I had just decided to start blogging because I was speaking at a lot of conferences and trade events and essentially sharing my thoughts with the “world” anyway and I thought why not also add a blog channel – so I set up a WordPress blog and www.rickjoubert.com was created: I was very enthusiastic initially…

Vincent is one of the early pioneer bloggers in SA and he had seen it all before: amateur bloggers starting with a lot of enthusiasm but without the committed blogger’s stamina to consistently post new content beyond the first year or so of starting a blog; Vincent warned me that my blogging efforts would fizzle out within six months; well he was wrong I lasted two years but he was certainly right about the principle – it is really tough to give sustained attention to a blog when you’re focusing on “important” stuff like running a business!

I have been fairly consistent in the use of the “easy” social media tools like LinkedIn, Twitter and Slideshare but I would like to have another shot at some free form blogging – right here.

So yes, in reply to some questions from some of my old readers, I am still alive and I am still very much engrossed in the development of businesses in the new media (especially mobile) and internet space.

In addition I have become very involved in the past year in the payments space and see some very exciting developments in mobile payments.

Maybe that should be my next post?

Watch this space…

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By December 2006 we had launched our first commercial trials and in October 2007 Vodacom launched its Mobile Media business, and for all intents and purposes the mobile media industry in SA was born.*

Although it is still in its infancy the industry has come a long way in a very short time.

1. Mobile phone usage

With over 71% of adults and 82% of the economically active population (AMPS 2009 B) the cellphone has become the most deeply penetrated medium in SA households and certainly the most ubiquitous consumer technology. All (est. 38 million) of these consumers can be actively engaged by marketers using voice, SMS and USSD. Based on figures provided by the mobile network operators, I have previously estimated the monthly unique usage of mobile Internet services (including sites specifically made for mobile) at 11 million, which is double the size of the PC Web. Research company World Wide Worx (WWW) has recently reported some interesting findings related to the use of mobile Internet services among urban cellphone users: according to Arthur Goldstuck from WWW, over 3.3 million urban cellphone users regularly access Web content on their cellphones and over 4.5 million regularly use connected mobile applications (mainly instant messaging).

      2.  The media owners

The dominant media owners in the mobile space in SA are still not SA publishers or media companies; in the past few years I have been quite critical of the large incumbent SA media companies for not moving faster to invest in the mobile publishing opportunity. To their credit many of them have recently radically upscaled their investment and focus in this area although still mainly with a mobile ‘replication’ paradigm ie building mobile sites and re-publishing existing content from other media into mobile; although that is a great starting point there are a range of other opportunities available to media owners that exploit the unique capabilities of the mobile medium.

I have no doubt that the local publishers will keep growing their presence in the mobile channel but for now the dominant ‘media owners’ are still the foreign giants like Google and Facebook, and other offshore social media and content communities as well as the foreign ad networks like Admob, BuzzCity, InMobi and others. Interestingly, based on their own reported numbers, there are now over one billion SA ad impressions per month available from the WAP-based ad networks alone. The dominant local players remain Vodacom (which itself has almost one billion impressions per month available via propositions like Please Call Me (PCM) tags, Vodafone live! and The Grid) and MXit with its powerful youth marketing proposition; Cell C also recently started making some of its media available, initially only its PCM tags. When will MTN SA enter the mobile media space?

         3. The marketers

For a long time mobile media was considered by some marketing managers to be relevant only to youth executions – that may have been because it was mainly the cool youth-focused beverage and sports apparel brands that were taking the ‘risk’ of moving significant budgets into mobile media at an early stage of the development of the medium. Ironically, today it is the far from cool insurance, banking and retail industries that have really embraced mobile, and with the exception of the mobile entertainment industry, are the leading spenders in mobile media. It is exciting to see the classical marketers in the FMCG brand management community waking up to mobile as both a medium in its own right, a powerful CRM and engagement channel as well as an interactive support channel to many other marketing and advertising interventions.

Outside of the private sector the NGO community has largely understood the power of mobile as a marketing and information delivery platform and yet government (all levels) is yet to embrace the mobile medium. Surely, the potential of mobile for citizen engagement cannot go unrecognised by government for much longer?

