Mobile Advertising Brand Recall Up 20 Percent in Q1

Some 41 percent of cell phone users who remembered seeing mobile advertising could recall at least one brand.

That's up 20 percent from three months ago, when 34 percent recalled at least one brand, according to Limbo's "Mobile Advertising Report Q1 2008," — via MarketingCharts.

"[B]rand recall is at an all-time high in the mobile channel," said CMO Rob Lawson, cofounder of Limbo.

SMS (text) is the dominant cell phone service, with usage highest among the 24-and-under age group, with 82 percent penetration, according to Lawson.

Nevertheless, "SMS continues to transcend the generational divide, with 50 percent of SMS users age 35 or over and 75 percent age 25 or over. Therefore, SMS should not be pigeonholed exclusively as a youth medium," he said.

Key findings of the Q1 report:

• Mobile penetration: There are more than 255 million cell phone users in the US, up from 251 million in fourth quarter 2007.
• Mobile usage: More than 50 percent of cell phone users make use of SMS, but WAP (mobile web) - with still only 50 percent of the reach of SMS - is the fastest-growing medium, with 69 million users.
• Mobile advertising recall: The number of people who recalled seeing advertising on their cell phones in the last three months has risen significantly, from 78 million to 82 million.
• Males engaged: Men are 10 percent more likely than women to recall a brand they had seen advertised. Those age 25-34 are the highest-performing age group.
• Income and recall: There is a reverse correlation regarding income, with those earning the least much more likely to recall brands than those earning the most.
• Brands making waves: The most commonly recalled brands were the mobile operators themselves, most notably Verizon and AT&T, followed by mobile service providers (ringtones, games, music, dating) and handset manufacturers.

About the data: Limbo's Mobile Advertising Report, produced in conjunction with Gfk/NOP Research, is issued quarterly and is distributed to marketers. The Q1 2008 report is based on a survey of 1,000 representative American adults interviewed by telephone.

Search engines are dominating how consumers look for hotels despite the best efforts of suppliers to grow their online presence.

Almost three out of five consumers used a search engine to find a hotel, according to a study by the BDRC, overshadowing the 36% who browse direct on a accommodation provider’s website.

The British Hotel Guest Survey 2008 also revealed city destination websites outperformed travel intermediaries such as online travel agencies, grabbing a 24% share over the 19% for third parties.

The BDRC said bookings are increasingly being carried out on hotel sites but third parties such as Expedia (40%), Lastminute.com (36%) and Ebookers (22%) continue to feature prominently during the research stage.

The top four hotel chains for the internet bookings in 2007 were Travelodge, Premier Inn, Holiday Inn and Hilton.

Overall the total number of leisure bookings made over the internet has continued to increase rapidly, growing from just 11% in 2000 to 70% in 2007.

Men, You're Outnumbered Online

Debra Aho Williamson, Senior Analyst, eMarketer.com

The US Internet population remains firmly skewed toward females.

In 2008, 100.4 million females and 93.5 million males will go online at least once a month, according to eMarketer's latest estimates. In 2012 females will outnumber males online by more than 8 million.

Females will make up 51.8% of all US Internet users in 2008.

One reason for the difference is that there are more females than males in the US population: 154.5 million in 2008 compared with 149.4 million males, according to the US Census Bureau.

In fact, teenage girls are the driving force behind increased female Internet usage in the US. In the adult population, females are slightly less likely to go online than males: eMarketer projects that 68% of adult females will do so in 2008, compared with 70% of adult males.

In 2008, 68% of all females ages 3+ and 65% of males 3+ will go online at least once a month.

Young women are prolific Internet users. According to data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project cited in a recent article in The New York Times, 35% of online teen girls write blogs, compared with just 20% of online teen boys. Teen girls are also more likely to use social network sites. Overall, 55% of teen online content creators are girls, Pew found.

A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites

By BOB TEDESCHI, NYTimes.com

Retailers and publishers have fought hard to work their way up in the ranking of Google’s search results and refine the search features of their own Web sites to help users once they arrive. Now, Google is taking a greater role in helping users search within particular sites. And some of the same retailers and publishers are not happy about it.

This month, the company introduced a search-within-search feature that lets users stay on Google to find pages on popular sites like those of The Washington Post, Wikipedia, The New York Times, Wal-Mart and others. The search box appears when someone enters the name of certain Web addresses or company names — say, “Best Buy” — rather than entering a request like “cellphones.”

