Want to make a smart career move? Get into mobile advertising. A host of research reports highlight this as the new, new thing in the media business. 

 

In the US, mobile advertising is predicted to grow from a $421m business in 2006 to a $4.8bn business in 2011. Globally, mobile advertising is predicted to be worth $13.86bn by 2011 as brands splash cash on placements around video content, music, mobile TV and social networks. 

 

As well as offering brands the chance to add technology-driven media firsts to their roll of honour, mobile advertising will enable a closer engagement with consumers, wherever they are and whatever they are doing. 

 

The most advanced markets are  Japan and Korea, and in the former 65% of consumers have browser phones – handsets that allow access to the mobile internet. Among key demographics penetration of browser phones rises to 99%. 

 

Three agencies are key to accessing this medium. Major carrier NTT DoCoMo has a 55% share of the market and in 2000 it formed mobile advertising agency D2 Communications (D2C) with the country’s biggest advertising agency Dentsu. 

 

This was followed by the creation of a1adnet by rival operator au Group, owned by communications giant KDDI, and Japan’s number two advertising agency Hakuhodo. In turn, Vodafone joined forces with Japan’s largest interactive agency Cyber Communications to launch Japan Mobile Communications. 

 

D2C offers a wide range of mobile solutions including an advertorial site called the Tokusuru Menu (“beneficial menu” in Japanese) where advertisers buy banner space to promote their services. It is accessed through key number four on the i-mode service. 

 

There is standard banner advertising on i-mode sites, which take up a quarter of the screen; text ads are sent to subscribers of mobile magazine services; Message Free pushes information to users who have opted in; and finally, ‘Toku numbers’, are the Japanese name for short codes that are prevalent across the world. 

 

SongAe Kim, communications director at D2C, argues that there is room for significant growth in the mobile advertising space. The company will be launching a mobile search system in 2007 that it hopes will further investment. 

 

“The most important issue is getting clients to launch their own mobile websites and we are still working on this issue. But we will start mobile search advertising from early summer, so this will hopefully help with this issue,” she says. 

 

The South Korean market is equally advanced with hi-tech 3G phones and huge penetration rates. SK Telecom, the dominant operator in South Korea, earned 2.46 trillion Korean Won from its data services in 2005, a 35% hike on the previous year and accounting for 26.6% of total revenues. 

 

SK Telecom offers a wide range of advertising opportunities including: Ad MoA, a service similar to Japan’s Tokusuru Menu; Call Back SMS, similar to Message Free; Page+, an advertising system based on advertising through certain numbers or barcodes; and standard banner ads on wireless internet pages. 

 

Despite this range of services, the Korean mobile ad market is still developing, according to Vincent Lee,   marketing director at Isobar’s Agency W. “The Korean mobile population is about 83% of the total population and wireless internet usage reaches 49.7% of the total. Despite this, the current penetration of the mobile advertising market is relatively small compared to the comparable market for internet advertising,” he says. 

 

Hyunsung Kang, communications manager at SK Telecom, believes growth will come from a better working relationship between agencies and brands. “The bigger the company and the more traditional the business it is running, the more conservative it is when picking a medium. So fostering a good relationship with the firm is the most important thing to do,” she says. 

 

SKT is hoping to develop these relationships in the mobile TV space, where Korea has more than 1.3 million consumers owning some sort of digital media broadcasting (DMB) enabled device. 

 

“It is thought that a new form of advertising can come out from the combination of mobile TV and mobile internet advertising. SKT is thinking about bringing out a new advertising model for its satellite DMB service,” says Kang. 

 

SunYoung Lee, managing director at Korean agency Ion Global, says the issue holding up ad spend is device penetration. “Mobile TV advertising has a long way to go. The devices need to be distributed further and the existing video-on-demand service is price sensitive,” she says. 

 

Adverts have already been aimed at this developing market, however. Adidas was the first brand to use DMB advertising on mobile phones in Korea as part of its ‘Impossible Team’ campaign for the 2006 World Cup. A 15-second TV ad was broadcast 16 times daily across a wide variety of c hannels on the DMB service. The campaign ran for three months and was viewed 1,200 times. Tellingly, the advert created more media interest in being a “technology first” than it did views from users. 

 

Adidas’ World Cup campaign also included the use of a new form of barcode advertising, a common technique in Japan and Korea that sees the phone owner scanning a barcode on a physical product by taking its picture using their phone camera. Adidas icons were used instead of the two-dimensional bar codes, recognised by the phone, which then took users to a dedicated mobile internet site (Cream, Autumn 2006). 

 

This type of technology allows mobile marketers to glue together a wider marketing campaign and, according to Ion Global’s Lee, it is vital to the development of mobile marketing globally. “The reason it has been so successful is that the mobile c hannel is well integrated with other devices, such as PCs, notebooks, Navigators and PDAs,” she points out. “When the clients think about a big marketing driving, especially holistic marketing activities between on- and offline, the mobile is the crucial bridge c hannel to make it successful.” 

 

The lessons being learned in Asia are now being watched in other territories but Julian Smith, research and insight director at MEC Interaction in the UK, says there are many more hurdles to overcome. 

 

“Research suggests that mobile TV uptake will be slow, although an advertiser-funded model should boost this in most territories, but it will take a long time to get an addressable audience that can support mobile TV advertising. It is very early days; first we need the content, platform and audience to be sorted out,” he says. 

 

Outside of Asia, Europe leads the way in terms of mobile internet access, with a third of mobile users able to access the mobile internet from their phones. 

 

Smith believes that the vibrant content market in Asia has given these markets an edge. “Most brands don’t even have a WAP site yet, so there is no destination for easily consumable mobile content. If you have a WAP site then you can advertise elsewhere on the mobile internet to direct traffic to it,” he explains.

 

It seems industry watchers looking for cutting-edge mobile advertising will be visiting Japan and South Korea for years to come.