IDC Conference Centre in Sandton, Johannesburg.

“There were at least 140 million mobile impressions in June 2009 in South Africa, which puts the country in top five's highest impressions in the world,” St Clair said.

“Mobile campaigns deltas currently outperform online campaigns deltas across all metrics, and mobile gives you around-the-clock reach while different pieces of traditional media interact with the consumer at different ranges of times,” he said.

However, it has been established that many companies are failing to successfully adopt this business model due to certain ‘predictable' factors, including a badly designed mobile campaign.

Principles are the same

“Creating a campaign for mobile is the same for print or web,” he said, “know who your audience is, evaluate the resources and the experience you would like to create, and implement a solution for the medium and audience.

“Learning about mobile technologies, however, gives you a voice into the process and gives you control to be more creative.

“When designing a mobile campaign, also consider the advert copy. Alternate treatments of copy for mobile are important. How will the piece work without animation? How will meaning change on smaller size?" he asked.

However, some mobile campaigns in Africa still have a long way to go due to lack of viable technology and infrastructures, a situation many attribute to the digital divide, and socio-economic factors (poverty and low purchasing power).

The challenges consumers face

According to St Clair, African consumers face challenges such as:

• My phone does not support GRPS
  
• My phone is not configured for GPRS
  
• Mobile internet is expensive
  
• I don't necessarily have money to spend on mobile
  
• I use mobile internet but the experience sucks
  
• I wish the adverts were relevant to me
  
• Why would you not want to engage on mobile internet

Why AdMob?

“Because it has a huge reach and it is the world's largest mobile advertising platform and global reach with 8.5 billion adverts served each month,” said St Clair, referring to his company.

“It is also Africa's largest mobile advertising platform with 500 million adverts requested in the last month,” he added.

AdMob targets contextual, device, carrier and has premium sites such as CBS Sports, MySpace, AOL, Moviefone, more than 7000 mobile sites - on and off deck - more than 2000 iPhone Apps, and more than 70 million Android Imps.

AdMob's mobile strategy includes mobile site developments, best practices, ad strategy and research.

Bizcommunity.com was a media partner of the Thinking Mobile Conference Series. For more, go to www.mobilemarketingwinners.com and www.mymobworld.com .