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"Kevin Nakao is VP of Mobile &amp; Business Search for Whitepages.com, a Top 50 Web and Mobile Publisher.  You can find him on Twitter, and on the Whitepages Blog where he writes about mobile, local search, and social media.\nAccording to AdMob, iPhone and Android users now account for 82% of US mobile web traffic.  Clearly, the two platforms have radically changed the marketplace. I\u2019ve got nothing but love for each, and believe the combination of Apple and Google has created a tipping point for mobile marketing.  \nHere are five things you need to know about how iPhone &amp; Android have changed mobile advertising and why marketers need to make the call now.\n\n1. Your Customers are on More Than One Carrier\n\n\n\n\n\nThe iPhone\u2019s web browsing and application market created the inflection point for massive mobile consumer adoption in the US.  However, the iPhone\u2019s superior handset experience is handcuffed to AT&amp;T Wireless.  Many mobile customers are tied to corporate accounts, employee carrier discounts, and contractual obligations that prevent them from switching.  In addition, AT&amp;T\u2019s official wireless broadband (3G) coverage map excludes 25% of the U.S. population and reliability has been questioned by users in top metros.  It was easy to make this point at a recent iMedia mobile class we led for top ad agencies.   Most of the iPhone-shakin\u2019 audience wanted to know about iPhone mobile ad campaigns for Starbucks and NBC, but had no 3G coverage.  \nUntil the iPhone is offered by other carriers, an iPhone-only mobile initiative may leave many potential customers in the dark.  A complete mobile marketing strategy must consider reaching Verizon, Sprint, AT&amp;T, and T-Mobile audiences.  Of all the smartphone options, Android is showing the greatest momentum with a number of analysts predicting the Motorola Droid will hit 1 million devices shipped by the end of 2009.\nA 2010 Prediction For Android:\nAt WhitePages, we are forecasting that there will be 10 million Android devices shipped in the US by the end of 2010.  We arrived at this number by taking the 33.5 million customer base of T-Mobile (the first US carrier to offer Android) and dividing it by an estimate of 2 million Android devices shipped by that carrier to arrive at a 6% penetration rate.  We then applied this penetration rate to the much larger and higher-spending customer bases of Sprint and Verizon who just started offering Android devices.  The predicted result is 10.1 million Android devices in the US by the end of 2010.\n\n\n2. Marketing Begins and Ends With Numbers\n\nThe mobile marketing platform has lagged behind the web in its ability to provide critical metrics and control for advertisers to measure and optimize ad campaigns.  On the web, many ad campaigns drop cookies to manage consumer reach and frequency.  This cross-platform capability was not possible on mobile until recently.  Companies like Ringleader Digital provide mobile ad-serving platforms with real-time capabilities to track and target users and meet advertiser needs around frequency-capping and acquisition tracking.\nGoogle\u2019s mobile initiatives will also help provide the metrics needed for mobile marketing.  I met with the Android leadership team earlier in the year to request subscription billing and found out that analytic capabilities were a much higher priority.  The Android app market dashboard provides user retention metrics via an active user count \u2014 iTunes does not. The Android team shares relevant information with publishers like the recent data on Android OS version share.  They are moving in the right direction, but I still find that iTunes provides slightly better analytics than Android.  As an example, iTunes provides daily download counts and Android only provides snapshots over time for free apps. \nGoogle\u2019s recent acquisition of AdMob has tremendous implications for mobile advertising.  AdMob serves ads for more than 15,000 mobile web sites and apps worldwide and openly shares the mountain of actionable data they are collecting.  AdMob recently announced support of the Palm Pre/Web OS phones, demonstrating their cross-platform capabilities.  Google should continue to share this information and leverage the AdMob acquisition to incorporate their data and expertise, build robust reporting hooks into the Android OS, and improve Google Analytics for mobile. While their free analytics service provides a standard measurement platform, it still has a very web-centric view, with reporting on things like keyword sources that are important for the web but not really applicable to mobile.  \n3. You Don\u2019t Necessarily Need an App for That\n\n\n\nBy now, most folks are aware of the iPhone application approval process which can take anywhere from two weeks to six months.  The BlackBerry App World also requires approval, but it is just a storefront policy, and all apps can be distributed through other markets and channels.  Effective mobile marketing campaigns are synched with other channels like TV, web, and product launch events, and can\u2019t afford the risk of an application sitting in queue.  Both Android and the Palm Pre/Web OS markets have no approval process to slow down the campaign.\nHowever, even without this friction, there are clear differences between building an app and providing a mobile web site.  The WhitePage mobile iPhone application has been a Top 10 app for over a year, but we see just as many iPhone users on our mobile website.  