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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Top 5 CTIA Mobile StoriesFriday, April 3, 2009 The wireless tribes met in Las Vegas this week at the semi-annual CTIA show. The torrent of press releases ensued, but what is worth knowing about the state of mobile media? We tease out the top five trends that magazine publishers should heed. 1. The spirit of openness. The arrival of the BlackBerry App World store of downloadable applications was long-expected and fulfilled in a CTIA keynote presentation. More newsworthy perhaps were the dueling announcements by carriers AT&T and Verizon that they were opening downloadable applications venues for customers. In Verizon’s case, it is opening a Web-based storefront where its users can find and download apps, although Big V does not seem to be making the process of developing apps for users more open. AT&T, on the other hand, is opening an “App Beta” site that lets users test new apps from developers. The upshot for publishers is that applications, not just the mobile Web, represent an important area of content development for their brands. Applications generally help bolt a user to the media brand and invite much more use than a standard mobile Web site. 2. The Next Web. According to MobileMarketer.com, ESPN product director for mobile Dan Mason said during one panel that the brand’s mobile site generates “millions of dollars” off its placements on carrier decks and the 8 to 10 million mobile Web users. In some categories of data, weather, sports and social networking, the mobile Web represents a real shift in eyeballs that may start impinging on Web-based content and marketing models. Forewarned is forearmed. 3. SMS in distress. The most popular form of mobile discourse is text messaging (over 1 trillion served in the U.S. last year, according to CTIA). Carriers are looking to increase the price of sending these messages, which have become a publishing platform for text alerts and news feeds from media brands. The advertising some companies are starting to feed into these SMS channels is not nearly enough to pay for the cost of sending the content, especially as the format scales rapidly. This is like online video all over again. The more popular the service, the more money a publisher loses in carriage costs. The Mobile Entertainment Forum, a coalition of content providers, released a survey of members that suggests the SMS content channel is already being hampered by price and could be threatened altogether if carriers try to extract more money from a channel that has not generated a solid revenue model yet. 4. Mobile advertising poised for growth. Market researcher eMarketer, which has tended to be fairly conservative in its mobile marketing projections, said this week that mobile ad spend would hit $3.3 billion by 2013, up from $760 million this year. The accelerated uptake of smartphones and 3G networks, which drive mobile Web and data usage, finally will spike the industry, especially between 2011 and 2012. 5. Mobility, not just mobile. If you are looking for the next major trend in mobile, look beyond the phone itself. While there will be tremendous energy around smartphones and downloadable applications and the mobile Web in coming years, “mobility” is the next watchword. Wireless connectivity to multiple devices, from in-car GPS to netbooks and e-book readers, will be a key area of interest for marketers, content providers and carriers. Google’s mobile phone OS Android is likely to populate multiple non-phone devices. The in-car GPS screen already gets more face time than the mobile Web, according to a recent cross-platform media usage study. Carriers are said to be exploring e-books as they see their own market for cell phones reach saturation in the U.S. “Wirelessness” will come to mean something much more than phones, and content providers will need to spend more time thinking about how their users synchronize information access across platforms. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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