It’s a blessing in disguise, but pricing for mobile advertising is falling into a more reasonable realm. This article in AdAge outlines some of the developments in this regard. In the past, I’ve mentioned the challenges of the anecdotal and confusing “average CPM” for mobile advertising. But the good news here is that impression volumes are going up and prices are falling.

For a sage assessment of what’s been really going on with performance-based mobile advertising, I’ll revert to my college classmate, Eric Eller at Millennial Media:

“In the online world, there’s the long tail of medium and small publishers, and in mobile that’s developing as well,” said Eric Eller, senior VP-marketing at Millennial Media. “I think it’s that long tail that doesn’t have enough brand equity to stand on its own. Most of it is aggregated into performance networks, which is sold on a CPC [cost-per-click] basis.”

Of course, this is both a blessing and a curse for a mobile industry that’s pinned many hopes on mobile advertising revenues. With rising impressions and falling prices, will overall market revenues be able to climb to their expected highs? Or are these just the growing pains of a youthful industry.

Without getting into an involved discussion of mobile media, the mobile platform still faces numerous challenges. Even if performance is more integrated in pricing across the funnel, then we must now find a way to cram more impressions onto that tiny screen.

There are times here at Yankee where I feel that the only platform that anyone notices is the mobile one. But for something as simple as television, the mobile platform drives miniscule audiences and even tinier revenues. Meanwhile, traditional Pay TV platforms such as cable, satellite, IPTV, VoD and DVR tick along, developing their own versions of Anywhere.

We’ve been tracking ad-avoidance behaviors on DVR in our survey products for the past several years, and I wasn’t surprised to see an article in MediaPost about a study that Starcom and TiVo did on the same subject. I was surprised to see such a generic conclusion — that people said that they would be less likely to skip through “relevant advertising.”

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Over the weekend, I was headed home from a family visit. I’ve been trying to negotiate the best diagonal passage across New Hampshire, and I enlisted the navigation system to make that happen. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve thought for a long time that the enthusiasm around mobile search has been an example of excessive hyperbole. Everyone who works on anything related to the mobile platform seems to have an inferiority complex about PC-based Internet experiences. Without thinking about how media experiences are different on the mobile platform, the accepted logic has become doctrine: Read the rest of this entry »

What’s in a standard? At Yankee Group, we interact with many different technologies and standards groups across the industry. Some standards are abstractions, and others are more immediate for us: such as the IEEE 802. family of networking standards, GSM, and most importantly — written English.

Last week my colleagues and I at Yankee Group were greeted with one of the most liberating e-mails I’ve received during my tenure at the company. It turns out that we’re shifting away from a set of proprietary technologies and are instead adopting an industry standard in the form of the AP style guide.

This may seem like a minor shift. After all, English is English, right? And our clients are more likely to notice our new formatting for reports.

But I have already begun celebrating the little things, such as being able to write “the Internet” with a capital “I.” That’s a habit I developed sometime in 1992, and I’ve found it quite difficult to refer to “the internet” without thinking of it as some off-brand knock off. For example, if you could buy something you’d use to access “the Internet” at BestBuy, then you’d buy an alarm clock that connects to “the internet” without packaging and on a lonely shelf behind a pile of boxes in the back of the Brookstone outlet.

Come to think of it, I actually saw that last one.

Standards are good things. Especially when they encourage ingrained habits.

So, to “the Internet,” I say hello again!

It’s easy to over-emphasize the role of internet video and its impact on television as a mass medium. But it turns out that there’s something there.

A few weeks ago, I was asking myself how many days I needed to postpone my vacation in order to push through the analysis for our 2008 Anywhere Consumer US Entertainment Survey. It turned out that the operative number was three, but something akin to analytical zeitgeist came to be somewhere during the fog of a fourteen hour SPSS session.

It all started with an e-mail from my father — a recently retired engineer with a new iMac and a little too much free time. More on that in a moment.

For the back-story: we’ve been re-designing our 2009 survey products, and during one of our recent team meetings, Chris Collins re-focused a set of aimless questions about social networks into something more specific. Chris argued that we really want to know how social networks, communities and recommendations factor into the decisions that consumers make when selecting communications services, buying electronics and consuming digital media.

