Those involved in the m-applications, especially those with a marketing background, can intuitively recognise the enormous opportunities that exist, but they don’t necessarily understand the complexities of the industry. For the last decade most of them have been banging their heads against a brick wall – the operators – and they have finally given in. Dozens of these companies who have given up after years of trying. They are all disillusioned about the industry, and rightly so, as most of them had the right ideas, the right concepts and the right business models.

Why mobile marketing won’t work

• Mobile operators protect their lucrative voice service which, together with SMS, accounts for 90%+ of their mobile revenues.

• The current mobile technology is not optimised for data and therefore not suited for mass use of mobile data applications, without very significant new investments.

• The billing and customer management services are archaic and won’t be able to manage the degree of sophistication needed for mobile marketing.

• Mobile operators are engineers, not marketers – they have excellent marketing groups but corporate decisions taken are based on engineering and monopolistic opportunities in voice.

However, it now appears that fewer and fewer of them are persisting with the battle. Interestingly, in the annual marketing survey by AFR Boss magazine, it was found that, of the new market approaches used last year, 9.4% mentioned mobile marketing. However, looking forward into 2007/2008, only 3.4% indicated that mobile marketing would be a likely future marketing approach.

It is getting too late for the telecoms industry to turn around – they may have already lost the game. By preventing our marketing and advertising talent from using mobile marketing they have alienated them to such an extent that many will not come back.

Remember the walled gardens and portals used by telcos and media companies in the 1990s, to monopolise the Internet? The new Internet media companies used the ‘open Internet’ infrastructure to launch their services, they were successful not the those who launched the ‘walled gardens. Since than they have completely taken over the lead from the telcos, because of their ‘greed’ they opted for the wrong business model and there is no way these companies will ever become serious Internet media companies.

Look at IPTV. By throttling down broadband speeds and protecting interests, such as, for example, Foxtel in Australia, the incumbents have lost the war here as well. IPTV has been overtaken by web-based video and TV.

As happened with mobile data, some researchers continue to hype up the market for IPTV, mobile marketing, mobile TV and IPTV, basically supporting the hype generated by the vendors of technologies. Unfortunately, this keeps the confusion alive.

After fixed, the operators will have to retreat to their infrastructure in mobile also and leave the marketing to the appropriate experts in this market. Unfortunately their grip on the market is such that it could well be 2010-2012 before they finally break down the barriers to mobile marketing and other mobile-related services.