The results of the search are almost all individual company pages. Google tops those results with a link to the home page of the Web site in question, adds another search box, and offers users the chance to let Google search for certain things within that site.

The problem, for some in the industry, is that when someone enters a term into that secondary search box, Google will display ads for competing sites, thereby profiting from ads it sells against the brand. The feature also keeps users searching on Google pages and not pages of the destination Web site.

Analysts generally praise the feature as helping users save steps, but for Web publishers and retailers, there are trade-offs. While the service could help increase traffic, some users could be siphoned away as Google uses the prominence of the brands to sell ads, typically to competing companies.

“Google is showing a level of aggressiveness with this that’s just not needed,” said Alan Rimm-Kaufman, a former executive with the electronics retailer Crutchfield who is now an Internet consultant. Google’s aggressiveness, Mr. Rimm-Kaufman said, ignores a user’s desire to reach a specific destination and it costs those Web sites visitors.

Take, for instance, a situation last week, when users of Google searched The Washington Post and were given a secondary search box. Those who typed “jobs” into that second box saw related results for The Post’s employment pages, but the results were bordered by ads for competing employment sites like CareerBuilder or Monster.com.

So even though users began the process by stating their intention to reach The Post, Google’s ads steered at least some of them to competitors. Similar situations arose when users relied on Google to search nytimes.com.

While executives of both The Times and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive declined to comment, plenty of others assailed Google over what they saw as a heavy-handed approach.

Google said it had not received many complaints directly from companies, but some search-engine specialists were quick to pounce when the company announced its service. Ann Smarty, a search-engine marketing consultant who originated the SeoSmarty.com blog, speculated that the new feature “could mean bad news” for sites. Other search-marketing specialists echoed her sentiments, and brands began to follow.

“Eventually this could be a huge problem if Google starts throwing this out there to all brands,” said Pinny Gniwisch, vice president for marketing of Ice.com, an online jeweler. Mr. Gniwisch, who is also on the board of Shop.org, an online retail industry group, said Google’s new feature did not appear when users searched for Ice.com, but he said he would object if it did. “This is essentially giving the customer a way to leave a search for your site,” he said.

Donna L. Hoffman, co-director of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing, at the University of California, Riverside, predicted that Internet users “will really like this because it’s probably a better way to search a site than going to the sites themselves. “

“But as consumers appreciate this more, there’ll be more and more outcry from companies.” Ms. Hoffman said. Consumers who see advertisements on Google when they search The Post’s or The Times’s content might view the ads as carrying the endorsement of those news publishers.

“Why would I advertise on those other sites when I could just advertise on Google and piggyback on the equity of the other brands?” Ms. Hoffman said.

Mr. Rimm-Kaufman said the new Google service also diminishes a Web publisher’s role in helping users find potentially useful content. “You may want to editorialize differently when someone searches, and maybe put a premium on certain reporters or content,” he said. “This moves you further out of the loop.”

Retailers, Mr. Rimm-Kaufman added, should be even more leery of this feature, and not because they will lose sales to competitors whose ads appear in Google’s refined search results. More sophisticated retail sites have search functions that take into account a customer’s past behavior to suggest certain items, as well as more accurate data on which items are in stock.

“Some of our retail clients have pretty horrible site search,” he said. “So for them, this will be a benefit. For our larger clients, we’ll probably ask Google to turn this off.”

That is the route that Amazon has apparently chosen. The retailer declined to comment for this article, but last week Google’s search-within-search function did not appear when users entered “amazon.com” into the initial search box.

According to a Google spokeswoman, the company has honored such requests from “a couple” of unnamed businesses. These companies, however, may not be able to reverse their decisions.

“So we ask them to try it out and see if they want it removed,” the spokeswoman said. “We think it could be a really useful feature.”

She added that the feature was currently available for an undisclosed, but relatively small, number of sites, and appeared when Google detected a high probability that a user wanted more refined search results within a specific site. While Google has not received much negative feedback on the service, she said, the company could change it in the future.

Some online publishers see little wrong with the new service. James Spanfeller, chief executive of Forbes.com, said, “I think this is interesting, and my hat’s off to Google.”

Mr. Spanfeller said he suspected that Google was “seeing a huge amount of searches on their service from folks trying to find a piece of content written by a name-brand publisher.”

