Increased categorization will grow mobile search: CTIA keynoter
April 1, 2008
Cary Tilds is senior vice president of Team Detroit
LAS VEGAS – Mobile search marketing couldn’t have found a bigger advocate than Cary Tilds, keynote speaker at the CTIA Wireless 2008 Marketing – The Mobile Channel show.
The senior vice president of Team Detroit, a joint venture of all WPP Group PLC agencies in Detroit, told wireless industry executives in the morning keynote session that mobile search’s time had come.
“It’s now, this is now, this moment in time is now,” Ms. Tilds said. “Search categorizes the world – it’s the common thread for all applications, content and devices.
“The more the categorization, the more people will search and the more your products will be found,” she said.
Mobile search benefits from several trends, including entertainment receiving, content sharing, social networking and local search for listings of restaurants and theatres.
Search giants in the online space have mobile applications that simplify the search experience for a smaller screen.
Yahoo oneSearch, for example, boils down the results. While the new MSN Mobile Search hasn’t launched yet, Ms. Tilds said, its goals are to make the mobile Internet easier to search, leverage the growth of location-based services and make scrolling easier.
Microsoft’s deal with Nokia to deploy the Silverlight development platform will also create bandwidth for the Internet and consumption of media on mobile.
Growth of mobile search may be stifled today, but marketers and providers should use the methodology already in place for online search.
“Make it easier for advertisers to leverage the process in place,” Ms. Tilds said.
She advocated working with the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization and the search providers themselves on backend APIs.
How should brand marketers look at mobile? For one, they need better integration with the carriers. And then there’s how mobile marketing professionals themselves look at the industry.
“The interlocking of place, time and people is really how we look at this industry,” Ms. Tilds said.
As for consumers, “wherever they are, they’re not at home, they’re not at work,” Ms. Tilds said. “That’s mobile time. What you’re looking at is time-shifting. It’s about consumption in general and what kind of drives it.
“We feel strongly that mobile marketing is digital marketing,” she said. “Mobile is mainstream. The masses are using it. It’s not just DR, it’s not Web site management. It’s about media, so you have to look at that.”
The phone itself helps. Most new models on the market are media phones. Consumers are already consuming media on mobile, with music being a case in point.
When pursuing a campaign, marketers must ask themselves what the objectives are. Sometimes it’s upper funnel. But every mobile campaign that Team Detroit does is measured against other media channels or tactical activities and tagged.
So now, Team Detroit has the ability to forecast what its mobile campaigns likely will do for the client’s brand.
A recent campaign for Team Detroit client Ford Edge offered integrated Web offerings. The campaign was uploaded into DoubleClick’s DART Search platform. Enpocket generated the site tracking for the agency.
While the keyword buys were small, the mobile campaign actually had a halo effect. Why? Because the Ford Edge is mobile-synced car, using some of the same voice-activated search technology that is reflective of the future of mobile search.
In the future, Ms. Tilds expects more media phones and smartphones, larger screens, more local information, mobile television and increased social networking on handsets.
“That includes the content consumption of mobile and that includes more mobile search,” Ms. Tilds said.