I remember writing a long feature for Revolution seven years ago about the "State of the WAP Nation". (You can find it on the newly relaunched Brand Republic website if you so desire - accessible at www.mediaweek.co.uk.) While the article is something of a historical artefact and many of the names have long since disappeared from the sector - it produced unlikely alliances such as Sir Bob Geldof and rugby legend Brian Moore in a joint venture called WapWorld - some of the themes are distinctly familiar. Everyone was wondering how to make money out of the format, but most were singularly failing to do so.
WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell is fond of quoting the Group M forecast that mobile advertising will double to £60m by November this year, which he sees as a "small but growing" slice of the ad market. But as our feature on mobile advertising this week suggests (page 24), while there is undoubtedly great potential in the market, even now, with almost saturation coverage of mobile devices, it is still a nascent medium.
The network operators are staking their claim to become the media owners in the mobile sector, trying to steal a march on traditional media companies such as News International.
Yahoo! has added a mobile display advertising platform to its offer, which, along with its Project Panama ad-ranking software system (page 20), it hopes will help it compete with Google and Microsoft, who are also muscling in on mobile.
Mobile's excellent targeting capability is its strength as well as its weakness. It enables advertisers to increasingly narrow down its target audience, but it is very private space where users resent intrusion.
A lot of activity is still in the testing phase. One agency type recently told me about a mobile campaign for one of the UK's biggest fmcg manufacturers that attracted just 20 responses. And most of them were from the agency ...
If the mobile advertising boom is to really take off, the format needs to be transparent to clients and agencies, and it must truly integrate with other media channels. There also has to be a degree of cooperation among traditionally warring mobile partners. Otherwise we may be sitting here in another seven years, Waiting for Godot-style, in anticipation of something that never arrives.
- Steve Barrett is editor of Media Week, steve.barrett@haymarket.com.