By Marsha Forbes

The Mobile Marketing Association’s (MMA) Consumer Best Practices (CBP) Committee met in Boca Raton, Florida on February 4th and 5th to continue its charge of shaping the mobile industry as a viable, profitable market place that provides value to the end user.

The forum and CBP meeting was hosted by mobile technology provider, 3Cinteractive, who also co-sponsored the event with Neustar.

The meetings spanned two days and concluded with an open CBP forum, which gave attendees an opportunity to hear from MMA executives, carrier representatives and other industry experts.

Presenters and speakers shared case studies of 2009’s mobile success stories and offered theories about the future of mobile marketing.

Michael Becker, the newly appointed MMA North America Managing Director, opened the meeting, describing the main objective as bringing “all pieces of the ecosystem together.”

Though the agenda covered a wide range of topics including mobile donations, MMS and WAP billing, a common theme quickly emerged: how can we facilitate the growth of the mobile industry in a manner that allows for profitable business models to thrive while also protecting the consumer.

The committee faces the unique challenge of representing the concerns of carriers, who want to ensure the safe handling of their subscribers, and content providers, who fear rules and regulations that weaken their business models.

All agree that self-regulation is preferable to the introduction of a third-party authority, such as the FCC.

“Friday’s open forum was a great validation of the points addressed in Thursday’s committee meeting,” stated 3Cinteractive’s Director of Service Operations, Niki Dunbar. “The committee’s charter must adapt so that it can bridge the gap between the current CBP focus, and the needs within our industry. It was clear that we must continue to uphold the carriers’ guidelines for protecting the wireless subscriber, and address consumer privacy in a way that will maintain our ability to self-regulate. Additionally, we must plan for and embrace innovation in the marketplace, while easing the pain of launching new programs and managing existing ones.”

With carriers, aggregators, application service providers and content providers present, the open forum format allowed for a lively discussion on the committee’s current progress and suggested future goals.

Some of the main action points:

1) Develop a standard set of core guidelines based on proven best practices
This has been the overall objective of the committee for some time. Ellen Roberson, AT&T’s Director, Consumer Data Products, highlighted last year’s CBP activities, which showcased the great strides the committee has taken towards the unification of rules and regulations.

Bringing all carrier playbooks together in one document, creating transparency around carrier rules and merging the commonalities in cross carrier rules were among the committee’s tangible accomplishments.

Committee members, however, expressed concern at the tendency of carriers to release updates to those rules after the CBP’s document has been published. Many commented this practice reverts back to the original model of a widely diverse and more complex set of rules and regulations.

A schedule for updates was proposed to allow for ongoing and unpredictable legal issues that sometimes require carriers to change rules mid-year.

2) A new concept, Trusted Partners
When carrier representatives described their upcoming initiatives to open up Location Based Services and refund APIs, they introduced the idea of “trusted partners.” This concept could be used more generally to address other content provider concerns.

As expected, the open format led to discussions of lengthy program approval cycles. One proposed solution was for the carriers and aggregators to begin to recognize trusted or certified partners to streamline this process.

Such a designation would allow those who qualify to move programs through the approval process at a faster rate.

3) Create different rules for standard versus premium rate programs
Also in the interest of speeding up program approvals, attendees suggested the rules and regulations regarding program submissions and audits be created separately for standard versus premium rate programs.

Carrier representatives and content providers agreed the increased efficiency resulting from creating a new set of rules applicable to standard rate program only would be beneficial on both sides.

Carriers could reduce the amount of resources needed to approve standard rate programs that carry only a minimal risk of poor consumer experience. Content providers would enjoy faster approval times and fewer audits for these types of programs.

4) WAP Billing, a major initiative
All carriers represented at the forum, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile, seemed to agree that WAP billing presents an excellent opportunity to provide mobile marketing services that offer the best possible consumer experience.

Among the most important benefits associated with WAP billing is a format that allows users to pay for content without breaking the experience. They can go from discovery, to purchase, to download, without leaving the mobile website.

This benefits the content provider, who can now offer the user a simpler consumer experience, and the carrier, who is assured the user gets exactly want he or she wants to purchase.

