The AdMob move should really come as no surprise. I have written about them before and, as its fifth largest market globally, South Africa is an important market for them.
Their stats are impressive. Founded in 2006, AdMob has registered over 29 billion impressions since its launch and is seeing on average about 1250 impressions served every second of every day onto mobile websites where AdMob has posted adverts on behalf of advertisers.
SA mobile users generated 159.2 million mobile ad impressions in the month of May 2008 on the AdMob Network, with double digit traffic growth over the last six months. This makes SA AdMob's fifth largest country market (by number of page impressions) after the US, India, Indonesia and the UK, according to Niren Hiro, AdMob VP of business development.
Locally, people often respond to these numbers with shock. Even analysts seem to be flabbergasted that the figure could be so high. But in reality, the figures pale into significance compared to what we are going to see from the local market in the next two to three years.
The AdMob traffic figures are generated by a fairly small base of users visiting, on average, a couple of sites every day where AdMob ads are posted. World Wide Worx research estimates that only five percent of mobile subscribers are only accessing the Internet from their phones.
Given that there are about 30 million subscribers in South Africa, five percent of that is 1.5 million. Supposing that only these users created the impressions (which is not the case - people with PCs also surf from their mobile phones) it would mean that the average user created 160 page impressions a month or 3.5 impressions a day, which is not unreasonable.
With around six million PCs in the country in total, it's a no-brainer that mobile marketing is going to be a huge channel to market in this country.
Hype has been around in mobile since the first mobile phones started selling well. Since then, anything new in mobile has been hyped.
When machine-to-person SMS came into being, SMS notifications flooded out into the market. When short code SMS came into the market, TV, radio stations and print publications were flooded with SMS competitions. Consumers who gave out their cellphone number widely got spammed with SMS marketing.
And now that mobile marketing moves into the multimedia space with rich messaging and mobile websites, it's likely that mobile marketing will get hyped once again.
Look at some of the advertising for the Mobile Marketing Summit held this month. “It's a breakthrough Summit, a must-attend for any marketers wishing to gain an expert appreciation of the new mobile media in SA. A top international speaker and a 'who's who' of SA mobile marketing talent will give you best practice advice and a host of marketing ideas to gain competitive advantage and increase response.”
While the summit had some great speakers, the market needs to understand one very important fact - the mobile phone is the most important communications device for people. And for some, it's their most valued possession. Breaking your customer's trust when communicating through that device could result in you losing your customer forever.
So before marketers go and sign up with an agency or start advertising on the likes of AdMob, some pretty basic questions need to be asked:
Most marketing managers can answer the first three questions without even thinking. It's the last one that's the catch. Mobile marketers need to understand that they are building a direct relationship with their base, and that they will be able to communicate with that base through the mobile channel on a regular basis if they respect that channel and invest in it in a way that makes it worthwhile for the people receiving the communication.
Marketing managers need to work with agencies which understand what people respond to on their mobile phones, how they respond, and what will keep them responding.
A good strategy will create a mutually beneficial relationship for both the company and the base it is marketing to.
