 RAIN 2/16: Carriers, phone makers to create Apple App Store alternative ·Feb 16, 12:45 PM COMPANIES LOOK TO BREAK APPLE’S DOMINANCE WITH WHOLESALE APPLICATION COMMUNITYDevelopers frustrated with Apple’s approval process for its mobile App store will soon have an alternative. Twenty-seven carriers and hardware manufacturers have joined forces to form the *Wholesale Application Community (here) as an alternative to Apple’s App Store.
Major phone carriers (including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless) and three manufacturers (Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson) announced the new coalition at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday. The WAC hopes to “establish a simple route to market for developers and provide them with access to a customer base of over 3 billion customers.” The announcement has met with a good deal of skepticism. For instance, Information Week blogger Ed Hansberry writes, “Any consortium with this many carriers is bound to get bogged down in its own bureaucracy and never see the light of day. They have already set expectations low… They hope to have a single specification within a year… You have to get developers enrolled, build the infrastructure for it and get the application stores on devices. Best case scenario in my opinion? Three years. That is an epoch in the mobile phone timeline.” Read more from him here. PANDORA, FM, AD-TARGETING, AND CELINE DION“Pandora’s Tim Westergren has been gunning for broadcast radio for some time now,” begins Jacobs Media president Fred Jacobs in a recent blog post, warning broadcasters of Pandora’s new initiative to target local radio advertisers. This effort, coupled with Pandora’s growing presence on mobile (and in-car) capability, means Pandora is truly becoming a real competitor for radio. Jacobs includes in his post a handful of retorts local radio salespeople might use with prospective clients looking to “move over to the coolest kid on the block” — advantages that local, broadcast radio still has over Pandora (and, presumably, other webcasters). One is particularly interesting. “Radio offers dynamic targeting,” Jacobs writes. “I’m listening to my Dire Straits station on Pandora and I get served up a Celine Dion ad. On the radio, you’re not going to hear ads for this diva on a Triple A or Classic Rock station. Radio isn’t just about zip codes — it’s about audience cults, communities, and tribes, with advertising targeted accordingly.” It’s interesting because pinpoint ad targeting was an edge that Internet radio was supposed to have over broadcast. Webcasting, using each listeners’ “age/sex/zip code” registration info, coupled with ad-insertion technology able to deliver different ad messages to different listeners on the same stream at the same moment, promised true “surgical targetability” for advertisers would soon be here. Now, keep in mind, in Fred’s Pandora case, this system may not have failed at all. It’s possible that the ad buyer didn’t necessarily want to target only, say, women 35-54 for this buy (perhaps the ad buyer thought the product could be marketed to men looking for Valentine’s gift ideas). Maybe the buyer specified no target demo at all for the Celine campaign. Or, for all we know, maybe one of Fred’s other Pandora channels is a “Celine Dion” channel, in which case the targeting worked beautifully! (Just joking here, we’ll assume this isn’t the case.) But that brings up another interesting point which we think does, in fact, show that Pandora can be a better tool for effectively reaching potential customers for an advertiser than an FM station. Final point: Most webcasters aren’t like Pandora. First, most online services are centered around “genre-based” channels which would offer the same “cult, community and tribe” targeting that FM radio does. But, more importantly, most are not yet targeting specific ads to specific listeners. Whether its because audiences aren’t yet big enough to “slice and dice” for specific campaigns, webcasters aren’t collecting listener demo info in the first place, or something else… the platform, for the most part, is not offering advertisers the pinpoint targeting that’s been a prime selling point of the technology. That goal remains to be realized. — PM share: del.icio.us.  Reddit  Digg  Yahoo  Wink  Windows  Google  Newsvine 
CommentCommenting is closed for this article.  Other stories RAIN has upgraded (and moved)! RAIN 9/13: RAIN Summit Chicago takes place today! RAIN 9/12: First Summit in RAIN's hometown takes place tomorrow RAIN 9/9: Summer holidays, "doldrums" impact July Webcast Metrics, but audience up over last year RAIN 9/8: Clear Channel launches new customizable iHeartRadio beta; RAIN goes hands-on RAIN 9/7: Meet more speakers you'll hear at RAIN Summit Chicago in less than a week RAIN 9/6: Clear Channel taps The Echo Nest to take on Pandora RAIN 9/2: RAIN reviews Spotify's radio-like product Artist Radio RAIN 9/1: UK online radio aggregator Radioplayer campaigns b'dcasters to create "all radio" ratings RAIN 8/31: Execs from Merlin, Triton Digital, jacAPPS and more to appear at RAIN Summit Chicago |
Notice in Fred’s screenshot that U2 and the Police have both played recently on his channel. Both are typical Triple A and Classic Rock artists, and likely make sense for “Dire Straits Radio.” But what if listener Fred despises these artists? He eliminates them from his Pandora channel, and by doing so Pandora (presumably) knows that he probably wouldn’t be interested in being fed an ad for U2 tickets or a Police compilation album, and so they won’t waste his good will or the ad buyer’s money by sending him such an ad. But if listener Fred tuned in to his local Triple A or Classic Rock FM, he’ll still likely hear ads for these U2- and Police-related products, and the impression will be wasted (and Fred might even tune out). 
