The industry has been musing over the possibilities the mobile internet could deliver to marketers, advertisers and publishers for many years. There's no doubt the industry is growing. Gartner, the bell-weather of technology forecasting, predicts there will be 1.82 billion smartphones and internet-equipped handsets in use around the world in three years -- more than the estimated 1.78 billion PCs that will be in use.
But from a digital marketing perspective, the potential of the mobile internet has yet to be fully realised. One aspect of the mobile internet's development that is yet to be resolved is how it will be monetised. Will it replicate the internet on the desktop or will new revenue models evolve? What's the currency going to be?
If we imagine that the internet was launched on mobile devices a decade ago, rather than on desktops, I think we can go quite some way to answering the question. Let's put all the baggage associated with desktop web to the back of our minds for now and look at the mobile internet with fresh eyes, unfettered by the convention that advertising is the only revenue model available.
No one can deny that running effective advertising campaigns through mobile is tricky. You only have to consider the form factor of mobile devices to see the obvious challenge: the size of the screen creates all sorts of issues from a display point of view. At the most simple level, these devices are simply not suited to display advertising as we know it.
Another, perhaps less obvious, aspect to consider is our 'relationship' with our mobile device. We take it everywhere with us. It's practically guaranteed that the two things most people have in their hand when they leave their house is a set of keys and a phone. And the panic if we think we've lost it doesn't bear thinking about! So the relationship we have with our phone is different to that of our PC -- it's personal, it's more connected, it's our whole lives in a tiny box.
According to B.J. Fogg, a Stanford University researcher and author of 'Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do', the 'special relationship' we have with our mobile phones is partly due to the fact that we take them everywhere we go. People develop far closer attachments to their mobiles than to their home PCs or laptops. Those same PCs are also much more likely to be shared than a mobile device and therefore less truly personal.
And because it's personal, we consume content in a different way and we become less receptive to receiving some kinds of information. We want to choose what we read, what we listen to and what we buy from where. We don't need others to tell us what do to. In this mindset, advertising, for example, could be considered just too intrusive.
I'd like to suggest that advertising isn't going to be the only thing that monetises mobile. But e-commerce just might. Think about it -- it's personal, it's secure and e-commerce transactions can be handled via one central account (your mobile bill) and with your mobile operator with whom you already have an existing and trusted relationship. It's much better suited for couponing and can handle micropayments easily.
It's still very early days and my theory is far from proven. A recent Morgan Stanley report on the mobile internet predicted that while advertising accounts for 40 per cent of revenue over desktops at the moment, only 5 per cent is over the mobile. This kind of illustrates my point, don't you think? Traditional web advertising just isn't suited to the mobile internet.
My money is on the e-commerce model. What do you think?
Grant Keller is a director of Acceleration
