Jason Wilson is a researcher and teacher at the University of Luton, Luton, UK. His primary responsibility there is assisting the editors of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Dr. Alexis Weedon and Dr Julia Knight. In January 2005 he submitted a PhD in Griffith University’s school of Arts, Media and Culture focussed on videogame aesthetics. He has presented and published aspects of his research in a range of international forums.

Mobile Dis-content
Mobile Content World , 13th-15th September 2005, Olympia Conference Centre, Kensington, London.
By Jason Wilson

The development of new forms of mobile content and new strategies for selling it is taking place with a sense of urgency that goes beyond the normal hustle and hype of the ‘creative industries’. Fierce and accelerating competition in mobile telecommunications in almost all markets has placed strong, ongoing downward pressure on prices and income for traditional voice and text services. Providers are in dire need of new ways to bolster receipts. Meanwhile, 3G phones’ new technical capacities offer a range of opportunities for old and new players in content to expand the range of products and services, but already there are a swarm of enterprises competing for a place in the mobile content value chain. The market for these services exhibits pronounced regional variations, and its ultimate size and preparedness to pay for mobile content are unclear, especially in Europe. Its old news that there’s a buck in ringtone downloads, but its thinly spread among countless players, and premised on one-off downloads or purchases. Certain examples of mobile gaming have successfully exploited 3G connectivity, but the market is still in its infancy. Outside East Asia, no ‘killer app’ has brought about the mass-scale uptake of longer-term, subscription-based content services.

This was clearly the context informing Mobile Content World, held from 13th-15th September 2005 at the Kensington Olympia conference centre, London. While the speakers at Mobile Content World were gamely assertive as to the quality of their products, and confident in their ability to sell them, not far from the surface was an anxiety that European mobile users will not be persuaded to pay for the array of extant and emerging forms of 3G content.

Judging from this event, the industry forming around content provision for mobiles has identified two areas where these problems can be reversed: their understanding of the audience and the content itself. The first area of interest gives rise to a set of questions. Why is the (potential) audience so resistant to subscription services? How do people understand their mobiles as media? Which audience segment is most likely to break first and start subscribing? How do they want their content delivered? The second area gives rise to debate between those who think that mobile phones as a medium require the evolution of medium-specific forms of content, and those who think that existing media – broadcasting, cinema, games – can be successfully adapted to phones given a better understanding of the circumstances of mobile media consumption.

Valerie Accary, the Managing Director of advertising agency BBDO, talked in her keynote about her firm’s research efforts at understanding the mobile market for advertisers. Her framework for analysing mobile technologies is a familiar, dilute postmodernism: mobile technologies have led to (a) an acceleration of time, with an accompanying decline in attention spans and forward planning; (b) an expansion and proliferation of new forms of social networks; (c) a change in consumption patterns and the rise of an ‘empowered consumer’ who brands and content providers must connect with. There are opportunities and dangers here: temporal compression, new social networks and more critical consumers mean that a brand can be made or trashed in record time in ways that are difficult to
predict or control.

BBDO’s research found that the mobile, as distinct from email or the home telephone, is seen as a distinctly intimate and private technology (‘my mobile is my right hand’), so traditional direct marketing to the phone is resented as intrusive. This leaves content providers and especially advertisers in the difficult position of having to be invited to advertise on a medium whose very intimacy is what makes it so attractive. Accary suggested leveraging opinion-making communities (as in Tylenol’s creation of a community of extreme sports aficionados), piggy-backing on virtual communities’ production of and desire for specific kinds of content (as in Snickers’ delivery of Euro 2004 results to teenaged boys’ mobiles), building creative campaigns (as in, apparently, Burger King’s www.subservientchicken.com), utilising connectivity (as in Nike’s rip off of mixed reality gaming concepts in Recon), and taking advantage of the commercial savings to be made (this last amounted to the idea that if you can get customers to agree to receive your SMS advertising, it doesn’t cost very much to deliver it).