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We spend a lot of time thinking about how ubiquitous broadband network connectivity will change our world, and as we’ve found, it’s easy to take the idea to extremes. Many things will be transformed, and some things will not.

For example — hauling firewood. There’s something that’s as analog as you can get. But believe me, there are times throughout the year when I’d very much like to be able to drag and drop a couple cords of firewood through the rotation from seasoning, to splitting, and into a covered spot near the side door by the woodstove.

Last week, Carl Howe mentioned all the people he sees on their BlackBerries. And I have to say that the anywhere me finds it far less satisfying to empty my e-mail inbox than it is to rake the yard for the tenth and last time of the season, seal up the cold frames that will protect the chard through the winter, and put a nicely seasoned piece of hardwood on top of the coals.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past couple of weeks talking to reporters about the ailing economy and whether or not the slow market will affect the online advertising market. As I’ve said before, advertising spending is linked to GDP, and if GDP drops, so does advertising spending. But the online market continues to grow at something around 19% annually.

However, I haven’t been prepared for the react quotes that I’ve been asked to give. This is the outgrowth of dabblers jumping onto the “ailing economy” bandwagon and adding a “and what does it mean for Google?” spin. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday was clearly one of the two days this week that Google/T-Mobile’s G1 ad campaign was pumping out impressions. We know that this was rated at a billion impressions — or a significant amount of Platform-A’s inventory — in that timeframe. My initial response to this was that such a large buy over a short period of time was more about brand advertising in the weeks coming up to the holidays than it was about CTR and other direct-response measures.

After sitting on the train yesterday evening, I have to second my own thought. What are the brand implications of having placing a banner on every single laptop on an Amtrak train? It’s definitely powerful.

I’d seen copies of the G1 lying around the office, but I’m the media guy, and my co-workers generally keep me away from things that I can (and will) break. So I really haven’t spent much time with the first branded incarnation of what has otherwise been Android.

That definitely changed yesterday. Sitting at the back of the car, I looked up from my computer and saw two dozen computer screens, everyone browsing the web, and G1 banners and leaderboards on each and every screen.

Come to think of it, it’s not only brand. It’s digital out of home. That’s two digital birds with one media plan.

I’ve been getting a fair number of questions lately about alternative forms of video distribution — or more specifically — alternative ways that consumers are accessing video. There are two basic types of video: long-form and episodic (otherwise known as television and film), and short form clips of the aforementioned media and the difficult-to-describe User Generated Content (UGC). Since clips and UGC aren’t yet driving mainstream revenues for video, let’s just talk for a moment about long-form video.

With one caveat. If I remember anything from studying applied sciences in this Newtonian world of ours, it’s to focus on the big stuff and to not get distracted by the little things. This is an inside joke for anyone who’s stood at a blackboard with a long physics equation and glibly crossed off parts of a polynomial with the explanation, “and we assume that this goes to zero over the range.” If only to find out that those factors gang up on you, drag you into an alley and beat you up the day before you defend your dissertation.

For those of you who haven’t had this happen, the media industry has a simple interpretation: focus on the trends that affect the biggest audiences first.

In this context, I keep seeing Slingbox in a list of questions about Over The Top content models. The funny thing is that for Pay TV services, Slingbox doesn’t go over the top of their network, rather the audience goes straight through the set top box and place-shifts from there. So for Pay TV, the real question is how many audience members are placeshifting, and is this something that affects audience measurement?

When we get to mobile applications of Sling — which I can only assume are really small numbers — that’s when we’re talking about Pay TV programming coming onto a mobile device over the top of the mobile operators’ paid video services. We could argue about the intricacies of this, but considering that mobile audiences account for something close to 0.1% of the overall audience, whatever small percentage of that audience is shifting to Sling’s model…it’s so small that we’d assume it away.

Put another way. NBC Universal is reporting that as much as 20% of their audience for prime-time television is shifting to the internet. That’s significant. Whatever small percentage that’s placeshifting cable service — that’s an audience measurement challenge.

And the mobile placeshifters that are jeopardizing carrier mobile network revenues. That audience needs to become large enough to measure. Because it really won’t matter from a media perspective until we’re talking about at least a half million viewers for a prime-time television show.  Our data sets aren’t yet picking up this behavior with any statistical significance, and until we see something measurable, we’re just guessing.