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Leverage partner?s expertise to navigate mobile ecosystem: Mobile Marketer/DMA panel

NEW YORK - Fragmentation of media has made life difficult for media planners and buyers -- on top of the growing number of cable channels and publisher Web sites, here comes mobile with its own ecosystem and quirks.

As mobile buys become more commonplace, media planners and buyers will be expected to have skills to place ads on mobile Web sites as well as make decisions on SMS programs and other efforts for branding or lead generation. A panel at the Direct Marketing Association's Mobile Marketing for Agencies and Media Buyers event offered tips for planning, buying and measuring campaigns using SMS, the mobile Web and mobile applications.

"Planning an SMS campaign is extremely easy -- there is some similarity to paid search," said Patricia Clark, regional vice president of sales for 4Info. "We have a list of best practices that we send out, and we encourage you to ask if your vendors have this.

"Mobile is still new, so if you don't already have a good agency, get one," she said. "We don't encourage mobile-only campaigns; we ask what else they're doing as far as marketing and figure out how to integrate keywords and short codes into their offline media."

4Info's clients include Coors, Taco Bell, the United Methodist Church, the NBA and the New York Yankees' YES Network (see story).

Various targeting levels are available on mobile, from geography and time of day to carrier and type of device.

"Almost anything you can put an action to is trackable: number of impressions, click to call, click to WAP, number of video views," she said. "Timelines in SMS are extremely short -- we can have people up and running in two days."

Mobile marketing companies can typically provide resources to help with the campaign planning process.

"We provide copy writers to help you compress the message into the space available based on what exactly you're going to be doing in this personal medium," Ms. Clark said. "The key is to send something of value, which is great for building a loyalty club for CRM.

"You have to get their permission and let them know the frequency of the messaging, how much they'll be charged and how to stop," she said.

Some panelists compared the current state of mobile to the early days of Internet.

"We are still in an early stage in a lot of ways, with the research organizations coming together and agreeing on standards and Nielsen looking at audiences across mobile sites," Ms. Clark said. "If you are planning a mobile campaign, get educated and call trustworthy folks as you're starting to plan, because there are a lot of disparate pieces of the puzzle.

"Most of big players have fair amount of in-house help, so ask them what resources they have," she said.

Crisp Wireless has been working in the mobile Web space for a long period of time.

"It was very easy to create a WAP banner, but agencies were not really excited about doing that, so now we offer services to make mobile ad campaigns more personalized," said Tom Limongello, senior director of business development for Crisp Wireless. "We're using rich media in the sense of JAVA script for display ads on the mobile Web, and we're able to expand and contract an ad unit.

"More than sending consumers to another Web site, we can do it right on the site, overlay ads like you would expect on the desktop," he said. "We help brand advertisers to complete RFPs for mobile and they can integrate either onto one of our sites like Fandango or a third-party site.

Recently, the entertainment industry has shown a lot of interest -- and invested a lot of money -- in mobile, according to Crisp.

"Our Crank 2 mobile campaign did well because we got to show more than just the clicks, we got to show taps to expand, taps to play a trailer," Mr. Limongello said. "We tested copy to see if we should send them to a site or go directly to a trailer, and if they wanted to make sure people saw the trailer, fewer steps were a great way to do that.

"Giving someone the chance to play around within the site or exporting them to another mobile Web site for more content and to enter their information provides interactivity with the brand," he said. "We were targeting a male demographic, and sports sites did better than entertainment sites, and overall the campaign got between 1.5 and 3.5 percent interaction.

"Landing pages are great for getting people's email addresses and phone numbers."

Crisp sees parallels between the wired Web and the mobile Web.

"Give us the creative, and we make that ad mobile -- why require new creative, we use your desktop creative and we can make that an interactive campaign for you," Mr. Limongello said. "For reporting, tracking impressions and click-throughs, we either use your existing Web server, such as DoubleClick or Atlas, whatever it is, or you can use ours.

"The RFP has to include potentially how that brand can connect to this device that is personal," he said. "Mobile can catalyze all the other spend that you have, outdoor, TV, whatever it is, for either performance or branding."

With the popularity of Apple's iPhone and App Store, as well as the introduction of RIM's BlackBerry App World and Google's Android Marketplace, many brands are looking into advertising within mobile applications.

Dockers recently tapped OMD and Medialets to launch a "shakable" motion-sensitive ad for iPhone (see story).

"Dockers didn't want click-throughs, it was purely a branding exercise, and the metrics were phenomenal," said Eric Litman, chairman/CEO of Medialets. "People were not clicking immediately on the close button, they were shaking it multiple times, playing with it.

"That is one piece of media buying in apps today, and it is absolutely the high end, but we run the gamut," he said. "Smartphone apps are a hybrid between the sexiest, flashiest Web site out there and Microsoft Word -- they talk to a service provider to update content, which drives stickiness."

Application developers have flocked to Apple's iPhone, as the platform enables unique, forward-thinking functionality.

"Most app developers are creative in finding ways to get brands engaged with consumers, and frankly they want to find ways that don't suck, given the very small screens, limited form factor and interaction capabilities," Mr. Litman said. "In the past, marketing was driven by device platform instead of the needs of the brand and the user experience, whereas these phones are computers that happen to make phone calls."