The Consumer Best Practices committee expressed a commitment to use the comments and concerns addressed in the forum as the starting point for the building of their objectives for 2010.

While a number of elements make up the CBP, its main product is the Consumer Best Practices Guidelines document, which is published annually with updates added throughout the year.

“The Consumer Best Practices guidelines are updated every six months in response to the ever-evolving needs of the marketplace,” said Michael Becker, MMA North America Managing Director. “Specifically, the MMA Consumer Best Practices committee works to align the needs of consumers, marketers, mobile marketing solutions providers and carriers in order to capture the compliance requirements of each player and to establish leading industry best practices as the standards of care in mobile marketing.”

People in all parts of the ecosystem – aggregators, content providers, and application service providers – will be looking to this document in future months to assess the committee’s progress in its goal to address the needs of its members.

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LAS VEGAS – A few things are clear about this year’s show: It’s crowded and frenetic, and there is a lot of buzz that simply did not exist last year.

Attendance is definitely up. Walking the show floor, which is filled with non-stop activity, there seems to be more purpose among the people here, as if they are ready to get back to work and move onto the future, as opposed to the skepticism and job hunting that seemed to be so prevalent last year.

From a technology standpoint, if there was one significant difference from last year’s show, it’s all about the screens – digital, touch, 3D, clarity, enhanced user interfaces.

Booths are crammed with impressive TVs, mobile screens and large-format displays. Devices such as smartboards, e-book readers, phones and TVs all have touchscreens.

Intel had its huge Infoscape interactive touchscreen display that looks like something out of the latest James Bond film. Kodak has a large touchscreen display, too. 

If you’re in Las Vegas, get to the Samsung and Microsoft booths to see their displays – you won’t be sorry you made the trek.

Engaging users in a “touch and feel” experience with technology seems to be a common theme.

TOUCHING SCENE
What does this mean for mobile? 

Well, it’s good news. Mobile is everywhere, in every booth – NBC Universal, Samsung, Dolby, LG, Sony, Pioneer, Ford. It seems like every vendor has a mobile application. Everyone is talking mobile in an unprecedented way.

There is an e-billboard streaming live TV over Clearwire’s 4G Clear network, which is up and running in Las Vegas.

Tivit launched a mobile TV receiver that enables users to watch TV on a smartphone or laptop computer.

Mobile digital television may finally be here, with a live demo from the Open Mobile Video Coalition and mobile DTV-enabled mobile phones now available from a U.S. carrier.

So it’s really upbeat – all about touch screens for TV, mobile, whiteboards – all about ‘touch’ – Apple influence everywhere.  Also, mobile is everywhere – in the booths of Dolby, NBC Universal, Samsung, Sony and Pioneer.

Seems like TVs, 3D graphics and mobile are the three major focuses. Also a big uptake in mobile use in cars – Microsoft booth is full of cars, Ford is here in a big way, too. It’s very upbeat.

At the risk of indulging in hyperbole, CES 2010 may be the show where those of us who regularly attend look back in a handful of years and say, “This was truly the breakout year for mobile.”

 Val Christopherson is managing director of Global Results Communications, Irvine, CA. Reach her at valeriec@globalresultspr.com.

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LAS VEGAS — It seems like there are a lot of ecosystems in mobile, and the latest one could be a game-changer in mobile marketing. 

Ford unveiled its new MyFord Touch system, based on the company’s SYNC technology. The in-car communications and entertainment system combines top-of-the-line voice recognition from Nuance Communications with touch-screen controls on the steering wheel to give drivers easy control over digital media and mobile phones.

Here’s the cool part: Ford wants to create what it calls a SYNC App Ecosystem and is offering a SYNC SDK (software developers kit) to encourage developers to create applications that will interface with iPhone, Droid, BlackBerry, WinMo, Palm and any other mobile device via a standard Bluetooth connection.

Internet music service Pandora.com is already onboard. Using SYNC’s voice-recognition system with a Pandora app running on a phone, drivers can flip through radio pre-set buttons that correspond to Pandora’s music feeds. Smart radio provider Stitcher.com and Twitter client OpenBeak are also live.

