JupiterResearch: Mobile News & Advertising

Julie Ask at JupiterResearch has a couple of posts on mobile news and marketing. The first covers her impressions of USA Today's new mobile WAP site. She liked how the content was formatted for her screen and asks "whether or not content should not just be "formatted" for the small screen, but whether or not it should be written for the small screen."

Ask thinks "it's great that USA Today is out there with a mobile portal and they are getting it included in carrier portals. Page views are low in number today, but they will grow over time. Great time to be learning. It won't be that long before a much larger number of mobile subscribers will have handsets with network access that makes this a reasonable experience."

She also noted that she clicked on a Microsoft Office mobile banner and submitted her email address. She writes about Microsoft's follow up in her second post. She noted that after submitting her email address, she "had no way of returning to the USA Today site." Ask then received a text email from Microsoft "with what looks to be exactly the same text as they presented to me when I clicked through on their banner ad on my cell phone. They included a URL, but it wasn't an embedded link. There was an embedded link to unsubscribe."

She concludes with:

No new information. They didn't leverage the fact that I registered through a cell phone. No product information. Really poor execution by some entity here. They may not have paid much for the ad ... but CPM's I've seen for mobile banner ads have been fairly high. Mobile marketers need to do better than this - this experience as is is ca. 1999 on the Internet ... but we've learned so much since then ....