If “content is king” then why can’t it run a wireless kingdom?

If Mickey Mouse can’t do it, and sports content can’t do, and even hip and edgy youth-oriented media can’t do it, then who can make the content-driven MVNO model work? This morning Disney Mobile users visiting the Web site were greeted by a notice of closure that reminds us of the days of crashing dotcoms. "Disney Mobile has announced that it will cease its wireless operations as of December 31, 2007," sayeth the Magic Kingdom. "It has been our privilege to serve as your wireless service provider and we want to thank you for your support of Disney Mobile."

According to its press release, the wireless service’s Family Center cluster of family monitoring and location services may end up at another carrier. A reimbursement program is being offered.

Bye Mickey. But we have to wonder what this means for the mobile content industry in general. With the end of Disney Mobile, we now have three media-fueled MVNOs (Amp’d and Mobile ESPN) to bite the dust in less than a year, how powerful is media in drawing people to a wireless service? Granted, Disney tried a smarter route by focusing on its unique kid tracking service. But still, MocoNews reports that part of the problem for Disney was simply getting retail distribution. This was an issue for Amp’d as well.

It may be hard to recall now that just a few years ago the media MVNO was all the rage. I was reporting on up to twenty in the wings. The thinking then was that the major carriers just didn’t know how to market to the niches like young and hip and sport fans. The MVNO let companies ride on the Sprint or Verizon networks but create wholly seprate services and plans. Everyone pointed to Virgin Mobile as the classic success story, but apparently no one successfuly repeated it.   

But getting people to switch is tough. Ultimately, the phone is about convenience and reliable one-to-one communication. People don’t like to fuss with that just to get some cool videos on a handset or even sports scores. The lesson here for digital media is that in most cases our product is nice-to-have, not must-have.   

Posted under Michael's Blog

Media muscles into mobile

In the eyes of the major agencies, mobile advertising remains at the margins, according to Digitas VP and media director Jordan Bitterman at the second day of Ad Week here in New York. Bitterman was speaking on a panel at OMMA East about how the company is allocating resources. Widgets, one of the big buzzworthy hits of the show, were producing good results thus far, but the obile side is not sufficiently big enough to merit inclusion in many campaign plans. "It doesn’t have the scale," he says. "Our marketers are looking for scale."

From the perspective of mobile marketers themselves, however, the market is heating up considerably. One of the panels I moderated at the show involved video advertising to mobile platform. We had executives fro MyWaves.com, which aggregates and re-renders online video programming for mobile, Versaly, which runs an ad-supported Fast Lane network of young adult programming on Sprint and off-deck, and Kiptronic, which has an ad solution for both mobile and online video. One of the themes I keep hearing again and again is media companies willingness to circumvent the carriers and go directly to consumers on phones via WAP. MyWaves.com now will hit two million registered members soon, although only a fraction are from the U.S. Versaly says it has served over 3 million video streams across the Sprint deck since its launch earlier this year. It also brought some interesting new ad units to the table…literally. Steven Burke who runs content acuisitions for the company showed us some units that include a prompt to text a sponsor for more information at various points in a clip. Others used branded entertainment that was folded into the programming as just another channel.

Much like online advertising in 1999, mobile marketing looks like a fast accelerating hot number from within the industry, but from the perspective of the media planners with the big wallets, it is barely on radar.  

The general sentiment that carriers simply have been too slow to embrace the mobile content model was growing among my panelists, and there seemed to me a sense that if the carriers won’t erect a better eco-system for content, then third parties and media brands will do it for themselves off the deck. Just the week alone we saw Fox properties and Myspace announce major mobile launches, and DoubleClick announced it was making its widely used online DART ad serving system available as a mobile platform. This latter development makes it that much easier for the major brands to get into mobile with an immediate revenue stream and an easy way of measuring mobile vs. Web performance. It is not clear to me why DoubleClick would make this announcement just as the FTC ponders its merger with Google. If anything, this move into mobile would just make a Google/DoubleClick marriage seem even more onerous to regulators.

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With Nokia’s purchase of enPocket, the great consolidation starts shaking things up

All of the coverage of Nokia’s planned acquisition of mobile ad network and marketing leader enPocket focused on how this move signaled the hardware’s maker’s shifting business model. But the news has important implications for the nascent field of mobile advertising. With AOL’s purchase of Third Screen Media earlier this year, this is the second major validation of the ad-support model for mobile content. Add to that CBS’s recent multi-network partnership to drive ads into its WAP and on-deck properties and some other deals in the works to launch next week, and we have ourselves a bona fide business model.