The direct marketing (DM) community has for some time acknowledged the importance of mobile as a channel in the DM mix (largest DM channel by volume and value by far) with automated direct dialling and SMS ‘push’ still the dominant channels although MMS is beginning to emerge as an important DM, service delivery and notification channel.

        4. The agencies

It is acknowledged that conventional advertising and media agencies have struggled to come to grips with new media generally speaking and mobile in particular has not been very well understood and, in some cases, even totally ignored. In the past 18 months, however, there has been a dramatic shift in attitude among the top management of a number of large full-service and media agencies. They have been investing in education and digital specialisation, and mobile has solidified its position on the media tick sheet. Even when agencies are still not prepared to seriously consider a role for mobile as a media buy most agencies have now understood the role of mobile as a support channel (some basic examples: SMS short-code response to above-the-line ads, USSD call to action on pack or mobile site as a destination ‘for more information’) for all the stuff they really want to do ie make great ads.

*It should be pointed out that MXit was experimenting with its  mobile advertising offering at that time but did not yet have any significant traction and AdMob was generating millions of ad impressions in SA (although no one in SA had yet heard of them). In fact, I have fond memories of a London meeting in early 2007 with Russell Buckley, one of the founders of AdMob, where he took me through the AdMob global network – at that stage SA was the second largest country in the global AdMob network (after the US)!

** the above is a re-published article which I wrote for the the Mobile Marketing Guide (Published by Marketing Mix Magazine);  Coinciding with the publication this past week of the guide I also did a presentation at the Mobile Marketing Summit (both Jo’Burg and Cape Town) – available here

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It provides a useful framework for the definition of “the mobile internet” and will hopefully assist in clarifying the mobile internet as a concept in future as there is still a lot of confusion around the language used by various role players and a lack of consensus about what actually constitutes the mobile internet.

It is a pity that in its recent research World Wide Worx was unable to properly size the urban adult market for Tier 1 access (“The WAP Internet”) and ironically by sizing Tier 3 (“The mobile web” i.e. the “real” internet on your phone) and NOT Tier 1 the announcement has inadvertently caused some residual confusion about the actual size of the unique user base for the mobile internet….I will provide more detailed thoughts on that in my next blog post.

Meanwhile Arthur Goldstuck from World Wide Worx has confirmed that he will be sizing Tier 1 (the WAP Internet) for the Urban Adult market in South Africa as part of his upcoming “Mobility” study – apparently due for release in about a month.

In addition the MMA South Africa Council is also working on a broad ranging research project due for release in the last quarter of 2010 (hopefully) which will serve to provide greater transparency around some of the key mobile metrics that marketers and publishers have been asking for.

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JOHANNESBURG, 27 May 2010:- The Mobile Internet is no longer a mystery in South Africa, after the announcement of a formal framework for defining the use of the Internet on cellphones.

For several years, the question of how many South Africans use the Internet from their cellphones has been veiled in confusion, with claimed numbers ranging from half a million to 15-million.

During the past year, representatives of two of the key players in the debate, World Wide Worx and the South African Mobile Marketing Association, agreed to a formal framework within which they would report the key statistics for Internet usage and access on cellphones.

The framework consist of three tiers, namely:

Tier 1: The WAP Internet (access to WAP gateways, which includes mobile versions of brand sites, mobile versions of traditional and new media publisher sites, downloads of ringtones, games and other content, which may only involve a single link from the phone; the typical user of the WAP Internet is not always aware of using the Internet).

Tier 2: The Mobile Application Internet (usage of “stand-alone” applications on the phone that rely on data feeds, such as Mxit, Gmail, and Maps; the typical user is aware of using data, but not of fully accessing the Internet)

Tier 3: Mobile Web Browsing (usage of a web browser to access the World Wide Web from the phone – understood by most users to represent full Internet access) 

The framework was developed by World Wide Worx managing director Arthur Goldstuck and Mobile Marketing Association founding chairman Rick Joubert. It is intended to accommodate the main perspectives that usually emerge in debates around the makeup of the mobile Internet.

