Former head of mobile strategy for News International (NI), Andrew Bagguley has been hired as a consultant for Guardian News&Media (GNM), as the title begins its move into the mobile market.
After two years at NI Bagguley has just started at GNM, a spokeswoman for the group confirmed to Journalism.co.uk.
“We want to benefit from his experience launching mobile for News International so he’ll be working closely with our in house teams to formulate our plans,” she said.
GNM currently offers news alerts via text message and a version of Guardian.co.uk for PDA, SmartPhone and BlackBerry devices.
But in Amsterdam, just a few weeks later, that sentiment was turned on its head. That next year will be the year of mobile is what people have said each year for five years, said Ilicco Elia, head of mobile for Reuters. No, ‘it’s here’, he told the assembled range of newspaper experts at the World Digital Publishing Conference 2008.
Where as Elia once was employed in ‘emerging media’ for Reuters, he now very much part of the mainstream product: “mobile has since emerged,” he said.
Elia certainly objected to one of Martha Stone’s slides during her presentation on online media, which said ‘mobile advertising to become a real business in a few years’. ‘My boss will shoot me, if he sees that’ he said. Elia’s been telling him that is already the case for a while; it is a real business.
While Elia stressed that he did not think “you should be going into mobile to make a lot of money immediately.” He said, “you can make more and more money slowly, slowly. Integrate into the rest of your products and it will come.”
His presentation touched on examples where Reuters have successfully monetized mobile: in the IBM ‘Stop Talking, Start Doing’ campaign (a slogan that should be applied to mobile, Elia said); by using Nokia phone cameras on for fast and effective reporting, and for widgets on iGoogle.
To think about search engine optimisation (SEO) is “a complete and utter given,” he said.
“You have to do it – SEO and SE marketing – and it is a cheap way to send people to your site,” he said.
The other mobile speakers sharing the stage, Jorma Härknönen, the senior vice president at MTV Media in Finland, responsible for internet and consumer businesses said were of similar opinion and Fredrik Oscarson, the founder and VP new business director for Mobiento, a Sweden based mobile marketing agency, were of similar opinion.
“Give it five years time, and I think people will choose to surf news on the mobile, because the mobile will have functionality [e.g GPS] that the internet doesn’t,” Fredrik Oscarson told Journalism.co.uk.
A short interview with Oscarson can be listened to here. He talks about mobile content for newspapers and different ways of advertising on mobile.
Plenty more blog action to come as I file back from Digital Revenue Goldmine, WAN’s 3rd World Digital Publishing Conference. In the meantime, here’s a nice pic from Martha Stone’s (Director, Shaping the Future of the Newspaper, at WAN) talk which looked at US advertising trends. We’re currently in the monetizing mobile session – hope lots of productive hints will come out of that.
The Sun’s mobile barcode service, which allow users to scan barcodes in the paper to access extra information on their mobiles, has received 11,000 subscribers, according to a report by Mobile Today.
The ‘quick response’ (QR) technology requires users to download software onto their mobiles from The Sun’s site – though Nokia handsets have this pre-installed.
“There is an educational process that needs to be done. In the next few months we’re looking to do another pull-out [supplement in The Sun] to further inform people on how to use QR codes,” Ian Samuel, group head of mobile advertising for News International, says in the article.
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Former head of mobile strategy for News International (NI), Andrew Bagguley has been hired as a consultant for Guardian News&Media (GNM), as the title begins its move into the mobile market.
Working in journalism and want to boost your digital skills? Questions about starting a news business online that you've been too afraid to ask?