A recent WhitePages and MediaVest study on a Continental Airlines campaign demonstrated that advertising performance is just as strong on the mobile web as it is on an app.  The downside of an app is that the consumer has to upgrade to get new versions, while a mobile web site can simply be updated.  In the past, we had to build an app on the iPhone to integrate with the device's GPS for location benefits.  Today this important capability is possible from the iPhone\u2019s Safari browser.  \nBrowser-based rich media, most often provided by Flash on the wired web, help create ads with impact.  Android\u2019s open platform allowed HTC to implement Flash on its Hero device.  The Palm-Pre/Web OS also supports Flash.  Android\u2019s growing presence will facilitate rich media even if Apple refuses to get on board.\nAs long as carriers can scale their 3G networks to meet demand, the future of wireless is going back to the mobile web.\n4. Location Demands Persistence and Endurance\n\n80% of the mobile ad campaigns that we run are geo-targeted and geared towards effectively reaching consumers while they are on the go.  While location will be a key driver in the future of mobile advertising, the industry will need to overcome a few challenges in order for location-based marketing to truly take off.\nThe popularity of applications requires persistence and the ability to run more than one application at a time. For example, on my Android device I can listen to Pandora and read Mashable at the same time.  The iPhone can only run one app at a time, while both Android and the Palm Pre can run applications in parallel. In order to provide a location-triggered ad, an app needs to be \"always on.\"\nThe other challenge to location-based offers is the battery drain from frequent GPS/location requests and poor cell tower coverage.  Verizon\u2019s superior 3G network and the Droid\u2019s changeable battery both help to address this problem. BlackBerry is also in a good position, with years of experience in dealing with the energy tax from push e-mail. They have learned to make batteries last longer.  \n5. A Different Call to Action\n\n\n\nThe key to the success of any marketing campaign is to make it easy for the consumer to react, but the tools of engagement for mobile are different than the web.  The most obvious but often ignored advertiser action is the phone itself.  By offering easy click-to-call actions, we have seen +5% conversion results for advertisers. A retailer may be better served by helping the on-the-go mobile user with location and mapping actions to get to their store, rather than asking them to register an e-mail.\nIn addition to location and calling, creative mobile marketing campaigns should make advertising fun by using unique device capabilities like shaking, blowing, and twisting.  Ad agency OMD created the first shakeable ad for Dockers and reported a 300% increase in conversions and 2b impressions for this innovative iPhone ad campaign.\nOther mobile action plans include a recent announcement by BlackBerry/RIM to offer the ability for users to click to call, and save to contacts and calendar directly from the ad.  To save an event today, a user needs to:  1. Click on in-app ad; 2. Go to a landing page; 3. Copy event info; 4. Launch calendar;  5. Paste event details; 6. Save calendar entry; 7. Re-launch app.  Did I lose you yet?  \nGoogle recently launched a visual search technology for Android called Goggles, which allows users to snap photos with their phone's camera to return relevant search results about the image.  Looking into the future, this capability may offer interesting mobile advertising solutions.  In addition to current response mechanisms using a web URL or SMS-short code, the consumer can simply snap a picture to get more information from a billboard, on-pack promotion, or product.  Google built on this innovation from its acquisition of Neven Vision whose iScout technology was tested in a Coca Cola promotion in Germany.   The beta results are still preliminary, but may prove interesting if Google offers this as a platform for 3rd party advertisers and publishers to integrate in mobile applications and add value to the end user experience.\nWill 2010 Be the Year of Mobile Advertising?\n\n\n\nThere is enough consumer inertia and advertising capability for every brand, publisher, and advertiser to decide if a responsible mobile test or a go-big campaign is appropriate.  Millennial Media forecasts the U.S. mobile web will reach 100 million unique users in 2010 \u2014 half of the web audience.  Morgan Stanley Analyst Mary Meeker has graphed her steepest hockey stick, predicting the web will be accessed by more mobile users than the PC in five years.  \nIf you are a brand, and your agency isn\u2019t bringing mobile campaigns into your marketing mix, ask them to, pronto.  If you are an agency and need either tests or scale, work with publishers that can provide integrated media programs combining web and mobile.  \nYou don\u2019t have to go big, but you have to go mobile in 2010, or you might as well go home.\nPlease share what your thoughts and ideas on mobile marketing in the comments section below.\nMore mobile resources from Mashable:\n- Top Mobile Productivity Tools for the Small Business- HOW TO: Choose a Smartphone for Your Small Business- 10 Amazing Augmented Reality iPhone Apps- 7 Soothing iPhone Apps to Help You Relax- The Best Free Twitter Apps for Android\nIllustrations Courtesy of What\u2019s Up, Android?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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