“It resolves the dilemma that some appear to hype up the mobile Internet while others appear to underplay it, when in fact everyone is talking about different elements of the mobile Internet,” says Goldstuck.

“Defining the mobile Internet is important,” says Joubert. “Neither one of the mobile Internet usage tiers is any more important than the other, but decision-makers and marketers should understand the nature of the end user experience as clearly as possible.”

According to the Mobile Internet in South Africa 2010 study, released today by World Wide Worx, almost all urban cellular users have WAP-capable phones, and a high proportion have used that WAP capability to access a variety of internet based content on a regular basis, but many without realising they were doing so.

Mobile web browsing is measured directly in the new study, and accounts for 3.36-million users at the end of 2009. The Mobile Application Internet is measured across several applications, including instant messaging, downloadable applications, Internet applications, and e-mail. The Mobile Application Internet user base is estimated at about 9-million.

“This does not mean marketers can target 9-million Internet users via their cellphones,” warns Goldstuck. “They would have to target the individual applications that make up that total, which means that the Mobile Application Internet is not a readily addressable market.”

“The media opportunity represented by the three tiers of the mobile web is quite fragmented and not easy to exploit, but that barrier in itself has presented a fantastic opportunity for early adopter brands who have embraced the medium,” says Joubert. “It has also offered opportunities for aggregators of the medium, such as application stores and advertising networks like AdMob and Buzz City, and for the very large publishers like Mxit, all of whom are able to offer marketers very significant reach.”

The Mobile Internet in SA 2010 study, backed by First National Bank, was conducted face to face among urban cellphone users aged 16 and older, representing 16-million South Africans.

Contact

For more information, contact:

• Arthur Goldstuck, MD, World Wide Worx, on +27 11 782-7003 or by e-mail on arthur@worldwideworx.com

• Virginia Magapatona, FNB, Head of Corporate Communications, on + 27 (0) 11 371 9330 or + 27 83 257 2777 or by e-mail on VMagapatona@fnb.co.za
• Rick Joubert, founding chairman of the South African Mobile Marketing Association and Executive Chairman of Yonder Media, click here 

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I was invited to speak at the Mobile Web East Africa conference, another in the series of “Mobile Web Africa” conferences put on by the very impressive All Amber, driven by Matthew Dawes.

Here’s my slideshow.

The message to my very enthusiastic and very friendly east African colleagues was not dissimilar to my theme a few months before at the same conference in Johannesburg and as contained in my previous blog post.

In a nutshell: whilst it is clear for all to see that mobile web consumption is showing explosive growth all over the world and certainly also in Africa, African mobile operators, publishers and entrepreneurs need to extend the definition of “the mobile web” to include access to internet based or proprietary content via SMS, USSD and voice – if they wish to find a market large enough to scale to a significant business opportunity in the present.

That is not to suggest that the availability of smart phones will not continue to grow rapidly in these markets.

In South Africa for example smart phones already account for about 6% of mobile phones in use and it certainly makes sense to begin to invest in content delivery platforms and applications for the top end of the market, users of phones with sophisticated operating systems like Android, the iPhone OS and high end Symbian OS.

In most African markets the number is significantly lower and the reality is that for at least the next three years mass distribution of internet based information is possible only via WAP, SMS, USSD and VOICE channels and from a monetisation perspective the available commercial models (commerce, transactions, content, advertising) will follow the eyeballs only where there is sufficient scale to justify investment.

It will be interesting to see how SMS based internet services like the one just announced by MTN Ghana with Mobile-XL (a J2ME application powered by SMS) and the pure SMS based internet offering launched a while ago by MTN Uganda in partnership with Google and the Grameen Foundation are adopted: much will depend upon the pricing and monetisation models supporting these offerings – how much value will be extracted directly from consumers and how much of the commercial burden will be passed to advertisers and sponsors?

I also need to ask the African mobile network operator community: why so few commercial USSD offerings? It is a proven, reliable and fairly cheap channel and usable by close to 100% of your customers.

In South Africa USSD is used by millions of mobile customers daily and for a variety of services from banking through content delivery, user surveys and customer service.

