Getting the mobile message

Michael Hedges March 16, 2009 Follow on Twitter

We know that mobile phones are everywhere. Four billion people worldwide have a mobile phone subscription, said a recent ITU study. We are, literally, lost with a mobile device. Get the message?

Mobile media is now more than just big business. It’s big media, big new media. And like all things new and everywhere everybody in media and advertising is looking at how to get in on the action. Mobile devices – from iPhones to Smartphones, Blackberry’s to Treo’s – connect people to people, always on, through the Web, no wire required.

With wireless Web access more available, considerable attention has been given to rich content delivery, micropayments required. Broadcasters and publishers dream of revenue streams from streaming content, capturing new eyes and ears that also download stuff to mobile devices. Except for music and games, it hasn’t yet become the next big thing. 

The connection between a big idea and reality almost always passes through a person. Call them consumers, users, listeners or viewers, it’s the same path. Woe be onto them who believe that person can be forced to follow the business plan.

It is useful, and occasionally discouraging, to see the world as it really exists. Fortunately, that message occasionally arrives. People, says a new TNS study, really do adapt technology. 

Mobile devices remain, primarily, tools of communication. We call. We are called. The last century’s most quoted media thinker Marshall McLuhan – “The medium is the message” - called the telephone a ‘cool’ medium because “the ear is given a meager amount of information.” That “information” must be “completed,” by one brain or another, the medium’s message – phone technology, in this case – is dependent on the user. If the telephone is a ‘cool’ medium, by that definition, the mobile phone is the ‘coolest’. (i.e. How r u? LOL)

The mobile phone is the world’s message center, far more than email, says the TNS study released last week (March 13). Three-quarters of all messages sent go through a mobile device, increasing from 59% just one year ago. The message is that messages have gone mobile.

“As mobile devices slowly take away usage share from fixed services in developed markets,” said TNS Technology’s Sam Curtis in a release, “in emerging markets consumers are more likely to by-pass fixed communications altogether and go straight to mobiles.” In emerging markets, 90% of messages come and go from mobile devices.

TNS offers conclusions, very much in line with the earlier ITU study, about emerging markets “leap-frogging” developed regions in mobile phone use. Where fixed-line technology stalled mobile technologies took over, typically with greater access. More developed regions – Western Europe and North America – show a preference for PC-based email, though that, too, is changing as Smartphones come equipped with Web access.

Curtis suggests growth in Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) is resulting from “low cost and less formal tone… ideally suited to consumers who can communicate without boundaries for the first time.”

What, then, for broadcasters and publishers competing for consumers’ time and money against the mobile tide?  Many offer SMS alerts, downloads, uploads and chat tools. Advertisers absolutely salivate at the thought of a mass medium of enormous scale, yet addressable and always on.

Social networking websites – Facebook, et.al. – are all the rage for consumers, even more as they migrate to mobile platforms.  They almost perfectly fall in line with McLuhan’s definition of ‘cool’. Consumers drawn to social networking sites are finding a medium that helps complete their message. These mobinauts have a specific purpose in mind. “High definition” or “hot” media – cinema, radio and newspapers, according to McLuhan – have a different, less interactive purpose.

Twitter is another example of ‘low definition’ media, instant thought in 140 characters. News agencies are apparently ‘monitoring’ Twitter traffic for headlines. In an email to ftm about Twittering after the last Beijing earthquake, Lucy Hornby of Reuters Beijing wrote: “Word that there had been a small earthquake in Beijing went out on Twitter one minute before the major news organizations: This is true, but had virtually no informative value.” Of course not; ‘low definition’ media carries very little information. That’s the idea!

The failure of broadcasters and publishers to find joy in new media – mobile or Web – is the failure to see the difference between content and technology. That technology makes rich and dense content possible doesn’t faze new media users who prefer fragments often to be assembled by others.  McLuhan’s theories are controversial and particularly damned by new media people. He never had a mobile phone nor used the internet. But he did understand the effects of technology revolutions.

“Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology.” (Understanding Media – The Extensions of Man, 1964)

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