Tomi Ahonen tears into media owners for their mobile apps fixation

Says they should be focusing on SMS and MMS to drive new revenues rather than keeping their iBlinkers on.

Author and consultant Tomi Ahonen certainly didn't mince his words on stage at the MIPTV Connected Creativity Forum event in Cannes today, as he addressed the mania for apps among media brands.

"There are about 100 million iPhones on the platform. Now multiply it against all mobile phones. That’s 2% of your audience!" he said during his presentation at the event to an audience drawn mainly from the TV industry.

"If you develop an iPhone app and you are a media brand, you are deliberately ignoring 98% of your available audience. That’s a pretty rotten strategy in my mind."

Ahonen pointed out that even when all the smartphone platforms are added together, they still only account for 17% of the world's handsets, which means media brands making apps are shutting out 83% of their potential audience.

What should they be doing instead? Messaging. "MMS is bigger than the total internet! The planet’s biggest multimedia platform. If you’re in television today and you don’t understand MMS, you’re a dinosaur! You’ll be out of business!.. In India today, one third of all SMS sent is media, not person-to-person messages. This is your future."