Great new book: Mobile Advertising by Sharma, Herzog and Melfi

I've just finished reading a brand new book by our friend Chetan Sharma, co-authored with Joe Herzog and Victor Melfi. Its entitled Mobile Advertising: Supercharge your brand in the exploding wireless market. (and I'd stay away from those explosive wireless devices, they can be pretty nasty, eh, ha-ha). Seriously, this is a great 404 page hardcover book just published by John Wiley & Sons.

Regular readers of ours will recognize Chetan Sharma's name from his excellent analysis of the American mobile telecoms market and other stats and analysis of the mobile telecoms industry. Several of our friends have also been involved in helping with the research for the book, including Russell Buckley of Admob, Peter Miles of SubTV and Tony Fish of AMF Ventures. In fact the acknowledgements section of the book is almost a list of the who's who of this space, ha-ha.. And yes, Alan and I are quoted several times in the book as well.

So the authors have been on very solid ground in preparing the book. What I really liked about it, was that it was both very up-to-date (they include Blyk for example in the book) as wide-reaching. They discuss very expertly the markets as diverse as those in Finland and Sweden, to China and India, to the USA, to the UK, as well as those in Japan and South Korea. I personally like to think that I know this area of mobile advertising and marketing very well, yet this book kept on adding to my knowledge and giving plenty for me to think about. Naturally I won't agree with quite all of it, but very seriously, these guys know what they're writing about, and they do a terriffic job at describing the full range of issues that are involved. Not sugar-coating it, but honestly, from the good to the bad, and putting the mobile media into context by comparing it to the older six mass media and showing how mobile is now a new media with abilities that are unique to it.

The book also has a good collection of case studies (16 cases including Admob, Enpocket, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone), and also a good representative set of expert commentaries in their own words, from several industry leaders (13, including Nokia, Yahoo, Microsoft, MTV, Disney and Ogilvy).

I was very impressed with the level of realism in the book, both in terms of the "positive realism" of what is already commercially available for example in Japan and South Korea, but also in the "negative realism" of how incredibly complex the mobile advertising proposition is still today, just about everywhere. Here is a short excerpt of the book and how the authors describe it (from pages 155-156):

"(A mobile campaign) ...quickly gets complicated. Mobile ad reach is either reated or crippled in the ensuing steps of campaign management. Targeting the details of handset models or user interface (UI)types, UI modalities, and user profile selections is hard, but getting campaigns targeted to the next level of application, channel or silo can be difficult. Text messaging targeting is easy and serves as the lowest common denominator. Multimedia messaging (MMS) and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) are not that easy. Idle screen adn applications, such as Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation or games, are orders of magnitude harder and their reach in campaigns is limited. Although some advertising and content standardization is in place, much more is needed. The complexities of these silos are simply too visible for advertisers. As a result, campaign complexity is too difficult to quickly scale, and reacing across innumerable silos is too hard and time consuming." 

And so forth.. The book is both very practical and realistic. I can warmly recommend Mobile Advertising to anyone who is interested in mobile advertising and would want to learn more about it.

Comments

[Chetan Sharma]

Tomi,

Thanks very much for your generous feedback and for your help with the project. Much appreciated.

Regards,
Chetan

[2012 Moncler]

thanks for your article,like your blog very much,well done