Not unlike the path of humanity, the history of media is made
up of great discoveries and progressive changes.
The 21st century for example, brought us the seventh mass
medium, and the second interactive media, namely the mobie phone.
The Internet is an all encompassing giant which swallowed
older products and services up, but now mobile media is threatening to
do the same.
Everything that’s possible on traditional mediums and the
Internet is now also available on a mobile device, from news services,
playing music, watching TV, radio broadcasts and movies.
Even the two key elements which made the Internet the global
phenomenon it is, interactivity an search, are also available to anyone
with a mobile device.
While mobile media is only eight years old, it is growing and
greedily capturing business revenues and content from its older media
siblings.
Mobile media can in fact replicate all of the capabilities of
the other six mass
media while sporting six unique benefits:
- The first personal mass media
- The first always carried media
- The first always-on media
- The first media with a built in payment mechanism
- The first media always present at the point of creative
impulse - The first media where the audience can be accurately
identified
(Source: Tomi
Ahonen explanation of the seventh mass media, mobile)
In this second part of this white paper edited by Alan
Moore,
CEO of SMLXL, you will be guided into a greater understanding of what
the evolution of mobile phones as mass media has in store for you.
Here the details:
Today, Gutenberg would be a mo-blogger: Mobile, 7th of the
Mass Media
by Alan Moore
Benefits of Mobile
Personal: My Media
It’s a fact that people today are more wedded to
their mobile phones
than to their wallets. And the mobile is rapidly cannibalizing our
wallet too.
A Unisys
survey revealed that if we lose our wallet, on average we report it in
26 hours. But if we lose our mobile phone, on average we report it in
68 minutes.
Meanwhile a 2006 survey by Wired found that 60% of married
mobile phone owners will not share their phone with their spouses. A
Carphone Warehouse
survey found that 68% of teenagers won’t let their parents
see what is on their phones. It is that personal.
Always Carried: The City in my pocket
It is no longer surprising that we will not leave home without
our phone. A global survey by BBDO
in 2005 found that 6 out of 10 people sleep with the mobile phone
physically in bed with them.
A worldwide Nokia
survey in 2006 found that 72% of the population use the mobile phone as
their alarm clock.
The phone is taken to the restroom and it was quoted
at Forum Oxford
that the bathroom is one of the common uses of both the mobile internet
and mobile TV.
No other mass media has this intense a relationship with the
audience.
Always On
Some early opinions by the newspaper publishers were that
maybe the
internet could offer a rival experience to the printed newspaper, but
the mobile phone screen has so little “real
estate”
that it could not fulfill this need. This is also being proved not to be
true.
Mobile offers an active screen which, can be far superior to
the
static printed paper view of a newspaper or magazine.
It just took a
while for the mobile content industry to develop its formats to
capitalize on the power of mobile.
iMedia
For example Japanese mobile operator
NTT DoCoMo has
introduced iMedia
– a news ticket feed that uses the idle screen mode of the mobile
phone.
So whenever the phone is placed on the desk or table for
example, it will scroll breaking news like the CNN
News Ticker on the bottom of the TV.
Users can select whether they want
sports news or world news or financial news or celebrity gossip news
and so forth, in any combination.
When the phone owner clicks on the current news, it goes to
more of
the story with text, pictures – and video.
The service costs 2 dollars
per month and in 18 months from launch, 8 million Japanese were paying
for this service, which amounts to a 16% adoption rate and a massive
192 million dollars per year in Japan alone.
Consider all subscription news services online on the
internet, Japan’s NTT
DoCoMo
has more paying subscribers on one mobile news service than all online
newspapers worldwide combined.
If we assume that the same rate of
adoption happens around the world – and there is no reason to doubt it
– this one mobile news service alone, if used by 16% of the 2.8 billion
mobile phone users could generate over 10 Billion dollars of revenues
worldwide.
Can a mobile news service threaten a newspaper? It already
does, the same service was recently launched in Portugal by Vodafone.
Coming soon
to an idle phone screen near you.
