At double last year’s volumes, and set to increase to US$20.6 billion by 2015, mobile advertising has become the new focus for newspaper publishers… a hoped-for replacement for lost ‘rivers of gold’.

And the Asia Pacific is potentially where it’s at: With Japan, the region will account for 49.2 per cent of mobile advertising in 2011, and a third of the global market in 2015, according to IT research company Gartner.

The company puts this year’s mobile revenue at $3.3 billion, and says most revenue will come from search and maps, although video and audio ads will grow fastest to 2015.

While advertisers, newspapers and other publishers continue to experiment with products and payment models, there is no time to waste, as markets become easier to segment and initial budgets are committed.

Gartner’s research vice president Andrew Frank is urging advertisers to get on with it: “Brand marketers should have their budgets in place now to take advantage of mass consumer adoption of smartphones and media tablets,”  he says.

And of course, publishers need to lead rather than follow: Expect search – which includes paid positioning on maps and various forms of augmented reality, all of which can be informed by location – to spearhead mobile advertising spending, Gartner says.

But Frank says that although this year is seeing important drivers fall into place, “it doesn’t mean, by any stretch, that the experience delivered by mobile advertising will reach its optimum point in that time frame”.

Targeting and contextualisation – especially in social sites and applications – see continued improvements to 2015 and beyond.

Nic Newman, whose UK mobile specialist company TigerSpike has developed iPad and smartphone apps for newspapers including ‘The Sun’, ‘The Times’, and the ‘Daily Telegraph’, says the future direction of the market is still uncertain. He says publishers want to differentiate themselves with a unique user interface and user experience – against a trend by media app developers – need to develop loyalty, rather than pure download numbers, and face a decision on how to target multiple platforms.

But set against the ‘I want a unique UI/UX design to stand out from the crowd’ mindset is the need for apps to be intuitive without too much complexity: “Certain features are becoming what I’d call the equivalents of the clutch, brake and gas pedal – for example, left to right reading versus vertical. In the same way that cars are driven the same way but the body can remain different, the slickness and speed of an app will define its difference,” says Newman. “There is a move from an obsession about downloads to an obsession about loyalty,” he said. “Android changed their rankings to include an element of stickiness, and I’m sure Apple will follow suit.”

These app store changes could have a big impact, and he says social features will need to develop filters over time.

Publishers are also concerned about which platforms to target, even though developers can increasingly offer proper cross-platform solutions. TigerSpike’s current vision is of a ‘hybrid app’ blending native code with HTML5, to make it easier to launch apps across various devices, while playing to their individual strengths.

The mobile success stories of two publishers in

the region – Fairfax Media’s Domain property portal and the leading iProperty.com Malaysian and Singaporean property sites – were discussed by Gumyo’s Gavin Burnett at a seminar in Germany in June.

Burnett who heads Gumyo’s Australian office, stressed the importance of ‘owning’ the mobile market, with a portal site for all handsets, and tools to link print and web to mobile. Individual client mobile sites, using the same data as the property portal, were a way of delivering subscription dollars for publishers. “Provide the technology that agents come to depend on, and you own the market,” he says.

Burnett, too, has statistics to quote: More than half of internet traffic will be in mobiles within a couple of years, he says, citing Google and Morgan Stanley research. He says consumers using Google Mobile will only use sites that are mobile friendly, and that once a mobile solution in place, real estate agents are unlikely to have another.

Talking to delegates at a seminar held by ppiMedia, manroland’s systems subsidiary, in Hamburg – where Gumyo has just opened an office – he looked at mobile potential for client Fairfax’s Media’s Domain brand.

Mobile listings were featured in extended media promotion, on billboards and magazines. Banner ads on Domain and third party websites promoted a mobile number to which users could text the suburb they were interested in.

Burnett quotes revenue ‘scenarios’ based on some 4000 suburbs, in which an average $50 a month would yield $2.4 million in a year; $200 a month would be worth $9.6 million… plus the potential for premiums in high value suburbs where an edge was sought.

A web-to-mobile ‘widget’ on the property portal enables every property listing to link with mobile, and generates leads as numbers are stored. This sends consumers to the agent’s mobile site, providing a value-add service for property clients,” he says.

Kuala Lumpur headquartered iProperty Group, is listed on the Australian stock exchange and has 17 sites in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Indonesia, as well as interests in India and the Philippines. Gumyo’s other clients include Among other clients are Kompas Gramedia in Indonesia, and Singapore Press Holdings.



What does it take to succeed? A report by analyst MagnaGlobal shows how technologies affect mobile publishers’ success:. It cites the use of search engines instead of printed directories to argue that “technology can allow a new medium to serve the same function offered by a traditional medium, and offer a wholesale replacement to a legacy service”.

Emerging technology also gives publishers more inventory to offer: User data and profiles can be used to segment viewers of online content and deliver different advertisements to them, facilities which will also be available to TV advertisers through nascent applications. “While many advertisers will continue to orient their marketing activities around content association for their brands, portions of budgets can be allocated to inventory which connects back to a consumer behaviour – such as purchases of goods offline – or other ‘strategic’ objectives,” says the report.

But how well this works will still depend on issues such as ease-of-use, with ‘operational friction’ strongly influencing the pace of change “even when all industry participants want change to occur.”

• Mobile front and central – An illustrations from Gavin Burnett’s ppiMedia presentation shows mobile’s importance in ‘owning’ the real estate client