Five reasons why mobile is important to customer publishing companies
01 Feb 2010
Category: Feature
Source: APA Digital
Mobile phones offer great opportunities for customer publishing companies; so said John Mew Head of Mobile for the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) in a presentation at the APA Digital breakfast earlier this week.
Mew outlined five reasons why mobile should now be taken very seriously by branded content companies.
1 Price barriers for mobile data have gone - Mew pointed out that there has been an 85% increase in people with unlimited data plans in the last year. Some of this has been fuelled by the iPhone but a large percentage has come from people on 'pay as you go' tariffs. Almost all the main networks now offer very clear data tariffs ranging from Vodafone's 50p flat rate per day through to 3's free mobile internet with every top up
2 High-end handsets have reached tipping point - Once again much attention has been focussed on the iPhone, however according to Mew the Apple handset only accounts for 2% of phones sold in the UK last year. Research company Comscore reports that over 18 million 3g handset have been sold in the UK, which is a rise of 25% year on year.
3 Mobile content is now good quality - John Mew argues that content on mobile phones has come a long way in the last few years. The catalyst for the growth has been the arrival on mobile of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. According to Comscore the number of people looking at social networking sites has gone up 102% year on year.
4 Advertisers starting to spend on mobile - Mew reported that 95% of agencies in the IAB had worked on mobile campaigns, while 75% said that they thought mobile would be the fastest growing area of advertising over the next five years.
5 Media consumption has changed - Mew once again quoted a Comscore statistic that shows that 40% of iPhone users access the web more on the phone than they do on any other device. Research organisation Gartner also predicts that by 2010 70% of all phones will be smartphones.
Mew also highlighted some of the most innovative new applications for mobile phones such as the augmented reality system Accrossair. This lets you overlay a layer of digital content over external reality as seen through your phone's camera. Point your phone's camera at a street/building/person, and on the screen, information about what you're seeing is overlaid onto your view of it. He also described The Guardian recent iPhone app as a textbook app in the way that the company spent time developing a user friendly and innovative way of retrieving its content.
Mew concluded by saying although that customer publishers shouldn't get too carried away with mobile just yet adding that in the UK only around 10% of visitors to website are from phones.