Built in payment
In Helsinki Finland 57% of the public transport single tickets
are
paid by mobile. In Croatia over half of all parking is paid by
mobile.
In South Africa you can have your paycheck paid directly to
the mobile
phone account linked to your mobile banking account.
In Soweto a barber shop has more than half of its customers
paying
by mobile. 20% of London’s congestion charge is paid by
mobile.
In
Slovenia every vending machine, every McDonalds restaurant and every
taxicab accepts payment by mobile phone.
In Kenya the maximum limit of
mobile-to-mobile money payments is set to 1 million US dollars per
single transaction.
And in South Korea all credit card companies enable their
credit
cards to the owners’ mobile phones by default, offering to
send an
optional old-fashioned plastic credit card to the customer’s
home
address for free.
Where the Internet is an iceberg that has started to
rise, and parts of its impacts are already visible, mobile as the 7th
mass media is mostly still submerged.
But make no mistake about it,
mobile will be far greater in its reach, much larger in its revenues,
more influential as a mass media, more relevant as an advertising
vehicle and more potent as a creative platform than the Internet.
At point of Creative Impulse: Convergence of User
& Creator
In the context of mobile and the web, the mobile web is
focused on the user as the creator and consumer of content, as Mobile
Web 2.0 author Tony
Fish says, ‘at the point of inspiration.’
It is “Prosumption”
(production and consumption).
We are using the mobile platform to share
information with a trusted network, we are collaborating, and we are
using our mobile as a media production tool.
Witness the use of mobile technologies in the London July 7th
bombings, witness the use of the mobile to bring down the government of
Joseph
Estrada of the Philippines, or SeeMeTV on
the Three
mobile network, the use of
Mo-blogging
at Moblog UK,
which has recently been incorporated into a project with commercial TV
broadcaster Channel 4.
MyNuMo
allows people to create mobile content and if they can sell it they get
a revenue share. Even Al Gore’s
Current TV is noted as
being a leader in the use of user generated mobile content.
Mobile makes TV interactive: Pop Idol
To illustrate its power, mobile is able to act as the
interactive channel for legacy media.
A good example is the global
Pop Idol
format, with its American Idol, Australian Idol, Germany’s
Deutschland
Sucht Der Superstar and the French
Nouvelle
Star
variants.
Pop Idol has had over 60 runs in over 30 countries over the
past five years, gathering a total of 3.2 billion viewings, where
nearly half of that number has been watching the finals of any given
national Pop
Idol run.
More revealingly, those 3.2 billion viewers have voted a
staggering
1.9 billion times, and almost all of the votes were on mobile phones,
mostly using SMS text voting.
The Pop Idol reality TV format alone has
generated more than 600 million dollars of revenues out of viewers
voting.
Accurate Audience: The Holy Grail of marketing
The Holy
Grail
for Mass Media is to clearly identify an interested audience. We know
what gets measured gets made, and so the more accurately we know who
the audience is, the more precisely advertising and marketing can be
targeted.
With magazines and newspapers those who subscribe can be
identified, usually by name and address.
But then we don’t know exactly how many in the given
household
actually read that publication. And for those issues bought at the
newsstand, we have no idea.
With radio and TV we can only measure
audiences by Nielsen
ratings, a sampling of 1000 families telling us what millions
watch. With cinema we know even less about the actual viewing audience.
The Internet promised “a segment of one”
– that we could
identify by the IP address of the computer, the actual user
base.
This
proved very inaccurate due to corporate networks, firewalls, multiple
PCs, and multiple users on a given PC such as a family PC shared by
teenagers and parents, or a university computer lab shared by
thousands. Not to mention Internet cafes.
The Internet industry has
gone to great lengths such as the use of cookies installed in internet
user computers to try to track usage. But even with the best of
methods, only a tiny fraction of Internet users and their usage is
accurately captured.
Mobile Phone Tracking
That is the exact opposite with mobile. With the 7th Mass
Media,
every phone is identified and all web traffic and service content usage
can be tracked.
There still are imperfections, in that some mobile
phone users have two phones.