The things that struck me most about this presentation, which was very well received by the corporate audience, were (i) the shrieking obviousness of most of its content (people don’t like being spammed on their mobiles; some people will accept sponsorship of information they find useful) ; (ii) the extent to which alleged ‘creativity’ in this form of advertising is premised on essentially parasitic relationships to the spontaneous networking of consumers; and (iii) how perturbed the industry is by the dilemmas posed by the juicy intimacy of this new medium for advertising and the resentment their brand might encounter if they actually use it. The naff and/or derivative nature of much of what was forwarded as innovative mobile campaigns underscores the structural problem the advertising industry is still encountering vis-à-vis media which don’t allow them to simply pump ads through to the audience.

The problems of advertisers are similar to the problems of broadcasters who want a slice of the mobile content market. As TV viewing declines, broadcasters whose whole business revolves around producing long-form broadcast content are more than a little concerned to keep their brands and services viable by tailoring them to the ‘mobile lifestyle’. Tanya Price, Head of Business Development at BBC Broadcast, formerly part of the venerable Corporation but now sold off to the Macquarie Bank, did her best to be upbeat about offering tailored and adapted broadcast news and entertainment content to mobile users. BBCB provides BBC-derived, specifically crafted editorial material to 3’s network users here in the UK, and to their and Price’s credit, they have gotten as far as realising that mobiles are a unique medium, with a unique set of viewing habits and contexts attached to them. She thinks that people will want to watch three main types of content:

* They’ll want to be entertained on the move, they’ll want short, punchy and funny stuff to fill in those moments of boredom…

* They’ll want to see the ‘money-shot,’ pictures that just can’t wait until they get home;… England winning the Ashes…

* Or they want to have timely and relevant content which fills an immediate need that won’t be relevant by the time they get home… in a supermarket they might want to screen a quick cookery vid to give them inspiration before buying the ingredients for that night’s supper (Price, 2005)

There is something slightly patronising in the tone here, but it is clearly a product of analysis and experience. Given this, though, there are some problems with using broadcast material to meet these needs. The first is that the standard toolkit of contemporary broadcasting – including tricky editing, headline tickers, fancy camera work, overdesigned sets – all turn into visual mush on a one-inch screen. Price’s answer to this is to subtract from the televisual image and flow in order to adapt it to mobile broadcasting: head and shoulders shots, tight camerawork, a minimum of visual extras and very short news grabs and packages. There is a useful insight here, but at the same time it’s depressing that the brave new world of mobile content will be in part a remediation of the ‘talking
heads’ aesthetic of early television.

Its not entirely clear that this effort at repackaging the televisual for the ‘unmoored screens’ (Pace, 2005) of 3G mobiles is succeeding in the important sense of attracting paying subscribers. When questioned and then pressed by an audience member about the break-even points in terms of subscribers, Price claimed that the complexity of the services offered meant that she could give no answer, nor even match an exemplary bundle with a break-even point. To one listener at least, this seemed frankly implausible. Either BBCB has not done its projections, which seems highly unlikely, or they have and the numbers are so large relative to the current market for this kind of mobile content that revealing them would scare off potential partners, clients and investors. You can bet if these crucial figures were good, or if break-even points were likely to be reached anytime soon, the question would not have needed to be asked. When a company’s numbers are good, as I discovered in the few presentations where they were, they will be shouted from the rooftops.

Unsurprisingly, porn, or ‘erotica’ as the industry prefers it, is being forwarded as a way of breaking the 3G subscriptions market, and those providing it seem to be doing an increasingly healthy trade, at least by comparison with other sectors. Porn has all the advantages as content that news broadcasts and advertising do not: people in a key demographic seem to want it (‘primarily 18-35 adult male, highly educated and with a high income’ (Penev, 2005)), it is a flexible commodity which can be delivered and priced in numerous ways (from one-off still downloads to mp3s to voice services to video), it fits with the notions of intimacy that seem to cluster around mobiles, it is open to all market players, and people are accustomed to using new technologies to access it (we could even say, along with games, that porn is a major educator in the use of new technologies since it draws audiences to those technologies: ‘38% of mobile searches are for adult content’ (Penev, 2005)). Even here, though, Victor Penev of Playboy Online expressed a concern that the ‘Wild west environment’ of 10 years ago would return, when millions of online porn downloads happened without anyone making a cent (presumably Playboy wasn’t a great place to work during this period). The question is whether or not all that mid-1990s free content acted in effect as a kind of loss leader, not only for the porn industry, which has since stabilised somewhat, but for internet use in general and then ecommerce and online content provision as a whole.

