I have little dispute about the need for consumer education in this area. I do, however, have concern with the two questions - “what is mobile content” and “why engage with mobile content”. As a relative newcomer to the mobile content industry - having been mainly involved with traditional and online media (television and online documentaries, radio, print magazines etc) - I have always been surprised at how the big “C” word has usually referred to ringtones, wallpapers and animated ringtones.

It is only more recently that the content offering has been expanded to short video pieces and access to some of the well known brands that we are familiar with from using them online (Ebay, RSVP).

I feel that the expanded functionality of phones to enable access to interactive properties that currently exist on the web is the key to driving uptake of mobile content services. If people realise that they can access all their favourite web content on the go (with additional functionality like location awareness and 1-to-1 personalization) then there is little need to explain “why use mobile content”.

If the purpose of the campaign is to convince people to only consume the limited content offerings in the telco portals then yes, they are going to need a lot of convincing as to “why” they should bother.

Perhaps the education campaign should be turned on the industry to ask “why is it so hard (and expensive) to access web services on my phone?”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 at 1:48 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.