JupiterResearch: Portable Media Players May Expand Mobile Marketing Opportunities

Somebody's finally talking sense about mobile as a bona fide media platform.

JupiterResearch is prognosticating that introducing portable media players (PMP’s) with internet browsing capabilities are likely to stimulate significant growth among those accessing wireless web and will create additional opportunity for advertisers, who are expected to spend $2.2 billion on mobile messaging, display ads, and search via mobile technology by the year 2012.

In a new report titled “Mobile Internet: Adding Portable Media Players to the Mix to Drive Up Audience Size and Revenue," completed in cooperation with mobile advertising service provider AdMob, the research firm found that the majority of page views and advertising impressions on cell phones and portable media players are on a small screen with a mini-browser.

Here's the deal: Impressions and click-through rates (CTR) per device, however, are higher for devices with full browsers.

"Mobility is adding a time and space dimension to media and advertising that has the potential to drive up CPM’s significantly. We are finding ads with location tags are selling at five to tenfold premiums over basic ads," says Julie Ask, Vice President at JupiterResearch and lead author of the report, in a statement. "The ability to tag users with location, demographics, and behavioral data complemented by devices that support rich media to avoid having their role in the advertising value chain made obsolete must continued to push forward.”

"New devices such as portable media players available on the market with dramatically improved user interfaces and capable of fully rendering HTML web sites are driving consumer demand for Internet access on portable devices," adds David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch.

“Carriers should continue to enable consumers by rolling out more devices that look like portable media players at affordable prices – perhaps even as a second device – and continue to break down economic barriers of pricing and application restrictions to consumer adoption.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. Mobile phones as they are today simply don't make very interesting or compelling media devices - I don't care how much you really want to watch a show, watching it on a 2.5-inch screen just. Doesn't. Cut. It.

Mobile devices are extremely powerful as a response mechanism to commercial messages people experience in other media. It is not, however, a powerful new cable-TV-for-the-mobile-generation appliance, no matter how much we wish it to be.

But...other devices could make the equation more interesting. Essentially we're talking an iPhone, but with a slightly larger screen, maybe even some projection capabilities, and new dynamics open up pretty quickly.

Time will tell if it means as much to mobile marketing as Jupiter indicates. And hat's off to AdMob for recognizing the potential.

But it sure as hell will mobile TV and other (ad-supported or subscription) content services a whole lot more interesting.

Read more about it, here.

Quick Links:

GENERATION WOW: The World of Multi-platform Marketing
BRANDING UNBOUND The Book
BRANDING UNBOUND IN ADWEEK Magazines
Rick Mathieson.com