Habits evolve and technologies progress - but it appears the core challenges of business rarely change. It was not so long ago that I remember buying a cassette tape from Toys 'R Us for my Sinclair Spectrum 48k (yes, that is a total RAM lower than dial up bandwidth), adjusting the volume of the tape player and loading up Jet Set Willy. Let alone imagining the challenges of programming for that machine – imagine the challenges of monetising them!
After the initial sale of the device (aka 'computer'), a one-off fee for each game on a cassette which you had to buy from a physical shop, not an app store, no internet connectivity at all (there was no internet) and maybe a subscription to Input magazine, if you were lucky. That was about all there was after the initial sale of a Spectrum. Oh, maybe a joystick... and an adapter.
The Spectrum was about the same size as an iPad. The differences, however, are vast. One simple metric highlights the dramatic difference – you can buy an iPad with memory of 1GB – that is twenty thousand times more bytes than the memory of the Spectrum. Every mobile device is now connected to the internet, and the opportunities for software and subscription sales are numerous.
So, it would seem there is vast potential here, ripe for monetisation. Yet, in general, there are fewer success stories than you might expect on mobile. The 'app' phenomenon has been huge, but what of good old fashioned digital marketing? Recent reports suggest Google, like Facebook, are suffering at the hands of rapid mobile adoption. You don’t have to look very hard to find graphs showing the extreme pace at which mobile devices are very quickly becoming the preferred method to access the internet. A friend of mine last week said that for an experiment he deleted his Facebook app from his phone to see if he would continue to use the service many times a day. Result – he visited Facebook only twice, and that was to check his FB mail.
So, what is the commercial problem? Is it the simple logistics of a smaller screen? Or that people don’t want to boot the laptop? Or is it something deeper? Is there a missing connection? I think there is – and it is one that Apple connected with very early on and predicated their success. It is the need for joined-up payment facilities.
Lurking in the wings are the numerous projects being worked on by banks, internet giants and other consortiums to turn our phones into wallets. Of course, this is happening a bit already – but consider when the flow really starts. A huge chunk of GDP just went mobile.
It has been nearly 30 years since the Spectrum hit our living rooms. It, and many other early home computers like it, changed our worlds. Since then, the internet emerged, which was almost certainly the biggest change to our society in recent years. I think that the next super change will be money going mobile and digital. Of course, our bank accounts have been digital for years, but I am talking about individuals having power over a digital fund in the palm of their hand.
What's so new about that as an idea? Well, maybe not so much as a concept, as we have all been thinking about and assuming it for years. The point I am making is about the actual significance it will have. This brings an entirely new meaning to the current notion of ‘exchange’, and changes the game when it comes to the challenges of monetising mobile.
Things change for the user too. We all protect our online bank accounts, homes and property. So, as our persona and capital go mobile and digital, the user will need to protect and take better ownership of them. The internet has a habit of moving faster than society is able to keep pace, and the tools to do things like this are emerging behind the curve of the technologies causing the change. If all spending habits and browsing behaviour is stored locally in a phone, then the mobile device becomes something not too dissimilar to a superduper Tesco club card. The opportunity is for the user to take a degree of ownership over that data and use it to communicate with the market – which is a concept known as Vendor Relationship Management or VRM. The UK government is certainly preempting this trend by pushing forward on initiatives like Midata.
At Switch, we have been studying this concept since our inception. Essentially, the user or consumer is able to use their own profile and demands to communicate with the market and field responses from advertisers. Content becomes a consumable resource, coupled with commercial communications that are actually requested by the user. If you like, the user can even help to broker between advertiser and the publisher!
Now, where did I leave that that Spectrum...