Do mobile ad networks deliver for premium publishers? I do not believe so. Remember not that long ago the talk of $40 CPMs from mobile advertising? Forget about it.  Today, it is more like $1 to $5 CPMs for premium inventory.

Mobile ad networks have failed to deliver value for premium publishers.

• They have driven CPMs down and devalued publishers’ inventory.
• They have broken their covenant with publishers by allowing advertisers to pick where they run at below market rates.
• They have turned premium inventory into remnant.

On the Web, many premium publishers have been making a clear distinction between premium inventory they sell and remnant inventory they might give ad networks sell. In mobile, practically speaking, all inventory is treated as lowly remnant.

On the Web, many premium publishers have stopped using ad networks altogether because of damaging channel conflict, invariably bad ads, and unwanted second rate advertisers.

The law of supply and demand is immutable. The scarcity of inventory drives the prices higher and the abundance does the opposite. Except for publisher’s inertia, I cannot fathom why publishers with sales staff already trained in selling online still give their inventory to ad networks to sell as part of a huge pool of generally lower quality inventory. The results are predictable.

I am hopeful that for premium publishers using ad networks is a short term solution. They are waiting for traffic to grow, the economy to improve, and mobile to become even more pervasive. It is a mistake to wait. Advertisers get conditioned to the trend that your mobile inventory is cheap.

Premium publishers need to stop relying on mobile ad networks to monetize their mobile inventory.  Instead of relegating ad sales to non-performing ad networks or using mobile as a value-add, premium publishers need to take control of their inventory and start selling.

The fact is that publishers can achieve high sell-through in mobile; since traffic levels are still below desktop, so it only takes a handful of advertisers to fill the inventory.  The key is delivering an engaging, beyond-the-banner experience and making it painless for the buyer.

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 300×250 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.

It is that time of year again and once again, we are proud to see that multiple customers of Crisp Wireless have won the Webby Award for mobile!  This time it is Discovery Channel (http://m.discovery.com), PetFinder (http://m.petfinder.com), and NPR (National Public Radio), ( http://m.npr.org/i)  which won Webby Awards for their mobile sites in Entertainment, Listings, and News.  Naturally, this begs the question, how is it that sites Crisp has built win so frequently?

First of all, it is our customers who win the awards. Their site concept, their content, and their mobile strategy are the essential factors to receive that recognition.  However, we like to think that our team has helped these customers move forward on all those fronts whenever possible and we are also proud of our technical approach to building, managing and driving traffic to great mobile sites.

Since the very first mobile initiatives that Crisp Wireless launched, we have always taken care to optimize the experience for every device.  With thousands of mobile devices, it would have been easier to find a happy medium on graphic design and functionality, but Crisp developed a mobile platform from the ground up with device optimization and operator compatibility in mind.  Following best practices makes a difference in site quality, and sometimes pushing the limit on what a mobile device can do makes for a more exciting user experience.

Crisp Wireless is hoping to bring success and recognition to all its premium publishers, which is why we are rolling out rich media mobile advertising solutions that break the mold on mobile advertising and help publishers fully recognize their mobile inventory.  The industry has acknowledged the quality and technology behind Crisp powered mobile sites.  Now that same expertise is bringing you the best in mobile advertising, creating a premium experience for publishers and brands.

The increased investment in iPhone applications by media and entertainment companies last year helped the mobile industry move forward quickly.  The innovations that came with the more than 30,000 iPhone and iPod apps have most definitely attracted many new mobile content consumers.  So what’s next?  Are we about to see Apple dominate the mobile content world by leveraging the most successful mobile content ecosystem forever?

How does any mobile device provide access to the broadest array of high quality content quickly?  How does the mobile user share information with friends instantly? How do users of computers, mobile devices and entertainment consoles all share the information on the Internet to make their lives easier and more interesting?  The answer to all these questions:  the web browser.

I didn’t like the mobile operator paid content ecosystems for ringtones and games and didn’t like the walled gardens of early mobile internet.  So naturally the iPhone app store is nothing new from that perspective. It is great for the app publishers at first because it provides a manageable distribution channel. But the much repeated history of this  type of mobile content distribution is a mobile marketing nightmare.

