Mobile Ad Targeting for 3 Italia

Christine Herron cites a recent research results about mobile Ad Targeting and its effects

Adriano Gaved from mobile media company 3 Italia recently shared the results of an internal case study on mobile content ad targeting. The big takeaways from their testing:

1. In mobile content, carriers will be disappointed to discover that the consumer's expectations around content consumption will trump his or her preexisting norms around mobile usage. e.g., free and advertising-supported is the standard content model, rather than premium payments. (Notable exceptions: users are willing to pay extra for games, adult
   content, and music.)



2. Each time you divide a target cluster, you will double the clickthrough rate.

That is to say, we Italians are avid consumers but... greedy?
Exception is -as always is- Porn.

Anyway, what's really interesting is the fact that you need to segment your user base, in order that you can obtain more performing Ad.
3 Italia tests stopped at a certain level of granularity. What Christine wonders is if they stopped because they just reached a sufficiently effective CTR or if they failed to achieve reasonable improvements by segmenting more.

In addition to that, I wonder if they are segmenting on mobility attitudes by interpreting the cell registration data (like long-distance-workers, sales representatives moving by car, sales representatives moving by plane, etc.)

Technorati Tags: cernio,
mobile, Christine Herron,

Ten things you need to know about "ten things you need to know about" lists

1. Lists should be guidelines. But they pretend to be commandments.
   
2. Lists are usually a personal representation of a more complex world: each reader would have pointed out different aspects, not just those ones.
   
3. Lists represent a "compressed archive" of some more thoughtful reasoning. They cannot replace a well-written document.
   
4. There are no good lists and bad lists: lists have no soul, no will :)
   
5. There is a tendency to grow the list in a more structured way, thus transforming the list into a document tree. But want to save the trees, don't we? :)
   
6. When someone reads a list, he/she feels an incoercible desire of building up his/her own list.
7. Most of the bullet points are just obvious statements we could have made without them.
8. A list cannot contain sufficient information to strengthen or weaken an argument. It's insane to pretend that a list can save you from a higher-pitch-debate.
9. When you feel confident that the list has been "marble carved" in your brain, the first thing you do happens to violate the guidelines contained in the list!
   
10. Sometimes it happens that the list is made of 13 or 9 elements. Some weird mental constraint (it has to be long enough, but not too long) lead the writer to cut out 3 interesting ones or to add one dumb bullet point to it. Like this one is!
    

Technorati Tags: cernio, lists, joke,

Fast Second: book review

On the verge of writing my previous post I started writing a review on a very interesting book. I was "frightened" of being rough, impolite, offensive somehow to the readers or to the authors.
Then, I had the occasion to read a really crude and earth-shattering review by Joel Spolsky on "Dreaming in Code" (Yep, I read his blog).
All of a sudden, my worries vanished :)

So, here is

My personal review of Fast Second (by C. C. Markides, P. A. Geroski)

It is a really interesting book, where "interesting" is twofold: the ideas expressed are interesting, and the writing style is interesting too, for it provides information by repeating the same concept in different ways. It seems to me that the most interesting thing in this book is the repetition scheme in itself.

In fact, it helps the reader by just writing the concepts twice or more, in order that the reader doesn't need to re-read the same sentence more than once. Memorization is easier because information is redundant and presented from different viewpoints (like 2D and 3D representation).

That is to say, it could have been written in half the paper, but it wouldn't have been such a light reading on such a complex matter. Books like this can be read on a noisy flight near the turbines, with a crying baby on your side, without the need to concentrate on the topic.

Uhmmm, what's missing here?

Oh yeah, I forgot the topic on which this book is focused on! The book is about competitive innovation in the mass market, it clearly advocates the strategy of waiting for a settlement of the technology evolution, then enter the mass market (well, actually it is "build a rather inexistent one") just before (or shortly after) a dominant design appears, and when most of Startups are running out of fuel.

What I don't understand is how such an ecosystem can sustain itself, and how can I estimate such a high risk (technical and financial) of entering in a typically narrow time window with big investments, which are needed to consolidate the product and create the market.

My Advice

Similar "redundant" books have been written and edited by Kathy Sierra and are called "Head First": they are far more capturing and interesting than Fast Second, and I advice to buy them if you want to stuff more things in your brain with lesser effort.

Technorati Tags: cernio, fast second,
Joel Spolsky, Kathy Sierra,