Entrepreneur - business angel in the Middle East

I had a discussion a couple of days ago with some internet marketers. I was really disappointed by their attitude regarding the mobile.

Of course, all of them will tell you that mobile is the future but in fact, they complain about the poor creativity capabilities in comparison with internet, you heard some “we are not there yet”, “mobile need few more years to be ready”,”there is no data usages”, etc…

Does that ring you a bell? the old media marketers 10 years ago when there were talking about internet.

If you recognize yourself in this, please wake up.

Mobile Age is NOW

To realize that, you need to look east (Japan, Korea, Singapore and an European exception Finland with Nokia) not as usual to USA (my opinion of USA telecom industry here), Iphone missed “rendez-vous” with Europe is another example.

+8* is a good information source for that

Then, you will realize why Google is so active with the android platform.

In a near future, their main competitor will surely be Nokia with their 40% market share (more than 300 millions handsets per year) and their Symbian platform.

I quote Tim O’Reilly in a recent post:

a platform beats an application every time.

the platform beats the application, the mobile will beat the Internet.
Who will be the next champion ? Do the maths.

Last week, I’ve broke my Iphone last week (see here)

But It was still working, so we decided to remove the glass to have access directly to Multi-touch pad. Despite what it seems on the video (see below), it’s still fully functionnal but not my fingers (it hurts !)

more on my flickr account

Here is the video

Why?

Because I can.

More surgery to come

I was just getting back home last night after a very nice diner with some friends.

While everybody was saying goodbye, my Iphone escaped from my hand and fell full face on the ground.

Here is the result

You know what, It still fully functional

I spend a lot of time talking, thinking about the evolution of advertising. I even get pay for that.

for a lot of peoples, Nike or Apple are the champions. In a way, it’s true. They have great products, they are really strong in innovation and their communication is really best in class.

But Google is the real champion as a brand and as a media.

1) Google Brand reaches the Top 20 (source: Interbrand Best global brands 2007) in less than 10 years without buying any media. For that, they have created the first business case of every advertiser dream.
How did they do that ? one key word: Innovation
Strong buzz around products: Gmail, they offered 1Go storage capacity by invitation only when others offered only 25mb then 250mb in reaction. Bottom line
Open Culture: Google maps, every website can use them for free, a real service and Google gets its logo on every page
Entertainment: how hasn’t play hours with google earth. Bottom line for them, you have called all your friends about it and spent hours with a Google logo in front of your eyes.

2) Google is the center of the advertising world
Having a website google search compliant is now mandatory,
they have redefine the advertising model by introducing remuneration based on performance, first online but TV is next to come (read here).
With Adsense, Google have provide a lot of startups their first stream of incomes. In a way, Google is also the most active business angel

To me, Google will be the spark that divide she advertising market into two worlds.

The “performance model” one where you will pay only for results based on its ultra dominant system Adwords. I’m not talking only for advertising but for all kinds of media, especially TV because of TIVOs systems and Catch up TVs.

It will the largest share of the market in term of revenues, but not in term of profit for the industry except for google of course.
This world will be good for generating sales, driving traffic but not to create brand or create your reputation. This last point introduce the second world in the advertising industry : the advertising on demand world.

Born with the Internet, the on demand advertising (ODA) can be define by one rule: if you have to buy ad spaces to promote it it’s not ODA.
ODA is and will be more and more about creating Branded Entertainment, Application or online services that people want to see, use even pay for it.
Need examples other than Google Earth? M&M’s e-commerce, Burger King Video games, etc..
Isn’t one of the best form of advertising to have people downloading your product, playing with it or spread the world about it?

ODA market will be small in term of market share by definition (remember no media buying) but will be the most profitable segment for agencies

Everything between those 2 worlds will disappear especially the good old $1 millions 30s TV commercial, but it seems that the industry is stunk in the old good “pay per view” model even Yahoo, so Google will have for years a bright blue sky in front of them.

I hope I will be wrong about that (no competition in front of google) but I doubt.