As beautiful as the iPhone is and as impressive as its applications are, it is very difficult to do anything meaningful with a mere ten thousand users in a market like Kenya for example.

From a mobile advertising perspective we are beginning to see some great momentum in South Africa with approximately $50 million likely to be spent on rate carded mobile media in 2010** – only the mobile web assets with real scale are able to attract direct ad dollars though – the rest must rely on the mobile ad networks like AdMob and Buzz City for monetisation as these networks are able to aggregate the smaller players and present advertisers with a mobile ad proposition with reach.

Ask any media buyer: reach and scale is important.

Key African markets like the east African region and the big markets on the west of the continent will follow South African mobile media trends and my recent visit to Nairobi confirmed that for me quite clearly.

The mobile phone is the only viable global digital mass medium and measured at the same time in its life cycle as Online Media in developed markets –  it is growing much faster.

It was interesting to see Google CEO Eric Schmidt echoing this view in a speech at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a few days ago; in this context look out for the mass commercialisation of voice search which will bring simple old “voice” into the internet space in a major way and could have profound implications for access to information in developing markets.

By the way, Eric summed up his speech by simply saying :  “It’s our goal to make mobile be the answer to pretty much everything.”

Use it, don’t use it.

** Personal opinion based on information sharing with most of the large media owners and ad networks

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There seemed to be about 150 delegates and certainly a very strong interest in and a lot of excitement at the prospect of the growth of the mobile web in Africa – the delegates seemed to be a mixture of entrepreneurs, marketers, agencies, mobile operators and developers and although the actual physical discussion during the “interactive sessions” was surprisingly subdued, the Twitter feed was on fire #MWA09: could that be because the Twitter stream was broadcast to a big screen in the room for all to see? Real time social media at its best but amazing how good old fashioned physical (using your vocal cords) discussion and debate takes a back seat when these tools are introduced.

Here’s a summary of some of the ideas I communicated in my presentation:

• Technology adoption curves look very different in different regions of the world. So for example while DVD player shipments in North America, Europe and Japan are on a steep downward trajectory, in much of the developing world (including Africa) DVD player unit sales are still showing strong growth
• The above implies that we should look for ways to monetise media with scale today rather than being exclusively focused on capabilities of media, devices and networks which are not sufficiently ubiquitous
• That does not mean that we should not invest in the future (of course we should) but it means that there is a balance between accepting (and monetising) the current reality relating to the penetration of data networks, mobile data access charges, mobile internet infrastructure and handsets and simultaneously understanding the likely evolution of these and investing accordingly
• Given the context above I proposed an extended definition of mobile internet access channels to include SMS, USSD and voice
• I also clarified the existing semantic challenge for use of words “Mobile web” (what does this mean?) and offered a three tiered definition developed by myself and Arthur Goldstuck
• Mobile has already emerged as the 7^th of the mass media, can do everything that the other six media can but also has many characteristics that the other media do not have (Tomi Ahonen)
• From a mobile marketing perspective mobile is not only an advertising channel but also an interactive response channel (integrated with traditional media), a powerful direct marketing and CRM channel and a great platform upon which to build a community around a brand
• In developing markets (and certainly in most of Africa) the mobile screen is not the fourth screen (after cinema, TV and PC) but rather the first and often only screen
• In South Africa many ad agencies are beginning to understand the above and in my estimate around 1/3 have already invested in at least one dedicated mobile resource
• In South Africa many media owners and publishers are also beginning to understand the above and have not only started presenting their content in mobile channels but are also beginning to use mobile for digital engagement with print and broadcast content
• All stakeholders need to join hands for the sustainable development of mobile as a medium with particular emphasis on measurement and standards (as with any other medium); to this end a South African council of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) was established late 2008 and although it has about thirty dedicated members there are still some noticeable absences from the advertising, publishing and mobile operator space
• In the long run performance based pricing models (rather than CPM) will dominate the mobile media category, particularly as the media buyer profile moves down the long tail via location targeting
• Mobile network operators have a key role to play in the development of mobile as a medium and if they are to significantly benefit from the resulting new revenue streams then the focus should be on industry development rather than operator specific initiatives
• Online ad spend recently overtook TV to become the largest media category in the UK market with a 23.5% share of the advertising pie
• Considering the shape of the adoption curve for Internet media in both the US and UK markets over the last twelve years, it is my forecast that in developing markets (like most of Africa) where PC based Internet media is virtually non-existent, that mobile will serve as a proxy for Internet media and as the only truly viable new media category and that the mobile media adoption curve will exhibit a similar shape to that of Internet media adoption in the industrialised northern hemisphere

