Mobile Entertainment

At the recent Mobile Web Europe conference, I attempted a re-enactment of the very first TV advertisement ever shown, to the ‘intentional’ boredom of the audience, I’m sure.

Here’s why. The first TV ad was for the Bulova watch company, which paid $9 for a slot before a baseball game in 1941. It went like this:

- The audience is shown a static picture for 10 seconds.
- A deep voice boomed really slowly: “America… runs… on… Bulova… time.”
- The picture is shown again in silence for five more painful seconds.
- Fade back to the game.

Riveting. It didn’t tax my acting skills very much, but you should have heard my American accent.

When a new media channel emerges, it tends to borrow from media that came before it. Only later does it develop into a style and format that is recognisably unique. The Bulova ad borrowed from radio, and singularly failed to exploit TV’s potential. And yet, within a decade or so, TV ads had become a virtual art form.

So it will be with mobile. Until now, ads on mobile have been borrowed from PC banners and shrunk to a smaller screen. Nothing wrong with that per se; the technique has proved hugely successful. But we need to develop our own formats. As someone with a vested interest in the evolution of the mobile ad medium, I’ve been waiting for this moment to come along.

Well, I think it’s arrived – thanks to the iPhone. The superb UI of the device, combined with fixed rate data and plain good timing has driven vast amounts of traffic. Not just to our network, though. The search company JumpTap recently said that while the iPhone accounted for two per cent of all handsets, it drove 50 per cent of all mobile searches.

Such results explain why we launched a series of ad formats just for iPhone a few weeks ago. These are uniquely mobile, allowing users to touch a banner to watch a movie trailer, or go to the Apple App Store, or click to call. Early results show phenomenal promise in terms of interaction with the consumer too, who are voting with their fingers.

Some brands are already creating imaginative ad-funded mobile apps that really exploit mobile’s uniqueness across all handsets. Golden Gekko’s Lynx deodorant mobile app (part of BBH’s award winning campaign), gave its young male users a bunch of sound effects they could use to amuse women. Later, the brand launched a mobile app replicating the farting chipmunk – and an amazing 500,000 people downloaded it. See, downloads can be measured too.

Golden Gekko also found that many consumers were happy to sideload these apps to their phones. This isn’t just a result of the App Store, although I suspect this factor will popularise the method even more.

Having said that, I still believe it’s preferable to run ads on the mobile web: apps only have a place when you really can’t achieve the same effect from browsing.

It’s still too early to say if the iPhone will be a long-term winner, or just a very important influencer of the market. But it’s certainly a major milestone in the fields of mobile advertising and search.