Mobile portals: a marketing conflict - Internet/Web/Online Service Information

Telecommunications, Jan, 2001 by Ross Parsons

The mobile portal marketing battleground is intensifying. Overcoming the years of deep market penetration enjoyed by the big internet players is the key to a mobile operator's success.

Europe is entering a mobile portal marketing war. Every operator worth its salt is busy plugging a new 'content-rich' portal which they promise will act as a gateway to the wireless internet. Yet, with WAP being met by the type of enthusiasm school kids normally reserve for algebra (slow, complex but ultimately useful), marketing such portals is a difficult business.

BT Cellnet, which has been heavily pushing its Genie service, has already been accused in some quarters of misleading the public with its 'surf the mobile internet' tag lines. Ads for the Vodafone/Vivendi Vizzavi portal have faced similar rebukes. Vizzavi admits that there is a risk associated with launching something new which is not yet what they want it to be, but argues that it is important to get to the market early. The stakes are too high to hang around. Merrill Lynch predicts that the European market for mobile portals will be worth [pound]14 bn ([epsilon]23 bn) by 2005 and [pound]63 bn ([epsilon]103 bn) by 2010. With massive investments being made in future wireless services, it seems operators are prepared to fight tooth and nail to start scratching out a share of this market now, Clearly, this is no time to worry about whether your ads are offering too much.

Most major players have launched new brands for their mobile portal operations. The argument is that while the big boys may be good at acting like mobile phone companies, they are not so clever when it comes to behaving like an internet company. Some of the major players have dealt with this by splitting out their web outfits into separate joint ventures -- BT Cellnet's Genie is now part of Openworld, Telefonica Moviles has set up Term Mobile, and Vodafone has its Vizzavi partnership with Vivendi. This gives the mobile companies marketing departments a double headache. Not only must they convince a skeptical world that the wireless web is worth getting onto, but they also must push a whole new brand to go with it.

Portal offerings for operators

At the moment mobile portals are little more than a list of links to basic text information. So what do they offer their mobile partners? "For Vodafone, Vizzavi combines the strength of our mobile operation, with the knowledge of contents rights and publishing that Vivendi has in cable and infrastructure -- not to mention the Universal film and music library that Vivendi now owns," says Chris Smith, director of multimedia at Vodafone. "Telecoms companies do not make natural publishers. We have the opportunity to build a portal that is a step ahead of other mobile portals, because we have already set it up in the fixed line world," adds Vodafone's Smith.

Smith is charged with developing applications to help drive data traffic onto Vodafone's network. Some of the applications with which his team has come up with count Vizzavi as a paying customer. "We have something called Vodafone Wallet or Vodafone location-based services which Vizzavi will probably use. We have some very smart network middle-ware for which Vizzavi will be a customer, but not the only customer," says Vodafone's Smith. Portals offer mobile-operators a triple chance of generating revenue. From transactions and advertising on the portals themselves, from the increase in data traffic which the mobile operators expect will come from customers using the portals, and finally from revenues generated by the portal paying for a series of smart services developed by the mobile parent.

The marketing drive

The push behind these portals is growing. Vizzavi has enjoyed a major campaign in the UK since it launched in September last year. 10,000 billboard sites across the country were plastered for a week, with 48 versions of its huge red ads proclaiming 'the net anywhere'. This was backed up by a campaign created by Vodafone's UK agency, BMP DDB that ran across TV, radio, press and the mobile trade press until November last year. Vizzavi however would not reveal how much it spent on this push or how many registered users it has since gained.

There are signs that Vizzavi and its parents are stepping up the pan-European campaign. It is understood that Vizzavi is hunting for its first international ad agency. The agency will be tasked with promoting Vizzavi across Europe and developing the service as a consumer brand in its own right -- promotional investment is said to be fixed at more than [pound]10 m ([epsilon]16 m). Publicis was responsible for the groups French launch, but the focus is now shifting to branding Vodafone and Vivendi's existing mobile Internet operations under one name -- Vodafone's mobile portals in Germany and Italy will be next. The agency search is likely to be overseen by Guy Laurence, Vizzavi's chief marketing officer, who was recruited from ONdigital in August last year.

Will mobile portals be popular?