Gaming is one area where some companies have made a reasonable fist of things, particularly in Asian territories and particularly if they are involved with providing content Nokia’s nGage phone/handheld hybrid. Scott Foe, who developed Sega’s Pocket Kingdom (a mobile MMOG) for the Ngage and then moved over to Nokia Games to be work as a senior producer, has something to crow about, since his is one of the leading titles in a $2.6 billion market (which puts mobile gaming, as he pointed out, practically neck and neck with PC gaming). He spent a lot of his presentation outlining the clear differences between designing for the PC platform and designing for mobiles.

Whereas the more immersive PC experience demands games that are ‘easy to learn and impossible to master’, the more distracted nature of mobile play means that there must be a more gentle ascent to success. Very quickly, designers like Foe have concretised vague concepts like ‘connectivity’ and ‘community’ in design, realising that a satisfying multiplayer game cuts down on development costs and boosts a service’s longevity by relying on P2P interaction as a source of pleasure. Asynchronous play has been accounted for in the design of games like Pocket Kingdom – if a player’s device is switched off the structure of the game means that this will not alter the result, and Nokia’s Ngage Arena server will replay the sequence of play. Technical problems for designers around the bewildering range of mobile telephony providers have been eased by a range of tools that Nokia offers for Ngage developers. Having said this though, it must be said that content success stories like Pocket Kingdom are vanishingly rare, and that the ‘worldwide’ statistics that Foe used to illustrate Nokia’s success are actually unevenly distributed across the major content markets. Also, it may be much easier to explain success than failure.

Apart from the papers summarised above, there was a widespread, evident industry concern that mobile content is not ‘sticky’ enough to garner an audience, or that the audience is too mysterious and ornery to be encouraged to take it up. Papers with titles like ‘Developing the killer application for mobile content’, ‘Innovating to create desire for music content’, ‘Making mobile music pay’, ‘Content acquisition – finding the right content’, ‘Is 3G for work or play?’ ‘The Asian experience of mobile content: why it has been so successful’ all revealed in their broader themes and detail the concern that the industry has not hit upon any kind of content or business model in

Western territories that can make the kind of money they may have been led to expect would flow from the consumer adoption of these technologies. Then there’s the mysterious, younger audience: one afternoon was taken up with a panel session, ‘How to exploit the massive youth market through mobile channels’, followed by a faintly bizarre ‘Live youth focus group’, where some ‘representative youth’ were dumped on the stage and asked questions about
their self-definition by moderators and audience. (I can only hope they were given iPods).

The overall impression, then, is of an industry which, as a whole, is a little at sea. Offering the simple observation that it took some years before anybody saw too many profits from the internet, that content designers take time to find their rhythm with a new medium and markets take time to mature is likely to be little comfort to those who are in a situation where they have a lot of glossy, expensive content in the pipeline and very few customers volunteering to pay for it.

Media historians on the whole get paid far too little to be allowed to speak at such events, but had one snuck on stage s/he might have offered that insofar as we can make any general claims about media change, it is often very simple applications, with a quasi-didactic function, that ‘break’ new entertainment media. From the history of games we can see that Pong and its clones initiated arcade and home console gaming with bare-bones visuals and interactivity; cartridge-based hand-held gaming arrived with Tetris; and Snake showed us how to play with our 2G mobiles. Content designers need to think not about shoehorning content from other media onto the one-inch screen, and relying on marketers to goad the audience into buying it, but about investing in content design (like Pocket Kingdom) that is sympathetic with and extensive of the characteristics of the medium, and new media educators and researchers need to think about how to conceptualise such design.

References
Foe, Scott (2005) ‘Creating games, community and entertainment.’ Presentation given at ‘Mobile Content World’ conference, Olympia, London, 15th-18th September 2005.
Pace, John (2005) ‘All aboard! Our screens are unmoored’, Metro Magazine, June.
Penev, Victor (2005) ‘The adult opportunity: Monetising mobile media.’ Presentation given at ‘Mobile Content World’ conference, Olympia, London, 15th-18th September 2005.
Price, Tanya (2005) ‘Made for mobile TV.’ Presentation given at ‘Mobile Content World’ conference, Olympia, London, 15th-18th September 2005.
Terrapinn B2B Media (2005) Mobile Content World Conference Workbook, London: Terrapinn.