Advertising Age - Digital - Video Report: Mobile Marketing Stymied by High CPMs, Small Audiences

This is what's wrong with the whole advertising industry, they just won't let go of the past. CPM's are not the only way to sell advertising and worse then that, we love to take the lowest cost CPM thing and compare everything new with that. Wait, I take that back. The worst thing is that we keep looking at the new technologies and trying to make them work like everything else we've done. So everything that we can do on mobile gets compared to yellow pages. Why? Because that's the level of creativity that most of the advertising industry works on. And, it takes way to long to figure out how to really use these emerging tools to create something new. No, instead it’s we know about yellow pages, so the mobile phone must be just a new way to deliver yellow pages ads.

And folks, that’s why people don’t get engaged with the stuff we create. Because rather then look at what we can really deliver with all of this new technology, we simply use it to do what we’ve always been doing. How about using the cell phone to E-tail Your Retail and do something completely new? Because that would take some thought and creativity, wouldn’t it? Because that would take us really looking at what’s really good for the consumer rather then just delivering the same old crap we deliver over and over.

So can we stop for just a little bit with all of the CPM hand wringing and get on with creating some new ways of engaging the audience that works no matter what the CPM? Engagement is what it’s all about. Let’s break free of the CPM system because it doesn’t always work any more. And what does CPM really mean when some mediums deliver nothing for their CPM and other’s deliver a great deal. Let’s bring back creativity to how we do business, not just what we deliver to our clients. Put your head out the window and yell "I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to use CPM’s any more!"

I know we can do it if we try.

Overly high cost-per-thousand expectations and audiences too small to matter are stymieing the development of the mobile phone advertising business, according to media buying executives at this week's Mobile Marketing association Forum.

High CPMs
"Most of the brands for whom we do investment advisory are not going to buy $60, $70 or $80 CPMs, even if that's what the market demand is right now," Eric Bader, senior VP at MediaVest USA, the country's fifth-largest media-buying agency, said about the cost of trying to reach a thousand people, a standard metric in ad sales.

"A lot of mobile activity is really competing largely against search and things like the yellow pages and yellow pages online," he told the gathering at the Times Square Marriott Marquis. "When you start to look at how effective search and the yellow pages and directory services are, that's who [mobile is] going to be competing against and those CPMs are down in the $8, $7, $4, $10 range."

'Hard to justify'
"And while we all understand the virtues of what mobile advertising can deliver," he said, "at [$60-$80] CPM levels, it's really, really hard to justify mobile against other opportunities to get the message to the same target."

Link: Advertising Age - Digital - Video Report: Mobile Marketing Stymied by High CPMs, Small Audiences.

Comments

[Hans]

How would Howard Gossage have looked at this ?

[Samthebigreddog]

Sorry, I'm late to the party but hey, I was late to my own birth and am frequently late for dinner...

The real issue at hand is not measurement, that's a mechanical assessment - it's really about engagement and activation. We here in the US are woefully behind in our leveraging of mobile messaging and commerce against a huge consumer base. This is a consumer base who, if made aware of the possibilities and not charged an arm and a leg to get engaged, can and will yield the bottom line sales dollars; they will participate, become engaged, and active.

File this under Ken's Two Cents...