Interactive Mobile Media
As networks and devices evolve to provide a richer set of media capabilities, mobile media services are also evolving to adopt principles of interactivity that drive more content consumption by mobile consumers. Mobile media services that are interactive have the following characteristics:
- Dynamic advertising—capability to apply context-oriented advertising on the fly during content consumption. Ad inserts can be determined based on time of day, day of week, location, and other attributes that define the consumer's context at the time of consumption. A Highly interactive mobile media service will implement analytics to create targeted and relevant advertising to consumers.
- Personalization—capability for the consumer to customize their experience and quickly allow them to access favorite content sources and mobile media services. This attribute also speaks to the ability of the service provider to create targeted offers to groups of users.
- Immediacy—providing the mechanism for the consumer to act on the media or advertisement without requiring off-line transactions. Immediacy also speaks to the user experience. Interactive mobile media services allow the user to quickly browse content sources and mobile media services to get to the content of their choice with minimal "clicks to content."
- Dynamic Content Promotions—the use of analytics to create new campaigns and offers with the ability for campaigns to create campaigns through dynamic offer generation. This capability is imperative to keeping offers fresh and relevant to the consumer.
- User Generated Sharing—Allows consumers to share content with applications and applications to share content with consumers, dynamically.
- Tell a Friend—capability to share content or content offers with members of the consumer's community and/or address book. A highly-interactive tell-a-friend feature will modify the offer to personalize it for the new target audience thereby applying other aspects of interactivity such as Personalization and Dynamic Advertising.
iMM Market Segments
Services within the interactive mobile media market can be organized into three primary segments:
Mobile Marketing Campaigns
Mobile Entertainment
Mobile Communities & Sharing
Mobile Marketing and Campaigns
Mobile marketing is any promotional activity or advertising using a mobile medium. Mobile marketing campaigns generally target a specific audience associated with a specific event or offer that is time bound. Music promoters advertising an upcoming concert can use SMS or MMS technology to promote the concert to a mobile audience. This is one example of mobile marketing. Other Mobile Marketing Campaigns can be generated for:
- New product launch
- Sporting event
- Movie or TV series launch
- Mobile coupons and other product promotions
Interactivity changes the nature and scope of a mobile marketing campaign. Heretofore mobile marketing has been limited to simple text interfaces (e.g. SMS, email) or clunky WAP interfaces. By introducing the aspects of interactivity, a more rich and entertaining form of mobile marketing will increase the attractiveness and value-perception of mobile marketing and campaigns, allowing mobile operators to offer a wider range of promotions to consumers.
Mobile Entertainment
Mobile entertainment has begun to take shape in the market over the last several years. Current mobile entertainment services/features include:
- Ring Tones
- Ring Back Tones
- Wall Papers
- Mobile Games
- Video Clips
More advanced services include:
- Broadcast Mobile TV
- On demand Video
- Video Blogging
- Social Networking (MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook)
Adoption of more advance mobile entertainment services such as mobile TV has been slow. However, introducing the attributes of Interactivity will increase the relevancy, immediacy, and personalization needed to make services like mobile TV more appealing to the mobile consumer.
Mobile Communities & Sharing
An online community can be described as a social network that shares a common interest, idea, or task and that interact amongst each other across time, geographical and organizational boundaries.
Different online communities have different levels of interaction and participation amongst their members, ranging from adding comments or tags to a blog or message board post to competing against other people in online video games. Not unlike traditional social groups or clubs, virtual communities often divide into cliques or even separate to form new communities.
With the emergence of social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, online Internet communities have enjoyed extremely high adoption in recent years, mostly driven by the youth market (13-25). As this generation increasingly becomes more influential financially and increasingly mobile Internet providers and Mobile Operators are looking to mobile networks to fuel additional growth and revenue generation.
The next generation of interactive mobile media services must include the ability to experience both existing communities and new ones on the mobile device. A key attribute associated with communities is sharing. Users within a community are more apt to share information and offers with other members of their community. The community becomes the central place to advertise products and services that are relevant to the individual members.