But for example the fact that over half of
the world’s phones are “prepay”
accounts (where the user name
is not known) often surprises people outside the mobile telecoms
industry, that these accounts are perfectly and uniquely identified and
can be tracked perfectly.
The only element not known is the actual name of the person.
But for Playboy
page views by phone number 0123 456 7890 can be tracked use after use,
day after day, month after month.
And we can see which other pages this
user consumed, at what time of day, from which address, eg., home or
work or hotel, etc that access was made.
AFM Ventures
illustrated the degree
of accuracy in 2007. On TV only about 1% of audience data is captured.
On the internet this is about 10%. But on mobile, about 90% of audience
data is captured.
This is totally unprecedented accuracy in any mass
media ever. And that is what’s has aroused the interest of
brands and
advertisers as they see the effectiveness of traditional marketing
communications as a pale shadow of its old self.
Data the Next Intel Inside
From who consumes our media content, to what the user
consumes. The
first level of audience understanding is who is our audience. That is
easy to understand. Who is my audience.
A magazine subscription or
Nielsen
rating or internet profile or cookie can get us that
information. But a more powerful element is what that customer
consumes.
Some Internet services can capture that level of information,
such as which YouTube
videos a given customer has watched, but this has the Internet
draw-backs of incomplete user data to begin with.
On mobile perfect
user-information can be collected. As every click of a mobile web page
is transmitted over the air (and may incur a charge to the phone bill),
the mobile network operator already collects total usage information on
its millions of customers, all day and all night.
Perfect usage
information. This is much more valuable to the media owner or the
advertiser than just knowing the size of the audience. Which pages of
the news feed were consumed, which were ignored, etc.
Social context of consumption
If we can understand every click and as mobile is also a
communication tool, we can apply “social data
analytics”,
to the massive flows of data. Not only discovering what we consume, but
with whom.
If we like a joke, to whom do we forward it to? If we
receive a mobile coupon which friend did we share it with who retrieved
our coupon?
Only if the users are accurately identified, their actual
usage is measured, and the media allows sharing, can we map out social
networking dimensions accurately.
This is far more valuable to advertisers and media owners than
only knowing the size of an audience.
One of the first discoveries out of the social networking
analytics was the concept of the “Alpha User”,
as discussed in Ahonen & Moore’s book
Communities
Dominate Brands.
When communities of interest can be identified by their
communication
patterns and, members each be accurately identified, then it becomes a
matter of tracking their communication to identify who are the
influencers of the communities.
Alpha Users
These are called Alpha Users and they are vastly more relevant
to any service adoption than the previous concept of the “Early
Adopters”
from the marketing theories of the 1970’s.
Commercial social networking
techniques were launched only four years ago and one of the pioneers,
Xtract
of Finland, reports that by using social networking insights, mobile
operator Swisscom was able to increase its sales by of a new product
launch by 90%.
The mobile device is the perfect platform for this to happen.
Also
it provides advertisers to provide relevant, contextual information and
services that are “Just in Time”
vs. “Just in Case,” avoiding
the huge wastage that is incurred with “Just in
Case marketing.”
Further more social data analytics enables the receiver of
information, driven by commercial need to see that information as
timely and relevant.
It is a critical component in the migration that
is occurring from what advertising was, Interruptive, to what
advertising is becoming, Engaging.
Engagement
marketing
is a very broad term, and purposefully so.
At its heart, is the insight
that human beings are highly social animals, and have an innate need to
communicate and interact.
Therefore, any engagement marketing initiative must allow for
two-way flows of information and communication. We believe, people
embrace what they create.
Engagement is about connecting large or small
communities to content that they care about and, delivering that
content in such a way that is always an emotional and valued
experience.
Media content and Mobile
Music on Mobile
Most media executives know the Apple iPod and
iTunes story
well.
In 2001 Apple brilliantly created a new market space into what
many thought was a diminishing market owned by
Sony Walkman
on the portable music player side, and in terminal decline due to
Napster
on the content side.
Apple turned it around, now having sold 100
million iPods in six years and creating a billion dollar revenue stream
for the music recording industry out of legitimate music sales through
iTunes.
