I've just read this article "Apps call, but will your phone answer" in MSNBC.com’s coverage of last week’s CES conference.  It's a topic which everyone here at Crisp is keenly aware off.  This article clearly makes the point that apps work on some phones, but not all. However, in reality the fragmentation issue of app incompatibility is significantly worse than portrayed in that article.  It has been around for a long time and isn’t getting any better because there really isn’t any unifying technology that is making much headway. 

While industry giants like Google prefer standards, software developers have a self-interest in pursuing new technologies.  To compare, one would easily assume it would be better and easier for auto parts manufacturers and car mechanics if everyone drove a car similar engine technology.  But the days of the Model-T are over.  This is a mature marketplace with (too) many types of cars that are still relatively expensive and increasingly diverse.  

Software developers, just like auto mechanics, benefit from the hard-to-achieve and broad skill set they’ve nurtured after years of building apps on multiple platforms.  Recent mobile software platform initiatives such as LiMo, Maemo, Bada, WebOS prove that there are plenty of people who don’t think that Windows Mobile, Palm, RIM, Android, BREW, Java ME, and Apple have done enough to complicate matters for developers and content publishers.

Google and most of the mobile advertising industry sees this fragmentation as a big problem.  Hence, there is much promotion on Google's part for HTML5 technology.  Without having too many delusions about its imminent success, Crisp loves to embrace HTML5, Flash, Javascript and other means to improve compatibility and simplification.  At Crisp, we always try to solve the fragmentation challenge instead of splitting efforts by re-writing the same functionality in many different programming environments.

Still, educating content publishers and advertisers that device fragmentation (app incompatibility) is a large problem, has been around for a long time and remains the important truth.  Acknowledging the problems while offering solutions to simplify the complexity for them has been one of the tactics Crisp employs to do business in mobile.  If you’d like to hear about how we do it, don't hesitate to contact me, or any other mobile veteran here at Crisp Wireless.
 

Let's get rid of the traditional online measurement methodology for mobile campaigns and get real about what we can measure and what those measurements mean in mobile.    Let’s face it, many mobile campaigns today are very poorly targeted, capped, and measured because doing this right is difficult.  At the same time, brand managers are faced with justifying their spend in this new channel. The lack of standard, reliable, and insightful measurement is hindering the growth of mobile advertising. To add to this confusion, many mobile ad networks and technology companies are making promises that exceed the ability of the technology and further confuse the marketplace.

Mobile Campaign Measurement is Broken
So let’s start with what isn’t working.  First, using the click through rate as the de facto standard for measuring the success of a mobile campaign is too simplistic of a measurement.  Mobile display advertising should encourage click-interactivity but not necessarily click-through events.  In fact, a successful rich media ad campaign may result in negligible click through rates.  This is especially true in mobile.  Mobile technology provides the capability to launch brand videos on embedded players, to directly initiate a call to the advertiser, or to auto-locate and route users to nearby stores.  In addition, rich media expandable panels provide brand interactivity and information without requiring the user to leave the mobile site.  Be warned: click-throughs launch separate landing pages which can take much longer to load on mobile networks.  This can quickly turn a positive advertiser (and publisher) experience into a negative one.

Mobile ad networks and rich media vendors dipping their toes into mobile are focused on the scale of their business and leveraging their existing know-how’s.  It is not surprising that many of their ads do not take advantage of the unique capabilities of mobile devices; nor do they adequately handle the challenges of mobile ad serving.  They tend to drive users to micro-sites, and thus they try to focus your attention on CTR as their go-to measurement benchmark.  While CTR it is important to their business, it is not necessarily important to yours.
The next challenge is audience measurement.  Every mobile technology provider is using their own way of determining unique visitors in mobile, which aren’t necessarily as accurate as the way it is done on the web using cookies. Online, due to frequent deletion of cookies on browsers and access from multiple computers, the unique visitors are overstated about 2.5 times in the server logs.  This creates a vast overstatement of audience reach.  Early on in mobile, there certainly have been some issues causing the understating the audience. Like when IP addresses were considered unique user identifiers by some or when page and image caching on the network were poorly understood. Still today, impression beacons (small invisible gif) are used to track ad impressions on the server but a good portion of mobile devices misbehave and won’t download the darn pixel.

This and various other issues caused each mobile technology company to figure out their own way to measure based on more granular parameters.  Now that cookies are better supported on mobile, we could move toward a more standard methodology, but again face the challenge of audience overstatement due to a variety of complex factors like gateway cookies vs. device-side cookies, carrier HTTP headers and more. 

Finally, while mobile advertising is starting to look and feel more like online advertising with rich media - beyond-the-banner - campaigns, online ad tracking and measurement simply doesn’t work for mobile.  For example, many online rich media companies utilize JavaScript in their ad forms.  Yet in mobile, not every phone supports JavaScript.  In fact, the BlackBerry, which represents 56 percent of the smartphone market in the U.S. (IDC) does not come enabled for JavaScript.  Mobile phones also handle video ads differently from online browsers.  While online browsers stream video, iPhone and other smart phones utilize video downloads, requiring a whole different method of measuring views. 