As is often the case, the mobile marketing industry met the news scrambling to differentiate themselves in an increasingly cluttered field. Ad networks that remain independent are quick to point out the possible dangers of advertising coalescing around too few players with conflicting interests. Exactly how open will Nokia be with its ad platform, some executives whispered in my ear after the deal was announced. Mike Baker, enPocket’s CEO insists this helps grow the ad market by helping the industry standardize in execution and metrics on a global basis.

How it shakes out is anyone’s guess until we see Nokia execute. What is for sure is that pressure on mobile carriers to embrace an ad-supported model aggressively is now coming at them from all quarters. Advertisers want measurable, target-able mobile marketing yesterday. Media companies see ad revenues as the real driver of mobile content innovation and profits. And now the world’s largest handset maker is building its own ad network.

Only two years ago industry pundits in all of those quarters doubted whether consumers would accept ads on phones. Today, it is clear to everyone, even the carriers, that mobile content cannot move forward without the ad model.

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With carriers inundated with proposals and big media options, direct-to-consumer mobile video may come on strong

With the success of MyWaves.com (1 million subscribers and counting) and CBS’s recent announcement that it was contracting with four mobile ad firms for its on and off-deck mobile media initiatives, the momentum for direct-to-consumer mobile video seems to be building. Getting content onto the mobile deck has become a long and tortuous process, especially for newcomers who don’t bring to Verizon VCast or Sprint TV the marquee value carriers crave. I have tracked companies over the past year that were promised deck placement month after month and ended up launching up to a year after originally scheduled. As well, the carriers still haven’t made up their minds about what video streams from which supplier gets to carry what form of advertising. For major media like the networks, who live and breath ad dollars, the lack of media savvy at the operator level has got to be frustrating. As John Gauntt, analyst for eMarketer told me recently, content merchandising by carriers has been a “disaster.” No wonder we are starting to see companies like MyWaves, MyCorner, 3Guppies, and CellFish emerge as serious players and the likes of CBS start erecting more of an off-portal strategy.

Versaly Entertainment, makers of the free and ad supported Fast Lane channel on Sprint is about to make its small network of mobile video for young men accessible to the wider audience off-deck allows. Versaly is an interesting company, in that it has evolved through all of the available models on decks. It ran for Sprint a fee-based entertainment news channel, but found the pay model limiting. It came back earlier this year with one of the first fully ad-supported and free mobile video products from a major carrier. Its Fast Lane was free to anyone with the Sprint PCS plan and a video-enabled phone. The company says that in about six months of operation it has served over 2 million video streams. What works for them? “Girls, girls, girls,” a company spokesperson tells me. Their channel of bikini-clad women has proven to be the killer content. Also interesting has been the ad model so far. Instead of pre-rolls (which the company will roll out at some point), Fast Lane created branded channels for BMW Mini and others to contain their video mini-series and branded entertainment. Within the context of a Fast Lane service for young men, the “ads” felt and looked more like more interesting content.

By going off-portal Fast Lane and Versaly have the opportunity to reach a cross-carrier audience and market the service more freely through search engines and mobile video portals. This can be as much a challenge as an opportunity, of course, but with some mobile brands like Crush or Flush, MobileSideWalk and MyWaves creating audiences without much help from the carriers one has to wonder if the mobile content economy may pass the Tier-1s by?

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Bejeweled, DailyMotion, Digg all want a bite from that Apple mojo

With only a fraction of the audience of any other mobile platform the iPhone is attracting dedicated development the way a chic new mall with little traffic sucks in upscale retailers. Everyone wants a piece of the hype, and so branded media and many marquee Web sites are pouring iPhone Web apps into the mix just this past week. The most visible, PopCap Games’s signature game Bejeweled, rolled out yesterday and in recent days DailyMotion opened a section of its streaming video portal formatted for the mobile Safari browser. Both releases are some of the best examples of what is possible under the iPhone’s Web-only platform for third party digital media developers.

As a Sci-Tech Today piece announcing Bejeweled points out, it is challenging to develop games for a mobile platform as Web-only apps. The Bejeweled game for the iPhone is free, but other PopCap games either come with ad support or as for-pay downloads. Making a subscription gateway for a game that players can’t even keep locally on their phone could be a tough model to sell, even to those Bejeweled-addled soccer moms.

Web-based games like Bejeweled also suffer on this platform from a lack of audio. Even via its modest speaker, the iPhone has good sound, so current third party apps miss an entire, vital dimension of game design.

See Also

• Digg

Posted under Michael's Blog