What most media executives outside of music do not know, is
that the
mobile music industry is actually dramatically larger. Last year alone,
309 million musicphones were sold.
The musicphone versions from Nokia,
Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson each outsold total iPod shipments
last year.
While the growth in iPod sales is down to 40% year-on-year
at under 50 million units, the much larger musicphone market of 309
million was growing at 250% year-on-year.
This is the underlying reason
why Apple had to rush the iPhone to the market, the iPod had lived a
beautiful span in music but its reign had come to an end.
The same is true of the music content side. While iTunes
delivered
about a billion dollars of music sales revenues in 2006, mobile music
was worth over 8.8 billion dollars worldwide.
Three classes of mobile
music – ringing tones, ringback tones, and full-track MP3 songs – each
outsell total iTunes sales on a worldwide basis. In South Korea 45% of
all music sold is sold straight to musicphones; in America less than
10% of all music sold is to iTunes.
Artists First
Artists First,
a UK based
firm of musicians turned-technicians that enables artists to create,
package and sell their content directly to mobile users and collect
payment via reverse SMS.
After launching in March, the service is live
in over 25 countries. The company is also working on a peer-to-peer
application and developing a range of content-creation tools that will
allow artists to rip a part of their content and deliver it as a
ringtone. The CEO Mark Bjornsgaard says:
“It’s all about empowering
artists to
communicate directly with their mobile audiences, limiting the role of
the middleman who could get in the way of that exchange and generating
revenue streams from a whole range of income streams over and above the
music.”
Gaming going mobile
Videogaming is the second content category to follow music to
mobile
and has already grown bigger than online gaming. The most played
videogame is not Pong or Pac Man or Donkey Kong or Madden’s
Pro
Football on a Playstation.
The most played videogame worldwide is
Snake
on Nokia mobile phones.
But games pre-installed to phones do not power the worldwide
videogaming industry any more than Minesweeper and Solitaire
preinstalled onto Microsoft Windows.
The gaming industry makes money on console sales (Playstation
3 and PSP, Xbox 360, Nintendo
Wii), on console game sales, and on networked games.
While most internet games tend to be large format multiplayer
games like CounterStrike,
World
of Warcraft, Lineage
and Everquest,
most mobile games tend to be small quizzes, sudoku games, poker etc
which are better suited for the smaller screen.
Still multiplayer games are emerging onto mobile as well, such
as Disney
Studios’ Pirates
of the Caribbean,
and Nexgen’s Dwarf battling game Elven Legends.
What is interesting to
note is that at 2.5 billion dollars, mobile gaming has already grown to
be larger than internet online gaming in revenues earned.
More social
As with the internet, interactivity is built into mobile – in
fact
SMS text messaging is used by twice as many people worldwide as e-mail,
and through SMS text messaging you can reach three times as many people
as through any messaging platforms on the Internet.
Because of Metcalfe’s
Law (the utility of a communication network grows by the
square of the number of network users) and Reed’s
Law
(a collaborative network derives even greater benefits than a
communication network), mobile has already become a bigger social
networking platform than the Internet.
And a very young mobile content category, the first mobile
social networking services went commercial in 2003 as
Cyworld Mobile
launched in South Korea.
But in only three years, by 2006, mobile
social networking had shot past internet social networking in revenues,
reaching a massive 3.45 billion dollars worldwide, according to
Informa.
This is a world record in how rapidly a new billion-dollar
industry has been formed.
Even books going mobile
First books published for mobile phone consumption were
released in
Japan in 2002. The early concepts did not work very well. Much like so
many others, the book publishers first tried to copy what worked in
print, take their bestsellers, and release as mobile books.
The
concepts failed badly. But experimentation found success. New authors
publish shorter novels to mobile before they have received deals to
publish traditional books.
Those authors who do well, get their works released in book
form as
well. The publisher has no risk of printing thousands of books of a
title that won’t sell, then having to resell them at a
loss. Booksellers don’t have to struggle with stocks
of obscure titles.
But
because of the payment channel inherent in mobile, very low cost
delivery is possible for content which is not heavy in data load –
moving text on the cellular network is not nearly as expensive as
moving images or sounds.