Mobile is unique and its measurement needs to be also.  Metrics around mouse-hover times or other online standards are meaningless in mobile.  It takes a mobile expert to figure out what can be measured in mobile and how to do it.

What Needs to Be Fixed
The time is ripe for re-inventing the ad format, placement and measurement of campaigns.  A mobile ad format needs to be interactive, captivating, rich, and leverage the medium – not just simple banners.   Ad placement should take advantage of the mobile display size without annoying or confusing the customer.  Measurements need to detail the interactivity with the ad and explain the corrections applied due to device form factor and technology.  Measurements need to accurately show that a campaign reached the promised target segments.

At Crisp Wireless, we are focusing on solving these issues because the mobile channel is the perfect medium for premium ad campaigns.  Contact our team to see demonstrations and to hear more about the innovative ways to create and measure mobile campaigns.
 

I’ve had it up to here with listening to everyone complaining about how the iPhone doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash.  People are either hyping the future of Flash or proposing outlandish solutions that don’t really work.  The fact is, there are substantial reasons why Adobe Flash doesn't get embedded into many phones. Instead of demanding that Adobe puts Flash on iPhones, people should wonder why it has been so difficult. I followed the saga of Flash on mobile since 2003, often experimented with it, and would like to share some findings. The Problems with Flash on Mobile

• It is high in CPU use, which is a problem on many levels for a mobile phone.  It is likely to deliver a sub-standard experience on a phone since vector graphics are complex calculations
• With Flash (a veritable resource hog) on board, the phone or app will crash more frequently
• Flash on mobile in the US has a tarnished reputation.  Not that this can’t be overcome but Verizon’s deal with Adobe FlashCast was a famous failure.  Crisp has first hand experience working on a FlashCast app with Verizon in 2007 and it was a nightmare.
• Flash Lite (v1 to v3) had many developers with high expectations fooled.  In truth, Flash Lite technology for phones is rather simple and useless.
• Embedding Flash as a plug-in in a browser creates all sorts of complications. QuickTime isn’t even running within a web page on iPhone Safari. QuickTime launches as a separate app.

The Future for Flash on Mobile

• Adobe is hard at work creating enough improvements to the technology to make it work better for phones. Only then will manufacturers and operators find it worthwhile to license it.  It would be logical to expect to see some results early 2010 as announced this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
• I’m convinced that it is not due to lack of will that Adobe requires time to do this.  Optimization of this complex graphical application often depends on use of low-level system API’s which might not be accessible.  These interdependencies take time to resolve.
• While Adobe will provide several popular mobile software platforms with embedded Flash capabilities in the future, expect that iPhone and Blackberry will be the last ones.  Apple has QuickTime and they are expected to drag their feet on working with Adobe to support Flash. Blackberry being a Java device for the enterprise would probably have problems providing the low-level OS access.  The first movers will be Android, Palm Pre, Windows Phone or Symbian.
• But Flash for the web and Flash on mobile will still be two different things entirely. Don't expect a regular Flash animation for web to be fully compatible with mobile Flash.  Which means, don’t expect your Flash-based ads or web pages to render on mobile devices seamlessly.  You will still need to optimize for mobile.

What to Do About it Today There are companies out there today who have announced ways to “fake Flash” or provide technology work-arounds for a Flash-like experience.  It surprises me that there are so few mobile sites taking advantage of the viable alternative that is SVG, a scalable vector based graphics library that is embedded in a remarkable number of browsers.  SVG is expected to be more broadly available in mobile browsers soon. Just like HTML 5 and SMIL, it is part of the list of technologies that within few years will be all the rage here at Crisp since it will be more broadly supported by phones and support the needs of mobile advertisers. I have well founded hopes for flashy and cool animations on the mobile web and SVG is the first to provide a technically workable solution, but let's put our web embedded Flash hopes to bed for a little while.  Until Adobe puts better solutions on the market, ad networks and agencies may look to repurpose regular Flash ads in mobile as an interim solution.  Serving Flash-like ads within an iPhone application has potential but then you are limiting your audience. In the interim, here at Crisp we have found a few work arounds of our own.  First, while agencies and brands may say they want Flash, what they really want is an engaging consumer experience.  We can accomplish this with a variety of rich media ad units including IAB standard 300x250 ad units used as full screen takeovers or interstitials, Javascript-enabled rotating banners, banner expansion units with tap-to-video within the ad itself.  As mobile experts, we continue to innovate rich media mobile ad solutions that capture the audience’s attention and provide multiple avenues of response to drive interaction and brand engagement and recall.