Mobile devices expand businesses’ reach
Mobile media have greatly expanded the reach of the Internet and are proving to be a growing consideration in online promotion.
More than 60 percent of advertising campaigns last year sent consumers to mobile sites and mobile applications rather than the main websites of businesses, according to a Nielsen report.
Darryl Ohrt, founder of Humongo, a branding company in Danbury that focuses on online, digital and social media, said mobile and smartphone media allow a more consistent level of access to a branded online presence.
Ohrt pointed to location based, or geo-locating marketing and media, as tools that are specific to the smartphone-connected demographic and are being used by retailers such as Starbucks to bring people into their stores through incentives with social media programs like FourSquare or Twitter.
Mobile compatibility for websites is also an important issue in addressing online branding or site development, especially for retailers, he said. A site design not being viewable in a smartphone could leave an entire avenue to sales untapped.
“You”™ve got to look at every campaign separately,” Ohrt said. “Mobile and social media have changed a lot of things, but from a marketer”™s standpoint a lot of the questions are the same. It”™s not about simply being there, but answering the questions who you are trying to speak to and what is it you”™re trying to accomplish.”
Nielsen”™s report found more than 25 percent of brands anticipating on spending more than $5 million on mobile advertising in 2010, up from 12.5 percent in 2009; industries entering the mobile space with aggressive budgets were pharmaceutical, automotive and travel and retail. Entertainment and telecommunications previously dominated the space.
Ohrt said in a lot of cases online presence can be repurposed for a mobile-specific application.
“In some cases you can build all new functionality,” he said. “But a simple update to a mobile-friendly presence may be all you need.” For example, a business with a hard to find physical location could leverage a mobile capability to make the businesses presence easier to find.
Greenwich-based iCall, which was founded in October 2005 by Andy Muldowney and Arlo Gilbert, is one of the most downloaded iPhone VoiP, or voice over the Internet protocol, applications on the market. The VoiP application grew out of a desktop software, similar to Skype; the model difference being that iCall gives away free calling to the U.S. and Canada purely through advertising revenue.
Muldowney said by understanding the market, iCall was able to achieve a unique model in which 15- to 20-second audio advertisements are played prior to the calls made through an Internet connection. The company also has a wholesale and small-business function.
“The old mechanisms for doing this are expensive and slow,” Gilbert said. “It”™s a new way of doing an old business. The telecommunications business is a business that is very arbitrarily priced. That leaves room for a lot of opportunity. The thing about mobile technology is it can go anywhere you go that you can connect to the Internet, and more and more that is everywhere.”
Gilbert said online telecommunications solutions that are simple light and automated are in demand.
“The mobile space is really exciting,” Gilbert said. “These smartphones are more powerful than the computer I had in college, and I”™m not that old. The line between the desktop and the mobile is becoming so blurred and with these little high-speed computers you have access at high speed.”