Future prospective authors get more easily published, and
publishers
can test with only modest costs, the ability for a given author to find
an audience.
82 Million Dollar Industry
In five years mobile books have turned into an 82 million
dollar industry in Japan, or across the whole mobile phone user base,
the average Japanese phone user spend 90 cents per year consuming books
on mobile.
When this catches on worldwide, it is another multi-billion
dollar content industry where mobile has cannibalized an older mass
media content format.
After Cyworld opened, I hardly touched MySpace
MySpace
is the well known social
networking site with over 100 million users worldwide. Users post
personal profiles, comments, assign indications of who are their online
friends, exchange digital photos, rate music etc.
Cyworld
is a similar social networking site from South Korea but older than
MySpace, and built in the country with the world’s highest
penetration
broadband Internet and 3G mobile phones.
Cyworld has evolved to become
by far more advanced social networking site, and fully integrated onto
both broadband Internet and 3G mobile.
Cyworld combines all the innovations of MySpace with the
avatars of Second Life,
the personal virtual rooms of Habbo
Hotel,
the music store of iTunes, the online store of eBay, the video sharing
of YouTube and the full blogging experience.
By every measure, adjusted for
South Korean population size of 50 million inhabitants, Cyworld leads
the world. 42% of the total South Korean population is active inside
Cyworld.
Over 90% of all pictures shared in South Korea go through
Cyworld
and for all its immense power of videos shared on YouTube, out of less
than a fourth the size in absolute user numbers, Cyworld actually
generates more video uploading today than YouTube.
Its no longer a question of “should”
Coca
Cola or Nike or Ford find marketing tools to join social
networking sites such as Second
Life or MySpace
or YouTube.
In Korea every consumer brand HAS to be inside CyWorld. 30,000
businesses including all major consumer brands offer over 500,000 items
of branded digital content for sale already. This is on top of all of
the user-generated content. It truly is a virtual economy eco-system.
Eating the Big Fish
And the Internet itself, currently still mostly accessed by
personal
computer, is rapidly being cannibalized by mobile phone. Japan became
the first industrialized country where more than half of all Internet
access was from mobile in 2005.
By 2006 South Korea and Japan joined
this club and in 2006 the internet user migration to mobile of European
countries such as Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria etc was in the 30%
range.
19% of American Internet users already use mobile to access
the
web. What was technically impossible until this decade, mobile access
to web content is rapidly becoming the preferred choice.
As the majority of Internet access migrates from PC to mobile,
the
first effect is that all Internet content owners start to format their
content with the small screen as the default.
Secondly Internet content
owners discover the power of mobile money – Japan’s
Cybird was the
world’s first Internet company that had been unprofitable on
PCs but
turned profitable in 2000 due to their mobile Internet money streams,
and made the cover of Wired in 2001 for this feat.
After the majority of Internet users move from PC to mobile,
the
next to follow is usage and traffic, also already observed in Japan in
2006.
And the next stage is that new PC shipments start to decline
at
the expense of new smartphone sales. This trend too was just observed
in 2006 for the first time in Japan.
But what is important to notice, is that the Internet was the
most
rapid cannibal new media ever. Now mobile is not only a faster cannibal
of legacy media than the Internet; mobile is cannibalizing Internet
access itself!
That is why Google’s CEO
Eric
Schmidt keeps repeating his mantra on the future of Google: “Mobile,
mobile, mobile!”
This white paper has been originally published with the title “Mobile
as the 7th Mass Media: An Evolving Story” by Alan Moore of SMLXL on June
2007. It is available for download
on the same site.
The 3 part series:
- Part 1: Mobile Mass Media | The Grass Roots Of The Mobile Phone Technological Revolution
- Part 2: Delivering Content On Mobile Devices | The Growth Of Mobile Mass Media
- Part 3: Mobile Mass Media Creative & Advertising Models | Mobile Phones Are The Future
Livia Iacolare is a contributing author discussing broadband video tools and software. His work can be found on MasterNewMedia. Post has Some Rights Reserved.
