News and Press Releases

Marketing and Brand: Read My Mind

World Telemedia: Peggy Anne Salz

CONTENT, CONTENT, content. It’s the offer that promises to grow mobile data revenues exponentially and the challenge that may bring operators to their knees. Today’s abundance of content means there’s plenty of cool stuff on mobile portals to capture consumers’ interest, but completing a successful sales pitch will require operators to become much better retailers. Smart retailers make shopping a no-brainer by placing hot-selling items where consumers can see them. Operators subject consumers to a tedious navigation process to find and buy content they like. No wonder mobile data revenues continue to disappoint. Spoilt by the PC Internet, mobile users have strong requirements for desirable content on an individual basis, and understandably lose patience with services that fail to deliver truly targeted and useful mobile content. In the fixed Internet content providers generally lose half of their audience to frustration or ennui at every additional click it takes them to find what they want. The situation in the mobile Internet is likely to be quite similar or even worse.

Indeed, mobile devices with their screen-size limitations and restricted input capabilities make it particularly cumbersome for users to navigate the hierarchical menu structures providers use to organize their content. Recent usability research highlights the scale of the problem and the gross mismatch between user expectations and reality. A WAP usability report conducted by Norman Nielsen Group found that users took an average of 120 to 150 seconds to locate content. It concluded that, to be genuinely useful, mobile portals must be able to bring content to users within approximately 30 seconds.

Put another way, users are unlikely to discover content that is more than 30 seconds from the portal homepage. Norman Nielsen data shows most mobile users are capable of making 12 clicks in the space of 30 seconds. However, recent tests of a variety of handsets, conducted by Informa Media & Telecoms, a telecom research firm in the UK, reveal the vast majority of mobile content may as well not even be on offer. It’s positioned too far down in the menu for users to find it, let alone buy it.

The Informa benchmarking study further found that users typically have to click through 10 to 40 screens, and spend more than two minutes, to download some of the most popular ringtones or games. And more bad news for operators and providers comes from an analysis of 19 leading European mobile portals a study conducted by ChangingWorlds, an Irish provider of artificial intelligence solutions, together with Mobile Metrix, a Swedish research consultancy revealed the only 35 per cent of mobile content is available within 12 clicks. In short, a whopping 65 per cent of mobile content is positioned too far away from the homepage, making it invisible to users, the report concludes.

Against this backdrop, enabling quick-click access to content is critical to boost content visibility and increase sales. This is the key message of Mobile Search and Content Discovery, a recent report published by Informa and the first in the industry to identify the technologies and models likely to help operators get more mileage and money out of the content buried in their confusing and often counter-intuitive hierarchical menus. After all, the Informa report points out, most operators’ mobile portals are organized according to a onesize- fits-all policy. This approach exacerbates the navigation problem and often causes content to be placed within an unacceptable click-distance from the portal home page.

The assumption is that mobile search is the answer. But Informa argues an approach that combines personalisation and recommendation is the real solution. While search is clearly critical to monetizing content, service providers shouldn’t short change themselves or users by merely retrofitting Web search solutions for the mobile Internet, the report says. Personalised search paired with recommendation can be a much more powerful combination and deliver the right content to the right users.

More importantly, these technologies expose users to relevant content they may have never known they wanted in the first place. While mobile search solutions will certainly help content companies present their offer to users within an acceptable click-distance, there is growing apprehension in the industry that mobile search could end up stealing the show.

If service providers want to sell more content, then they’re going to have to remove the pain from the content discovery process and provide users with what they want perhaps even before they know they need it.

Alatto Technologies, a mobile search and service discovery company headquartered in Dublin, has developed Tribes, a hosted solution that makes accessing, recommending and sharing mobile content a no-brainer. The company counts almost a dozen deployments. In a way, what we’ve done is turned the mobile device into something akin to a TV remote control, observes Neil Flanagan, Alatto CEO. If you want to change the content, it should just be a one button press on that device, no hierarchical menus, no navigation. Our solution is therefore a one-button press to get the next piece of relevant content.

The Alatto toolbar also offers one-click recommendation, allowing users to rate the content they like and pass it on to their friends. In the background, Alatto’s technology observes user click behavior and determines which content to offer the user next.

We thus ensure that the system recommends relevant content that the user is then more likely to pass on to peers through viral-marketing, Flanagan says. It’s a virtuous cycle.

More importantly, the service doesn’t depend on plainvanilla mobile search as offered by the major players from the Web. It’s predictive search because we don’t believe services that require the user to do anything but consume content they want and discover content they like will fly, he adds. This view is confirmed by recent user research that shows users neither want nor require the Web on their mobile phones. Against this backdrop, operators and content providers are well advised to embrace personalisation and recommendation schemes. Moving ahead, it’s the companies who consistently match the right content to the right users who will keep their customers coming back for more.

Mobile search schemes, such as paid search, which showcases content from the company that pays the most for a top-notch spot in the results, could lure users away from the very sites many content companies have bet their bottom line to build.



A brave new world
Make way for another mobile industry buzzword. According to a recent report from ARCChart, a UK-based independent technology consultancy, the industry is witnessing the rapid adoption of On-Device Portals (ODPs), a new generation of products delivers content on the mobile phone through the use of a client application. Put simply, ODPs leverage the handset’s capabilities to deliver a more appealing user experience, increase service awareness and streamline content purchasing. For content providers, ODPs are able to deliver an immersive user experience, providing a 'wow' factor through the use of rich graphics and targeted content, observes report author Andreas Constantinou. The market is crowding fast, and the report analyses 15 vendors jockeying for position: Abaxia, Action Engine, Cibenix, Handmark Pocket Express, Macromedia, MSX, Nellymoser, Onskreen, Opera, Openwave, Opera, Qualcomm, RefreshMobile, Silk and SurfKitchen. In 2006, we expect to witness a second wave of heavyweight vendors enter the market, while in 2007 we see the wide acceptance of on-device services by the key industry players, Constantinou says. He estimates the ODP market will grow from $30 million in 2005 to a whopping $1.4 billion by 2009, corresponding to 1.1 billion ODP licenses sold for that period.


About Alatto:

Alatto Technologies is a leading provider of multi-media products and services solutions for Mobile Network Operators, Brand Owners and Content Portals. With its unmatched expertise in mobile multi-media since 1999, Alatto enables its customers to rapidly generate a return on their investment. Alatto has a proven track record of delivering value for customers such as Vodafone, O2, Orange, 3, Jamba and Lucozade. Renowned for innovation Alatto has a reputation as a world leader in innovative revenue boosting services. Visit www.alatto.com.