The last time we published a list of bad practices in the mobile advertising industry, it caused quite a flutter. The resulting consequences were bad for some companies indulging in such practices. Although, we won’t like to go into those details, here’s a round up of the Top 5 Mobile Advertising Bad Practices in 20o8.

#1 – Misleading (mostly porn) ads leading to unnecessary clicks

This is number one bad practice in mobile advertising still dominant amongst most players. Networks create a dummy porn Ad link which takes them to another page which contains several set of other actual ads. To add salt to the injury, these ads were put on adult inventory.

This practice stopped briefly after we posted the last blog entry but it has made a resurgent come back with a few smaller ad network players.

Here’s the AD screenshot taken just 3 days back.

Here’s what a user actually see’s when he clicks the ad

What is surprising is though most networks stopped this practice, several newer networks have adopted it including copying the exact ad text creative.

#2 – Advertisers getting charged for fraud clicks?

Although we’re not sure of this, there is a strong possibility that this could be happening because we’ve seen that several advertisers get very high CPA charges on a few networks. Though fraud clicks may not be the exact reason, but it could be one of them. Most advertisers don’t tend to use detailed tools to analyze their campaigns and therefore mobile ad networks can take advantage of them if they want to.  This highlights the importance of having detailed advertiser analytics – something that we will cover in another blog.

#3 – Taking user clicks directly to those pages which charge the user

Several forums were abuzz this year about another India based advertising network directly routing the users clicks to a page where they are billed for. When a user clicked on ads, content was downloaded (without the users’s permission), the money was deduced from his phone balance and a ‘thank you’ message was sent to (mock) the user! This is a classic case of misusing mobile advertising. The responsible advertiser or ad network must understand that such an event undermines the effectiveness of the medium and can have long term consequences. It is also the duty of advertising networks to check and advise an advertiser against it if he has put such a URL willingly or by mistake.

# 4- Auto Redirection to Landing Page

Another bad practice, this one by mobile publishers has come to my notice is auto redirecting the end user to an advertiser’s landing page. Recently when I was talking with a wap site publisher, he told me about this feature, some of his partner sites were using, wherein the site has a no. of ad links and if the user does not click on any of the links within a time frame, the publisher automatically takes the user to any 1 of the landing pages of the advertiser. I am not sure if such a thing is possible but if it is possible, then again advertisers and users are being taken for a ride.

#5 – Expired Ads

Some large players in the mobile ad business end up showing ads which have already expired but display “Nothing to show” when clicked. We’re not sure what is the reason why this is happening – it could be that the ads have already expired but not removed from some temp cache or it could be to create a false impression that there is inventory available where as it is not available.  This misleads publishers and leads users to a dead end.

Time to update the Mobile Marketing Association Code of Conduct?

I think it is high time that MMA take notice of such bad practices, updates its Code of Conduct, and inform all stakeholders in this ecosystem to avoid such practices.

Players in the mobile advertising ecosystem must behave responsibly otherwise the medium will loose its credibility with advertisers. Given the tough economic climate and recession in several countries, advertisers might start expecting the rates to be further commoditised or might just stop using this medium until credibility is re-established.
Publisher Team

http://www.zestadz.com

From http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/25_nominees_for_mobile_award.php

Yesterday MobileMonday announced the 25 nominees for its Barcelona Peer Award. The selection of the winning mobile startup will take place during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain in ten days on February 11, 2008. The nominees for the award represent early stage and emerging start-up companies from 25 different world cities. We’re reprinting the list here because some really cool, mostly unknown startups have been nominated and given how big we think the mobile web will be this year, any one of these companies could make a huge splash in 2008.

* Amsterdam – Movels
* Bangalore – Mobisy
* Barcelona – skuair
* Berlin – ViiF
* Boston – SnapMyLife
* russels – Mobixx
* Chennai – Mobile-worx
* Dusseldorf – Cellity
* Helsinki – Fromdistance
* Istanbul – Mobinex
* London – The 3G Dating Agency / Taptu
* Madrid – Kimia
* Milan – Waymedia
* Mumbai – Ziva Technologies
* Munich – hiClip
* New York – BuzzD
* Oslo – Adactus
* Paris – WebWag
* Rome – Nanology
* Shanghai – DuoGuo
* Silicon Valley – Funambol
* Singapore – mBit.tv
* St. Petersburg – 4Mobi.TV
* Stockholm – Momail
* Taipei – Toro

As he new year unfolds, we are bracing ourselves for some exciting growth in the year ahead. Based on our knowledge of the market, we at mobile-worx have put together the top 10 predictions for Mobile Marketing in 2008 (for India). We have deliberately avoided putting specific numbers as they are debatable at this moment of time.

So here you go, the top 10 predictions for mobile marketing in 2008

– Mobile advertising in India will continue to grow at a good pace.

– Social mobile marketing will be big in 08 – Keep watching this blog for more updates on this

– SMS will continue to generate substantial traffic. WAP traffic as always is underestimated but will continue to surge with more users expected to logon to the mobile Internet.

– Major web portals will unveil their mobile portals.

– Players like Vodafone could shakeout the mobile data business offering cheaper data access to consumers. Wireless data could get more affordable.

– Many innovative mobile VAS applications will be launched free of cost to the consumer powered through mobile advertising. Mobile publishers will begin to take mobile advertising as a serious alternative business model.

– More and more advertisers will begin to test mobile as a medium for marketing. Mobile will get acceptance as the third and more powerful medium than the web. Despite that, we don’t really expect to see drastic shift in the allocation of marketing budgets just yet.

– Premium rates for mobile content and mobile services will continue to drop.

– Several small and medium VAS players will move into mobile advertising

Blyk a new mobile operator announced precisely this – free ad-supported mobile service. With Google bidding at the upcoming FCC spectrum auction, a free mobile serice free mobile service might not be too far. It is said it is hard to beat free… while this might make for a humorous flippant remark, it pays to remember what Milton Friedman (the guru of free markets) said in Chicago “there is no free lunch” [his precise words were a variant of this but that is besides the point]. What is not free is our personal time, our eyeball movements, our keystrokes, our mindshare and our spending appetite. These are precisely what advertisers are after and if we have to trade this for free mobile service, I would say that the carrier and advertisers are getting one hell of a deal. The industry is getting interesting by the day. The universal coverage combined with the hyper-targeting that mobile medium offers is very potent and can make for a “win… win… win… win” relationship [consumer, carrier, advertiser, publisher]. This is what we should strive for and is entirely possibly if all parties in the eco-system respect the other party’s role in the value chain. At ZestAdz this is precisely what we facilitate. Stay tuned…. Nat