Now, think about how many hours people spend in their cars – a captive audience.  You could deliver location-based services, mobile surveying and market research, mobile learning, targeted advertising, social media, digital media – all enabled through voice recognition to prevent the “distracted driver” syndrome.

App developers and mobile marketers should be falling over themselves trying to figure out how to extend brand building into the type of in-car experience that Ford’s SYNC offers.

******
Google all the way

Hmmm, let’s review the last 24 hours …

Motorola announces its cool, new Backflip Android phone, which is getting rave reviews.

At its annual developers conference yesterday, AT&T Mobility was all over Android, announcing devices from the aforementioned Motorola, HTC Corp., computer maker Dell and two new devices from Palm.

T-Mobile announced a $180 pricing package for new subscribers on the Nexus One.

We’re no shill for Google, but they own the wireless side of CES this year. Guess this means that all those iPhone app developers better bone up on their Droid coding.

 Val Christopherson is managing director of Global Results Communications, Irvine, CA. Reach her at valeriec@globalresultspr.com.

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We have all seen the hockey stick charts and innumerable slides about growth in mobile advertising. We have also seen the stats on mobile Web adoption and wireless data usage, and heard the pundits speak on and on about how “this is the year.”

Sound familiar? That was 1998.

Here we are, 10 years later, and a whole industry has been born on the speculation of mobile advertising. The players making a big gamble on the future of mobile advertising are the ever-increasing number of ad networks.

In the beginning, mobile ad networks were focused on the first basic need in mobile advertising – lack of inventory.

From there, the land grab was on and most ad networks focused on the long tail of mobile advertising to secure this precious inventory. They offered to take anyone and everyone who had mobile content and deliver and optimize their advertising efforts.

Essentially this has been a good deal for publishers, even premium publishers, because as long as their mobile platform was small, having an outsourced group monetizing their content works well.

But now the problem isn’t inventory, but a lack of quality inventory.  The big brands that advertise on mobile need to know that their brand is associated with content that is of a caliber that they feel comfortable with, and that it is contextually relevant to the consumer. Advertising a food product makes a lot more sense on Good Housekeeping than it does Joe Schmoe’s blog or a local car dealership.

Another challenge currently facing mobile ad networks is the current usage of search in mobile.

Unlike the big online ad networks that rely on search to target and serve ads, in first-quarter 2008, less than 7 percent of mobile site and content discovery is derived from search, according to the latest Crisp Wireless Index.

The majority of mobile discovery (53 percent) is through on-deck carrier portals, with 39.5 percent of discovery being performed off-deck through users directly typing in site names or bookmarks on users phones.

The problem ad networks will have, as the market grows, is that top-tier publishers will bring the inventory in-house.

In the online world, where ad networks can do behavioral targeting without content management systems, only 11 percent of ad sales are done through ad networks.

In mobile, there is the additional complication of the need for content management. Therefore the number will almost certainly end up even lower.

The future
Big brand publishers today dominate mobile advertising. They have more traffic, stickier sites and, most importantly, complex content management systems that allow them to understand how people are using mobile very differently than they are using the Internet.

As these publishers begin to realize real revenue from mobile advertising, they will bring their ad sales in house. When this begins to happen, ad servers will start to drop prices and become as commoditized as they are online.

Online ad serving has survived due to its ability to offer behavioral targeting and cost-per-click pricing. Almost all online ad networks now differentiate themselves in these two ways.

In mobile, you can take away the behavioral targeting and get some remnant CPC companies. This still represents a large market opportunity for ad networks, but very different from the premium positioning they have now.  

The winners will be infrastructure companies that can offer the ability to provide publishers with real data about how consumers are using their sites, where those consumers are coming from, where they are going, and what they are consuming.

Even more important than that, the infrastructure companies will be able to deliver comparative data; how one site is doing with respect to the mobile Web universe in general, in the vertical, and any other properties specific to that site’s focus. This is the future of mobile advertising.

Michael Weaver is vice president of strategy/business development at Crisp Wireless, New York. Reach him at mweaver@crispwireless.com.

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