It’s not that Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of ad holding company WPP, isn’t bullish on mobile advertising taking a larger piece of the revenues from other media outlets. He just thinks there’s a little too much hype. Closing out the GSM day-long mobile summit Friday, he cataloged the promises and pitfalls the industry faces over the next five years.
—Need for universal mobile ad standards among operators: “I recognize that it’s difficult to ask competitors to get together on this kind of issue, but it strikes me that some Darth Vader threatens to invade this space and impose an ad platform on the industry eventually.” Asked to elaborate on the prospects for a single standard, Sir Martin added, “I think they see that having a standard in place would accelerate the growth of the mobile ad business across the board. But that’s not enough of a reason to combine efforts. Usually in these situations, a common threat is more effective than the promise of simply improving a business.”
—Growth potential—to a point: The acceptance of mobile content among populations all over the world gives mobile advertising tremendous growth potential, he noted. But there are impediments to that growth, namely due to variations among adoption among regions, within regions and among gender. As a result, the enormous reach of mobile compared to internet access on PCs is greater – more people have cell phones than computers – but the data collected from users varies from carrier to carrier, limiting its value.
—China: Sir Martin is excited by the growth potential of China Mobile. “It has nearly 300 million cell users – that’s the population of the entire United States. It’s growing 3.5 million a month. And China still has a large population who do not yet have cell phones.”