Mobile TV – What it means to mobile advertisements?

The next wave riding is mobile web, and naturally, the economic engine that would power the mobile web is the mobile advertisements. According to the Kelsey Group, a market research firm, “U.S. mobile advertising revenues (search and display) will grow to $3.1 billion in 2013, from $160 million in 2008, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 81.2 percent”.  The advertising value chain on the mobile advertising is depicted here (credit: HeavyReading) .

However, there are some emerging trends on mobile TV broadcasts. Currently, services in Japan and South Korea enable content broadcasters to directly broadcast mobile optimized TV content directly to mobile handsets capable of receiving TV broadcasts. This is still an emerging trend, with number of infrastructure challenges; the handsets need high processing and memory power, longer battery life and better screen technologies to give optimum viewing pleasure; the service broadcasting standards itself are different in different countries; the services are free, and the content broadcasters have not yet figured out a way to subsidize their production and transmission costs. Sports, especially live telecast, and financial news broadcast are two genres of content a fast paced mobile user watching TV program on the move will be interested in.

The mobile TV provides new and exciting avenues for advertisers to monetize their ads. In a normal TV broadcast, often the lag between awareness, the time when the consumer views the ad, and action, the time when the consumer makes a purchase, is very long, and this time lag has not allowed advertisers to quantifiably measure the success of their campaigns in more concrete manner. However, mobile TV allows the adserver to provide tools for consumers to instantly purchase the goods and services. In three simple steps, a consumer action chain can be depicted  - Awareness, Assimilation, Action. 

For example, a Domino’s Pizza ad broadcasted on the NFL match can carry a link to order pizza instantly, with the ability to locate stores that are close using location based services(LBS). This would vastly reduce the time lag between ad consumption and product purchase that is seen in traditional TV advertisements, for a vast majority of goods. Of course, a consumer wont instantly purchase a car after watching an ad on mobile TV. However, foods and beverages, consumer products, less expensive fashion goods etc can benefit from this new ability that mobile TV advertising that is mashed up with instant purchase tools and payment options.  Mobile TV advertisements hold a promise to solve the long standing problem of campaign results quantification and monetization in TV advertisements.

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