“Google is probably trying to get additional usage out of their product,” he added, ”and monetize those page views.”

Web publishers, Mr. Spanfeller said, might not like that Google is selling ads against their brands. Nor, he said, would they like having to buy ads on the new search service to help ensure that users who were headed to their sites through Google actually got there.

But, Mr. Spanfeller said, they will not suffer much economic damage, over all, from the new service. “Not to be cavalier about it,” he said, “but sites like The Post and Forbes, which have strong enough brand names, won’t lose more than a very small percentage of people who will go to other sites.”

Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association, an industry trade group, said online executives were growing accustomed to the idea that users often did not find their company’s content through the site’s own search box or its front page. More often than not, she said, users would find links to specific articles or products on blogs, search engines or other sites, and navigate to that page.

“So publishers are building their sites,” Ms. Horan said, “to make sure the experience is the same, whether users are coming in through the front door or the side.”

OnMedia VC Survey Results

In preparation for OnMedia NYC, AO and KPMG wanted to find out how the forces of new media have affected the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries. Below are the results of a survey we conducted of more than 300 VCs, CEOs and insiders in the media industry.

So where are the investment dollars going and will they turn a profit? Almost ninety percent see advertisers moving more than a quarter of their dollars and time away from traditional channels. Seventy-one percent of respondents see the recent new media acquisitions by established media companies making money in less than five years. The industry is poised to engage in -- and profit from – new media.

Respondents also said companies will pay more attention to mobile technology. More than eighty percent see an increase in the use of mobile marketing in the media mix in the future. E-commerce is a key area of current and future investment.

But survey participants don't think the industry is ready yet for social networking. Ninety-one percent don't think advertisers have figured out how to include social networking in their overall advertising plans. "Social networking breaks with the traditional view of mass communications (one to many) …. (Advertisers) need to learn to establish a dialog with the consumer instead of the traditional monologue," noted one respondent. In addition, almost half (48%) don't feel advertising agencies have a plan in place to leverage it for their clients.

The reigning confusion in the media industry coupled with the commitment from media companies to crack the online code means there is a huge opportunity in the marketing, advertising, branding and pr industries. Get ready for a big year in new media innovation.

Brian Hughes
Partner, KPMG

Following iPhone Flash Snub, Windows Mobile Licenses Flash Lite

Now on board

Adobe announced yesterday that Microsoft has licensed Flash Lite and Reader LE for the Windows Mobile OS.

Flash Lite was available as a download for Windows Mobile, but it will soon be incorporated into the OS. Flash Lite is already installed on 500 million devices worldwide.

Ars Technica thinks Microsoft hopes to snare Apple marketshare in the mobile market. The iPhone has been criticized for not having Flash support.

The deal comes weeks after Steve Jobs ruled Flash an inadequate addition to the iPhone.

Microsoft also plans to unveil its own Flash competitor, Silverlight, on mobile phones this year. Silverlight is slated to appear in Nokia's Symbian OS, according to the BBC.

As for licensing Silverlight's main competitor, Microsoft's Derek Snyder told CNET that Flash is something people have already invested in, and it's "good to have both."

Interpretation of 'Ripa' May Retard Behavioral Ad Delivery in UK

I spy with my little lie...

The UK's Foundation for Information Policy Research (Fipr) has published an open letter to the Information Commissioner, dubbing Phorm, an online ad system, illegal.

Phorm crawls pages a user has visited, then pairs keywords from the content to a user's profile. The user is targeted with ads chosen from a constellation of his or her interests, as determined by the profile.

Phorm can only glean keywords from websites that implement its technology. Its clients include Virgin, Talk Talk and BT.

Fipr said Phorm violates the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa), developed to protect users from illegal information interception. The final interpretation of Ripa will determine whether Phorm — and other behavioral ad technology — are legal in the UK.

In Fipr's letter to the Information Commissioner, it argued Phorm must actively seek the consent of web users and website operators before gathering any information.

A BT spokesman told the BBC News that "Provided the customer has consented, we consider that there will generally be an implied consent from website owners." Secure, password-protected content will not be profiled, stored or scanned, he added.

CEO Kent Ertugrul of Phorm took a similar position. "With regards to a website that is published openly and fairly, we are not breaching any laws in using information that is published on it," he stated.

Ertugrul also said Phorm has an "on-off switch" for users and "does not store any personal data at all."

On its website, Phorm positions itself as a privacy advocate, not a violator.