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South Africa continues to be a mobile marketing pioneer: consistently in the top six markets (by volume of mobile advertising impressions) of the major global mobile advertising networks like Admob, Buzz City and Mkhoj (who between them serve close to 500 million monthly advertising impressions to RSA) as well as the dominant independent mobile web browser, Opera MINI.

Further, home-grown mobile social media services like Mxit and The GRID never fail to draw admiration from international peers and also continue to grow beyond the South African market.

Vodacom’s Mobile Media business is a leading mobile advertising unit within the Vodafone group globally; its model has also significantly influenced the thinking of many other mobile operators and global technology vendors around mobile marketing best practice.

It is a little disappointing that the other mobile operators in South Africa have not yet invested in any meaningful way in the development of the mobile marketing industry; they occupy such an important place in the mobile media value chain and have control over a range of high quality advertising inventory.

It is however great to see the large media companies and publishers visibly working toward integrating mobile into their offerings and also in some cases looking to actually publish their content to mobile: we are not only seeing the print media players entering this space but increasingly also the broadcasters – look out for permanent mobile integration into many TV and radio executions in the near future.

Today, in South Africa there are well over 10 million unique monthly users of the mobile Internet (broadly defined) compared to just over half that amount for the PC web; more importantly however is the fact that the overlap between these two access channels is quite small – less than 30 per cent of regular mobile web users have easy access to the PC web.

In addition Mxit (July 2009) reports over 14 million registered users (unfortunately Mxit does not report unique monthly users) and Vodacom’s Please Call Me ad tags reach on average about 23 million unique South Africans across all cellular networks, every month.

I estimate that approximately one third of South African advertising and media agencies already have a dedicated mobile resource, normally as part of a ‘digital’ or ‘new media’ team; agency attitudes to mobile are shifting, with the understanding of its massive potential in this market.

The recent establishment of a South African council of the global Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has, as at end August 2009, attracted close to thirty member companies most of which have become actively involved in supporting the development of four key priorities: mobile marketing standards and formats; measurement; training and networking/PR. So far only three large mainstream agencies have committed to the local MMA so the advertising industry is under-represented and is at risk of missing a great opportunity to help shape the development of the mobile medium.

At Vodacom, close to 70 per cent of mobile media revenues originate from agencies as opposed to brands direct – a sign of a medium fast gaining acceptance (the 2009 Loeries advertising awards will for the first time also include a mobile advertising award).

In addition to driving innovation, and enhanced user experiences in publishing and advertising, mobile is also having a significant impact on processes related to customer service as well as commerce (mobile wallets), both of which are ultimately key in the overall marketing value chain.

We will look back at 2009 as the year that the chasm between the early adopters of mobile media and the early majority (mainstream agencies and brands) was crossed: the year that the 7^th mass medium reached a tipping point.

* Note:  I wrote this piece for the October 2009 edition of Marketing Mix Magazine

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I try to contribute to industry education both via my involvement with the MMA as well as in my capacity as head of Vodacom’s mobile media unit and this normally takes the form of presentations at conferences, participation in panel discussions, presentations and workshops at media and full service agencies and now and then guest lecturer stints at colleges and universities.

A more interesting recent experiential educational push however was the Vodacom backed “MAD” challenge, which ran over a number of months and had fairly large scale participation by staff at South African ad agencies.

Ultimately there is nothing quite like actually consuming a medium with a view to understanding it.

The MAD challenge has just wrapped up and yesterday I presented the two top prizes to the winner and runner-up, both of whom happen to work at OMD in Johannesburg – these guys will soon be on their way to Mauritius and Zanzibar!

