Last week, MobiTV, a provider of mobile television content, released data about its audience and the impact of its advertising. It said its audience consists of over three million subscribers and 60 million handsets and that its ads generate a response over 300 percent above direct response standards. Jack Hallahan, MobiTV’s VP, advertising and brand partnerships, explains the significance of the numbers and the mobile video advertising opportunities that exist, with special attention paid to branded channels, which allow advertisers to become programmers who provide a wealth of video content to MobiTV’s subscribers.
iSPOT: Can you provide details on the research findings you just announced?
Hallahan: The most important data point is we’ve been able to do interactive television on a mobile phone with greater success than Internet television has had in the first screen and probably in the second screen. TV has struggled to make interactive TV good for advertising, while we’ve been able to see over 300 percent above the industry response rate. One example is the Schwab campaign. It looks like animation of a person who’s standing around getting ready to board a train talking about how’s he looking for someone who will help with his money. While the dialogue goes on, below the ad there’s a message coming on that says “Talk to Chuck.” It’s flashing, giving you a strong set of cues to interact and once you do, you get a text message with an 800 number. Schwab can see the metrics around the clicks and the folks who called the 800 number. We measured the clicks and saw over 300 percent above industry standards on direct response. We also saw it with Paramount for the work we did on the launch of the Transformers DVD where you saw an ad running a trailer and underneath there was a “View More” call to action that took you to a channel we set up on MobiTV. With the channel, Paramount became a programmer and played a lot of features they have on the DVD like a director interview, how they shot the final scene and interviews with actors. We put it into a long form channel that gives subscribers a sense of wanting to buy it.
iSPOT: How do the branded channels work?
Hallahan: We run two or three branded channels every month that are dedicated to advertisers. We have 50 channels and the branded channels fall to the end of the lineup because people pay $10 a month for MobiTV for the channels they expect to get. Last month we did a Nikon channel called Picture Town about a project they did in Arkansas where they gave a small town about 200 Nikon cameras and let them play with them and they had a photo exhibit at the end of the month at their town hall. They had mobisodes of the people with the cameras and they played it up. You see a Nikon ad on MobiTV which clicks to Picture Town.
iSPOT: How do you make branded channels available? Is it a regular ad buy?
Hallahan: It’s a sponsorship buy that includes the ability to get one ad every hour on each of our channels. It happens 24/7 across the 30-day buy. It gives the advertiser a strong association with the viewer base and it’s not just about usage when people come in for 15 minutes a day. It’s about the largest advertiser getting a lion’s share of exposure, like high frequency radio.
iSPOT: Once people watch the hourly ads, does it bring them back to the branded channel?
Hallahan: If they don’t interact, they’ll continue to watch the program. But if they interact, they’ll go to the branded channel. By the way, people find branded channels as they go through the channel lineup as frequently as they do through call to action. The channels are there for the taking and a lot of people find them by going through the lineup. There’s a lot of curious subscribers on our service. We’ve got three million subscribers in a 200 million handset universe in an early adopter mindset. The people are very curious, they bought the service for the big channels they know and once they see the channel lineup they’re all over the place. It’s a great time to be an advertiser because you get exposure to that kind of mindset.
iSPOT: What other ad packages are available?
Hallahan: Branded channels and interactivity are the two compelling approaches we have and both provide the advertiser with metrics. We’re considered more of an online extension than a broadcast extension. Broadcast buyers aren’t looking at MobiTV yet even though they know this is where some of their viewers are going to watch television. They know that it’s part of the replacement factor where the lost ratings points are going but we don’t have a way to measure it. Nielsen and the rest of the measuring companies are looking at MobiTV and trying to determine how they’ll measure it. We’ll see some solutions this year.
iSPOT: Nielsen made a recent announcement about mobile measurement.
Hallahan: Yes, with SinglePoint. We’re in the early days in terms of measurement but we’ll be able to resolve that issue as the year progresses. Even so, advertisers have come into MobiTV and 80 percent have come back because they’re gaining insight about interactivity and understanding how people interact on mobile devices. They’re extending the brand lifestyle through the branded channel and the combination of the integrated approach of being able to have a :30 spot and a channel and push people from the spot to the channel. It’s a lot for the advertiser to capture and measure and understand the value it will make in the branded initiatives.
iSPOT: Are most advertisers running TV :30s?
Hallahan: They run :15s and :30s and some have run :60s. On the far end of the spectrum American Express ran a two-minute mini-movie. It was a beautiful piece so instead of having a backlash from the subscriber base, we got calls saying when is the ad going to run again. We’ve also run some odd lots, like a 37-second spot for Duracell with a seven second bumper that was a billboard that allowed viewers to enter into an instant win promotion. We’ve also done rollovers similar to YouTube.
iSPOT: You have over three million subscribers; is it accessible to any carrier?
Hallahan: We have several carrier partners. We power Sprint TV and Alltel and broadband IPTV. We’re on all major tier 1s, we’re on Verizon Windows Mobile and Palm platform. We’re on higher end phones. But Verizon has its own VCAST platform that’s powered by MediaFLO.
iSPOT: How does mobile video advertising compete with traditional forms of mobile, like text and banners?
Hallahan: When I get an ad embedded in text, it doesn’t feel really compelling. The ad networks are pushing big numbers and making a big play on mobile but is it really the best way to message? It’s the early and easy way of doing it. Banners are good with mobile WAP sites, but anybody who has played in the mobile WAP world knows it has a ways to go until it wows you. Our ads gets featured in a nice elegant way. It doesn’t feel like the early days of the Internet. I think mobile video and mobile TV are doing interesting things that will play out over time. We’re setting up the groundwork and learning in the lab how people will respond to the ads, what kind of ads they like to see, whether they enjoy branded channels and how we can integrate ads into content. It’s good but we’ve got a long way to go and I mean that in a good way. The more we learn about how the viewer wants to receive the content and the ad message, we’ll be setting up an interesting proposition going forward.
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