It has taken a while but we’re now at the dawn of what could become the most significant technical evolution mobile devices have seen.  It is WebOS, Webkit with SQLLite, GEARS, Safari, and Opera Mobile.  This hodge-podge of terms and brands has been around for awhile and are indeed the future– even though they aren’t known under any one brand.  What all these products have in common is that they are all working towards converging into a RIA (Rich Internet Application) standard, HTML 5.  Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Apple, Google and several others seem to be committed to supporting the HTML 5 standard which will make mobile web applications a lot more capable and significantly faster.  A good example is Google who re-launched Gmail on iPhones with HTML5 capability.

The drawbacks of the typical web browser on mobile devices is that they don’t work without a network connection, they don’t provide persistent storage, and they don’t tie into the device’s APIs well.  The next generation of mobile devices is about to fix that with HTML 5.  It will be a step towards platform independence of the advanced mobile web application and will narrow the feature gap between the downloadable application (like those in the iTunes App Store) and web applications which are generally accessible for free via the mobile web browser.   Content publishers can make great mobile application functionality available outside of a closed ecosystem and with the scalable advertisement supported business model as a recurring revenue opportunity.

Everyone heard that AT&T was slow during SXSW, but what was working with mobile? Well there is no consensus, but I can tell you what I used. Sched.org’s mobile website for calendar, shortn.me for sharing news, and Foursquare for managing the parties.

Using Sched

Sched.org’s site redirects to an optimized iPhone experience which leverages Javascript popups of event descriptions and lets you save events to you calendar. With three types of panels at SXSW, no time staggering (most panels were at 10, 11:30, 3:30 or 5pm), screenings all over Austin, and 1600 bands–Sched.org’s interface is a calendar lover’s miracle. You can share your calendar with friends with a static URL based on your username and you can use advanced settings to search and browse by popularity. The fight against paper schedules continues, of course with battery troubles (I’m now keenly aware of each outlet available in Austin, and even found the secret outlet near the stage at Stubbs!) When you start offering sorting features and bookmarking, sched.org starts to beat the pocket guides. It’s much more fun to share your shedule with @philton, whose favorite band name is ‘Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head,’ and show him that you’re going to their show instead of his party. To indulge, my favorite SXSW artist names were McFrontalot, Beans on Toast, Biscuit Brothers, Doctor Krapula, Flosstradamus, Japanther, Abe Vigoda, Scissors for Lefty, Dear and the Headlights, Venice is Sinking, We Were Promised Jetpacks, Whole Wheat Bread, and of course, Yak Ballz.

Foursquare

There’s no paper offering that can prepare you for the official and unofficial parties each night at SXSW. So, if for some reason you forget what your plans are while you’re listening to the 5pm Suxorz panel that chronicled the worst social media ads that featured Sara Smith from Wonkette talking about Truck Nutz, you were not alone. It used to be that Twitter was the crib sheet for where to go at events, but this year there’s a new interactive mayor in town and SXSW saw the introduction of Foursquare. If Twitter tells you what people are doing, Foursquare tells you where people are partying. Just like its SMS predecessor Dodgeball, the Foursquare’s iPhone app tells you where everyone is. Let me clarify…not where they think they might like to go, but where they are at a point in time. Foursquare adds a new dimension to Dodgeball by awarding badges for behavior related to your own personal navigation of the city.  As Dennis Crowley put it at the New York Tech Meetup–going out using Foursquare is like playing The Legend of Zelda in that you get points and unlock secrets based on your check-ins. This is simple design for irrational behavior in NYC, but of course, using it in Austin added a dimension of weirdness - have a look at the Smule Fool at the Belmont during SXSWi playing his Ocarina:

There were more panels dedicated to talking mobile at SXSW than ever before and even this year’s t-shirt symbol was a hand holding a mobile phone, but there was too much to cover in these panels and I think people went home more confused than when they left. Marc Curtis of Flirtomatic found it necessary to make a distinction that not everything in mobile is a downloadable application.  There are channels for mobile data such as mobile sites, widgets and apps; and that mobile sites like BBC have scale at 100MM page views per month.  Marc also made a poignant comparison between the EU and US in terms of interactive behavior.

Austin was different from Barcelona in that in Barcelona attendees had ditched their laptops for mobile browsing, but at SXSW we were all tied to our laptops. I had my own laptop failure, which made me use my iPhone a lot more than I would have, I got so attached I started to make my own games. And I have to note that laptops are not the only devices that need to be charged. Why Mophie didn’t have a ‘mobile’ salesman or even a mobile RV like those that sell pizza, kebabs, tacos and BBQ is the biggest mystery of all this SXSW. The mobile service that I’d like to see next after SXSW? GPS enabled electrical outlet locator for the city of Austin and suggested tip amount!