OMD also won the top agency prize (R50K worth Vodacom media).

Check out the detail as well as some interesting thoughts from Josh Dovey, OMD CEO – here.

For more background to the MAD campaign including a background video, go here.

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It is also beginning to disrupt some cosy legacy marketing value chains, for example, in the traditional retail space savvy smartphone owners are increasingly engaging in in-store price comparison behaviour.

Operating systems from Microsoft, RIM (Blackberry), Apple, Nokia (Symbian), Palm and now Android (driven by Google) combined with some pretty sexy hardware from a range of vendors are radically changing the way that people work, play, consume and create information.

Being within arm’s reach of most of the information you need and desire 24/7 creates a level of stickiness which is almost addictive and probably also makes us pretty lazy.

For example, a well-known ‘ad man’ told me recently over lunch that he almost never uses Facebook on his PC anymore because the Facebook application for his Blackberry is so great and never more than a few seconds away. In addition, he gets to create and upload content in a seamless way using only one small device.

Talk about personal media.

It is, however, the recent emergence of the Apple iPhone, which has truly transformed the way we think about the mobile ‘phone’ and has forced competitors in the hardware, software and mobile operator space to raise their game. It has also forced a wave of innovation (and reverse engineering!) which has made a lot of very powerful products available at increasingly affordable prices.

Add to this the Apple application store which, on 23 April 2009, saw its billionth application download – ranging from utilities like weather, navigators and song identifiers to games and information resources – there are over 35 000 applications available in the App Store.

The success of the Apple application store has driven a range of competitors like Blackberry, Nokia and Google to follow suit and the recently announced Vodafone application store clearly signals the determination of mobile operators not to be marginalised by the Internet and handset brands.

Although the browsing of the regular Web is a far better experience on most high-end smartphones than on a regular cellphone, the application stores with their massive diversity are causing the creation of an ‘application-based Internet’ for mobile, which implies a very user-friendly mobile Internet experience as well as more often than not an aesthetically pleasing ‘rich media’ experience – all of which is driving dramatically increased mobile Internet session frequency, session time and page impressions.

It is interesting to see how once advertisers have been seduced by the marketing possibilities in smartphones, they soon become converts to the broader mobile media opportunity and start to seek much larger reach than currently offered by the smartphone population, even at the expense of dazzling creative executions.

Brands have opportunities to engage the typically high-end smartphone audience in a variety of ways some of which are classic display advertising, brand sponsorship of applications and utilities and, most interestingly, brand applications, where brands are able to create their own applications allowing customers to engage with the brand in a meaningful way.

A radical and successful example of a brand application is an iPhone application from Kraft where rather than merely ‘sponsoring’ an application Kraft has had the temerity to develop and brand an ‘iFood Assistant’ application featuring recipes and tips, and place it in the App Store charged out at a price of US$0.99! This application is among the top 100 App Store applications by download.

It is worth mentioning a few other interesting (and this time free) recent brand applications: Audi A4 Driving Challenge (370 000 downloads in first two weeks!) and Zippo Virtual Lighter application – yes, now non-smokers no longer need to feel left out when the lights go out at rock concerts (number one free application in the lifestyle category).

Current smartphone offerings clearly show the future of mobile advertising but it will be some years before smartphones have a sufficiently deep penetration in developing markets to allow for mobile campaigns with the kind of reach required by most mass market brands.

Meanwhile, I would recommend that brands look for opportunities to include the capabilities offered by smartphones within their mobile strategy – particularly brands serving primarily affluent market segments – but not at the expense of the more ubiquitous mobile media which today provides meaningful and large-scale mobile engagement opportunities with the mass consumer population.

Note: the above piece was written for Marketing Mix magazine and is published in the June 2009 edition

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The event started with a introductory speech by the Finland Ambassador to South Africa (MoMo has strong Finnish origins and of course Finland has created an amazing country model for everything ICT and are actively looking to assist developing countries do the same)

I was one of three “panelists” at the event all of whom were asked to do a five minute talk on “Mobile in Africa – current state and future opportunities” followed by some questions from the floor and an unusually civilised debate between the panelists.

