KEY POINTS:
With people spending less of their time watching television commercials, the "mobile internet" is emerging as one of the new advertising frontiers.
The appeal of the mobile phone as an advertising medium is clear. By interacting with people via their mobile you are tapping into a very intimate communications channel. You're targeting punters at a very personal level and they don't have the opportunity to flick channels.
The intimacy of the mobile medium, as well as being attractive to marketers, is also a major potential pitfall for those bold enough to try to sell products and services to phone users.
People hate being spammed on their mobile, so the evolution of mobile marketing has been slow.
Text marketing is a well-established discipline, and has found itself a niche. Inviting ad viewers or readers to text in if they have an interest in a particular product has proven a useful way to harvest leads from the wider consumer pool. Auckland company HooHaa even pays people who sign up to read the text ads it sends out.
Mobile internet marketing, however, is about tapping into the advertising real estate offered up on the new generation of mobile devices - those equipped with the technology to make web-surfing-on-the-go more user-friendly than it has been in the past.
A deal announced last week between Vodafone and Snakk Media should add momentum to the local mobile internet marketing scene.
Snakk - a sister company of home-grown mobile marketing success story The Hyperfactory - has signed up as the exclusive agent for selling ads on the Vodafone Live internet portal.
Vodafone says it gets 75,000 visitors a day coming to the Live portal, which offers up news, video content, downloads, and a social networking platform. Users clock up 15 million page impressions on the site a month, making it the country's third most popular internet destination, the company says.
The Hyperfactory tied last week's Snakk Launch around a day-long internet marketing workshop targeted at the advertising industry. Speaking at the event, Vodafone NZ chief executive Russell Stanners said research showed 79 per cent of consumers were "very okay to receive advertising as long as it has relevance and as long as they have control".
The fact that in parts of Europe online advertising now accounts for up to 18 per cent of total ad spend, whereas in New Zealand the figure is in the 5 or 6 per cent range, also meant there was a strong opportunity for growth, he said.
Enthusiasm for mobile internet marketing has been given a boost by the popularity of Apple's iPhone. Workshop speaker Diana Pouliot, Google's director of mobile advertising, said the search giant had recorded a surge in mobile search queries over Christmas as iPhone recipients began playing with their new toys. Consumer resistance to the high data charges associated with mobile surfing was raised several times at last week's workshop.
Rich Frank, a former Disney and Paramount Studios president who invested in The Hyperfactory last year, said mobile surfing did not take off in the US until carriers introduced "all-you-can-eat" data pricing plans. These allow phone users to pay a fixed monthly rate to access the internet and services such as mobile email.
In New Zealand, Vodafone's customers can browse the company's Live portal - complete with ads - for free, but are stung up to $11.25 per MB when they surf away from the platform or download emails.
Vodafone's head of entertainment, Charlie Clementson, admitted that despite spending "millions" telling customers that the company's Live portal was free to browse "people don't believe us".
Michael Bayle, senior director of monetisation at Yahoo's Connected Life unit, said flat-rate data plans were an important element in the success of mobile internet marketing. "That is the one thing that is really slowing down the industry right now," he said.