The question topics ranged from opportunities in core mobile services right through to emerging value added services, media and m-commerce.

MoMo is not really about presentations and panel discussions though – most of the audience was there to network and yes let’s say it – to sell: before the first beer had even been ordered business cards were flying around the room and elevator pitches being done for the latest and greatest in mobile services or tech solutions.

If you are an entrepreneur in the mobile space or an investor or corporate looking for mobile opportunities in the South African or African market then look out for the next MoMo event in the coming months – could be a few hours of networking well spent.

Contact me via this form and I will gladly pass your details on to the organisers.

Well done to Dylan Piatti from Cellsmart, Prejlin Naidoo from Cap Gemini and a few others who have taken the intiative to get MoMo started in South Africa.

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With the large developed economies likely to remain in deep recession during 2009 and with a significant slow down in South African economic growth it seems likely that overall ad spend growth in South Africa will be nowhere near the usual double digit media inflation numbers we’re so used to seeing – and that of course will also impact mobile advertising.

However mobile advertising revenues will continue to grow faster than any other traditional or new media channel and during 2009 will overtake investment in Online advertising.

Although there will be a slow down in experimental spend in mobile advertising from brands who have not yet fully understood the medium and are unwilling to take risks in a tough economic environment, the measurability and adaptability of the medium will ensure significantly increased mobile budgets for brands who have seen solid and sustained ROI’s over multiple campaigns being achieved both in the direct response and pure brand advertising space.

Among brands who will not put any significant budget into mobile advertising in 2009, many of them will still discover the power of integrating mobile into much of their traditional above-the-line advertising as a response and engagement channel – mainly using SMS but increasingly also the mobile web for mass market digital interactivity with customers.

Advertising agencies really started putting some serious effort into understanding mobile through late 2008 and I predict that before the end of 2009 at least 30% of established media and full service agencies would have developed a dedicated mobile planning and execution capacity.

I saw a major upsurge late 2008 in the attendance by agency people at events and conferences related to mobile as well as a significant number of requests for presentations and workshops, often involving almost the entire agency.

At Vodacom we have also seen the percentage of mobile media spend sourced from agencies (vs. brands direct) go from less than 20% one year ago to over 60% currently.

The financial services and mobile (handset and content) brands will continue to dominate the mobile advertising spend charts although there will be significant growth in the investment in mobile by the retail, consumer goods and automotive industries.

We will also see the emergence of three entirely new large scale purchasers of mobile media during 2009: political parties, government and the small business long tail.

Political parties, inspired by Barack Obama’s incredibly successful use of new media will invest significant sums in mobile (I have my doubts as to the quality of the execution based on lack of local experience) leading up to the South African general elections.

Progressive and efficient government departments will realize the unprecedented power of mobile as a medium to both deliver a government message as well as interact with a very large percentage of the population.

The small business “long tail” opportunity for localized mobile advertising will start to be unlocked because of the emergence during 2009 of at the very least city level targeting for most mobile advertising offerings – by end 2010 suburb level targeting will be common place.

I also expect a handful of large brands to make a play for ownership of a mobile utility, mobile application or mobile content piece during 2009 – especially in the mobile social media space.

Look out for brand sponsored IM services, social networking applications, location based services, mobile tickers and mobile content.

By the end of 2009 there will be more than twelve million unique users of the mobile web (WAP or WEB access on a handset) – that is likely to be at least twice as many as the PC web.

I have previously estimated that there were about 9.5M unique users of WAP in South Africa in September 2008.

Finally, I expect the mobile phone to start living up to its promise as a wallet, ticketing and vouchering channel during 2009.

Although there is effectively already a large volume of m-commerce, it is largely confined to the purchase of mobile content items using network based charging like premium SMS.

Good work done during 2008 by banks like FNB with the Cell Pay Point product and start-ups like SWAP Mobile and the probable local launch during 2009 of m-commerce services similar to Vodafone’s Kenyan operator Safiricom’s mPesa, combined with the coming to market of infrastructure projects like Gautrain and others, should start seeing the mobile phone emerge as a more general purpose payment and fulfillment channel – and that is good news for marketers.

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